You Can Thank Rich Folks For All The Clay-Colored Cars

Oh, OK. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your dealership and select that lumpy grey 4Runner because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you drive around town. But what you don’t know is that 4Runner is not just grey, it’s not silver, it’s not pale blue. It’s actually Lunar Rock. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2006 Lamborghini introduced a collection of Grigio Telesto supercars. And then it was Audi, wasn’t it, that showed Nardo Grey in sports cars?

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Then similar colors quickly showed up in the collections of eight different European automakers. Then it filtered down through the coupes and sedans, then trickled on down into some tragic crossover, where you no doubt fished it out of some buy-here-pay-here lot.

However, that grey represents millions of dollars and countless jobs. And it’s sort of comical how you think you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the automotive industry, when in fact you’re driving a vehicle that was selected for you by the people on this blog, from a pile of stuff.

OK, so I was paraphrasing Meryl Streep’s iconic Miranda Priestly from the groundbreaking also-from-2006 film The Devil Wears Prada a bit there. But she was right about fashion, and I’m right about cars. You can blame the current trend of every car looking like putty on trends set in motion by rich folks and their buying habits.

Why do Cars Suddenly Look Like Putty??

When a normal non-car person, like Tik Tok Science behemoth (and author and YouTuber and all around pretty cool dude) Hank Green, begins to notice automotive trends that have been in play for nearly two decades, clearly it has reached its zenith. The trend of desaturated non-metallic car paints has trickled its way down from the Lamborghinis and Audis through the Porsches and McLarens to touch your most basic Honda Civics and Toyota crossovers. This was a less noticeable trend when it was confined to the world of the upper-crust sports car, but now that seemingly every dealership in America is selling a car with zero paint flake, usually a grey or desaturated blue or green, it’s kind of hard to avoid.

Cars have increasingly trended toward greyscale color palettes over the last thirty years. Allegedly these were the inoffensive colors that second buyers preferred, and they would improve resale when you were done with your ownership experience. Long gone were the days of “resale red” and the time of greys and whites were here to stay.

Of course, there are larger trends at play here. From the prominence of “Millennial Grey” in home decor and wall paint, to black and heathered grey being the most popular shades of t-shirt. People, particularly Americans and Europeans, are trying to blend in and stay under the radar. The idea of buying a grey Lamborghini is borderline offensive to me, but “stealth wealth” was a big part of culture from the 2000s to today. And the trends that wealthy people popularize begin to trickle down to the middle class, where they become borderline universal.

For decades metallic paint was the hot shit, but after the success of Audi’s Nardo Grey, the trend has increasingly become putty-lookin’ ass whips.