50 Shades of Gray Cars: The Epidemic of Boring Car Colors

Car colors have been getting duller and duller over the years, but if you think you’ve noticed an increase in gray cars in particular, your eyes are not deceiving you. What’s with this boom in popularity of gray cars?

The Stats: Car Color Trends Over Time

The vibrancy of car colors on the market or the popularity of a certain hue can be attributed to trends at any point in history. The graph above from The Drive shows the distribution of car colors on the road from 1990 to 2020. Neutral colors have always been widely available, as they’re cheap and simple to offer and easy to sell to a wider audience.

Notice gray’s share of the neutral pot growing, kicking off all the way back in 1998, but growing even more rapidly after 2003. In 2020, gray and white cars tied for the highest share of car colors on the road, at 20% each. What could be attributed to this boom in gray popularity?

We think the culprit might be a certain manufacturer.

The Trendsetter: Audi’s Nardo Grey

Audi first sprayed a production model in Nardo Grey in 2013 as a signature color for its “RS” line of performance vehicles, and since then, it has taken the world by storm. Nardo Grey is a flat color, which has no metallic, glittery sparkle—not to be confused with matte, which has no gloss—that is often described as what primer would look like if you finished it in clear coat.

It sounds bad, right? In theory, a primer-colored car doesn’t sound too attractive, but adorning some of the world’s best luxury sports cars like the Audi R8, RS7, RS6, RS5, RS4, RS3, and TT, Nardo Grey shows how beautiful a car can be in its raw form without the compliment of reflections, glitter, or loud colors.

The simplicity of the color allows you to pay closer attention to other aspects of the car’s design, whether it be the massive rear-engine vents of the Audi R8 behind the car’s doors, or the ultra-wide and low stance of the RS6 wagon. Nardo Grey became an instant classic, and you could watch that take place on social media. The color quickly became the color to post on Instagram if you wanted your car photography to go viral; there’s even an Instagram account dedicated to featuring cars finished in the color, Audi or not, with nearly 13,000 followers at the time of this post.

It also became the color of choice for many car enthusiasts to wrap their cars in—imagine a big, solid-color sticker applied over every panel of your car, allowing you to temporarily change its color. Soon enough, you could see anything from a 90s Japanese car to a classic American muscle car in Nardo Grey all over Instagram. As they say, imitation is the best form of flattery, and other car manufacturers soon picked up on the trend.

The Followers: Nardo Grey “Knockoffs”

Soon enough, gray cars in all sorts of varieties from many different car manufacturers began popping up in a similar flat, primer-esque form to Audi’s Nardo Gray. Though it’s unclear who the first manufacturer was to attempt a Nardo Grey clone, or whether mimicking Audi’s signature RS color was a deliberate move, Kia offered its performance sedan, the Stinger, in a color similar to Nardo Grey called Ceramic Silver as early as the 2018 model year. Kia stunned the performance market with this seemingly random, yet surprisingly good performance entry; being Kia’s only performance offering, it may be the case that Ceramic Silver was deliberately created as a nod to Audi’s Nardo Grey.

Other car manufacturers quickly followed up with their own iterations of the flat gray color, and these vehicles started selling like hotcakes. According to a Los Angeles Times article, Hyundai’s Blue Stone and Sage Gray, two Nardo Grey-adjacent colors, are among the quickest selling colors offered for the Santa Cruz compact pickup truck.

The Future: Are Gray Cars Just a Phase?

Between performance cars like the BMW M2 standing out among the lineup in flashy colors like Toronto Red, and EVs like the Kia EV9 entering the market with its signature Ocean Blue color, it’s not likely that the end of flashy colors is coming anytime soon.

However, it may become harder and harder to find a car color to differentiate yourself in the future. According to an article by Repairer Driven News, the market share held by grayscale cars is still continuing to increase after 2020.

Worried about how you’ll stand out on the road? Visit DriveHH.com and use our “Shop by Color” feature to find the perfect bright and bold car for you!

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