► Britain’s most popular car colours
► Which paint is most common?
► We pore over the colour charts
Ever wondered why our roads appear more monochrome these days? It’s not just the January blues: Britons are increasingly picking grey cars, official sales data has confirmed.
Trade body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) has issued its annual colour palette of newly registered cars and it reveals that grey is the most popular paint choice for the seventh year in a row. The second most popular colour was black.
More than half a million new cars – 543,464 vehicles – hit the roads in 2024 wearing a muted grey paint hue, up nearly 7% on 2023, according to the SMMT.
Nearly two-thirds of all cars registered last year were grey, black or white – suggesting that Brits prefer to play it safe when it comes to the colour of their cars.
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the SMMT, said: ‘While 2024 saw more new car buyers go green, with a record number of EVs reaching the road, the ‘face’ of the market remains familiar, with grey and black proving perennially popular. While manufacturers strive to ensure every driver can have their pick of a vast choice of paint colours and personalisation options to suit their individual tastes, it seems UK car buyers’ preferences remain steadfastly monochrome.’
The CAR top 10 paint jobs
The least popular colours were pink, maroon and turquoise, accounting for just 747 registrations in 2024. The most popular colours were:
Why are Brits so dull with their paint choices?
Something appears to have changed around the millennium. Scroll back to 1996 and green was Britain’s most popular paint choice. Remember those toothpaste green Vauxhall Corsas and their ilk? And blue was the most common colour from 1997-1999 – giving way to grey in 2000 and the following eight years.
Some combination of grey, black or white has topped the colour charts every year since 2000. It’s not all down to user choice: manufacturers’ design teams, paint manufacturing processes and canny marketing teams’ upselling tactics have all helped to nudge the colour of our cars towards a more muted palette.
It’s also worth pointing out that manufacturers are also charging more than ever before for paint choices. An investigation by our sister website Parkers.co.uk found that on average most new cars come with just one free paint colour – leaving motorists with big bills to splash out on lucrative metallics and other flash paint finishes.