Skip to main content

New Report Confirms Car Buyers are Exceptionally Boring People

Apparently the auto market is increasingly looking like an eight-bit grayscale, with the vast majority of new vehicles sold these days finished in a less-than-exciting quartet of colors.

That’s according to a report from paint supplier Axalta, which found that an astonishing 77 percent of cars, trucks and SUVs sold in 2016 were finished in white, silver, gray and black. If there ever was a barometer of just how boring car-buyers have become this is it.

White led the way at 37 percent of global sales, trailed by black at 18 percent. Gray and silver followed at 11 percent each. Worse still, 2016 marked the sixth consecutive year white was the No. 1 seller, which overtook silver in 2011. Line them all up and it’s like our parking lots are stuck in the movie Pleasantville. (If you understand this obscure reference then you will understand how sad the situation is.)

The picture is a slightly less bleak one in North America, with red (10 percent) and blue (eight percent) adding a splash of color to the mix, though white, black, gray and silver still led the way on the continent by a landslide.

There is, however, some reprieve on the horizon. Axalta says “colorful hues are tinting traditional neutral colors” to bring color back into vogue. Here’s to a slightly darker shade of burnt orange coming soon to a dealer near you.

this post first appeared on Auto Guide

The post New Report Confirms Car Buyers are Exceptionally Boring People appeared first on VWVortex.



from VWVortex http://ift.tt/2nbLloZ
via IFTTT

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Project SportWagen: Going Stage 2 with APR

    When we last left you, the humble little SportWagen was fresh from the development process with our friends at AWE Tuning, sporting a new downpipe, exhaust and intake, allowing things to breathe a bit easier.  The car sounded great, but there was no getting around the fact that our wagon was still quite, well, slow.   While we realize that nothing we do to the Golf SportWagen at this point will make it a race car, we still felt compelled to do something .  To put it bluntly, we had a fever, and the only cure was more power. Flash forward a few hours, and we found ourselves at Waterfest, staring down APR’s palatial spread and the numerous tuned vehicles surrounding it.  Earlier in the year, APR had hinted to us that their 1.8 TSI files would be quite impressive, and based on what they were able to do with the 2.0 TSI found in the new GTI and our time in their Golf R, we knew it’d be worth the wait.  So with this in mind, we lined our G...

Project Golf SportWagen- Intro

I’ve never really been one for SUVs and crossovers.  The current offerings aren’t the body-on-frame, go-anywhere specialty tools I remember from my youth, and what they lack in capability, they also lack in on-road performance. The current crop isn’t terribly good at handling or being efficient, which in my opinion are major components of our ideal driving experience.  So when it comes to space or utility, I usually look for something of the wagon variety- and it seems that I’m not alone. We hit quite a few shows around the east coast each summer, and we see modified Jetta SportWagens at nearly every event. Even amongst common consumers, these cars are highly sought-after. They don’t depreciate much, making even early Mk 5 2.5 versions expensive in comparison to other Jettas or Golfs of the same vintage. This year, Volkswagen launched their latest SportWagen, which is now billed as a Golf.  In many ways, this latest SportWagen is the best yet and it has certai...

Volkswagen Group Records Best Ever First-Half-of-Year Sales

With 5.5 million vehicles in customer hands after the first six months of 2018, the Volkswagen Group is seeing the best performance of its history. Group deliveries increased significantly in all core regions,” said Fred Kappler, head of sales for the Group. “Our core brands recorded strong growth in the first half year.” For the year-to-date, all of Volkswagen’s brands had sales bumps. MAN, SEAT, and Skoda led the sales charge with performances 24%, 17% and 11% better than the previous year. The big sellers, too, had strong sales periods, with Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, and Volkswagen sales rising 3.5%, 4.5% and 6.3% respectively. That last figure is particularly good new for the board, since Volkswagen alone sold more than 3 million vehicles in the first half of 2018. As Kappler stated, the numbers are equally good when you break sales down by region. Brazil and Russia were the most improved markets (22% and 20%, respectively), while strong sales in Europe and China (u...