Color wheel: When Seattleites pick car colors, we tend to stay neutral

The Toyota Yaris' Absolutely Red, center, is one of the few bright-color favorites in a town more likely to gravitate toward the Subaru Impreza's Sunlight Gold Opal, left, or the Outback's Diamond Gray. (Photos by Cody Ellerd)

Our technology may be green, our ideas may be bright and our politics may be liberal, but when it comes to the car colors Seattleites choose, it's a conservative world.

The best-selling cars in the Seattle-Tacoma area, according to AutoCount data from Experian Automotive, are Toyotas, Hondas, Fords and Subarus. The best-selling colors of these cars, local dealers say, are shades that tend to match our cloudy sky and murky waters. Diamond Gray, Polished Metal and Steel Silver get snatched up right away, while upbeat, cheery colors such as Speedway Blue and Kiwi Green languish on the lot.

Are we boring? Timid? Clinging to our depression like gloomy old Eeyore? The dealers say we're probably just practical.

"It's harder to maintain a vehicle in this climate," says Kosal My, a senior salesman at Bill Pierre Ford in Seattle. "You wash your car one day and it rains the next."

Jennifer Moran, general manager at Carter Subaru, says we also like to think ahead. Average Subaru drivers own their cars for an average of 7.4 years, and for the last decade or so, they have stuck with neutral colors that she says "people don't hate."

"If it's a car that you'll have a long time," Moran says, "you want something you're not going to get sick of."

Tracy Miller, sales manager at Honda of Bellevue, says that it's partially the interior color that drives the choice of exterior paint. "In the Sun Belt, people like light-color interiors that don't get too hot. Then they want some color on the outside. But up here where it's dark and cloudy, people go for more neutral colors on the outside and darker interiors that don't show dirt."

Plus, Northwest buyers tend to stay away from trendy colors that won't resell well. Silver, which enjoyed a seven-year run as the most popular color in North America, has been a pretty safe bet. That's the longest reign of any color since DuPont, a major supplier of paint to automakers worldwide, started keeping track 56 years ago. White surpassed silver in 2008.

A greater variety of shades has helped keep the drab out of neutrals in recent years. With advancements in paint technology, today's whites, silvers and grays often have a metallic or pearlescent sheen, or a hint of another color when the light hits the car.

The Toyota Prius' Seaside Pearl has been a popular shade. (Cody Ellerd)

Shifts back to white, says DuPont color marketing and technology manager Karen Surcina, are indicative of a "palette cleansing" and often precede a resurgence of more vibrant colors.

DuPont's prediction for 2009 is that consumers will be rediscovering blues. "Blue is potentially the new green," says Surcina. "It represents green technology."

While not many dealers say they've noticed an uptick in sales of blue cars so far this year, they can barely keep the green technology cars in stock. And it's in the more innovative vehicles that bolder colors sell better.

In the fuel-efficient Toyota Yaris, for example, Absolutely Red has been a popular color. And in the hybrid Prius, buyers are gravitating toward Seaside Pearl, a shade of blue one is more likely to see while gazing out from Venice Beach than from the shores of Puget Sound.