Some years ago, a picture of a car park would look like a scene from a Diwali festival. A glory of technicolours. Today, the majority of cars are white, silver-grey or black. What’s going on? Traffic watcher.
Most car brands offer a wide range of colours, and the choice is made by the person who buys a brand-new car. As fewer than 10 percent of the vehicles entering Kenya each year are new, the colours of more than 90 percent of our vehicle supply are chosen by customers in another country, mostly Japan.
So, part of the reason for the current very emphatic trend towards white, silver-grey or black in Kenya must be sought on the other side of the world.
Their reasons (and ours) will include practical considerations like dirt and sunlight, fashion trends, the chromatics of individual personality, whether buyers want to stand out or blend in, “image” objectives, ease of resale and retention of value, and so on.
As Kenya is on the equator, we have fierce sunlight, which generally lighter colours will reflect more and absorb less. White and silver-grey do that better than anything else.
Black achieves the diametric opposite. Add dark windows and you have to believe that “image” is a more important factor than practical considerations.
There might also be a notion that black, white and much of the silver-grey spectrum is easier to colour-match if it is damaged. That is a misconception.
Even so-called “white” paints for the inside of a house come in several different tones, and if you patch them with the wrong one the repair is very obvious). And these days, extremely accurate computerized colour mixing and matching (tailored to a single task) is available and accurate.
We do, of course, also have coloured cars, but these days even most of those are less garish than they were a few decades ago, when car parks looked like bowls of fruit salad.
Seriously bright, gaudy and often primary colours (so common a few decades ago) are now extremely rare. The few (about 10 percent) that are not white, silver-grey or black are mostly very light or very dark beige/metallic bronze/brown, deep claret red, midnight blue or bush green etc.
