Whatever happened to pretty cars?
The Source
Whatever happened to pretty cars? Unless my memory is coloring the past, I’m sure that the cars of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s had pigment. Driving on today’s highway you’d think everyone was getting off work from a Russian slate factory. ….sorta-gray, kinda-gray, really-gray, gray-gray. It’s not that gray is un-pretty. It’s just that it’s…well…nothing. Like celery watching amateur golf. What’s the point? To test the metal of this argument I conducted a completely unreliable poll, and kept track of the colors on the cars I’d meet on a typical Saturday afternoon in January. The route was Arenzville to Jacksonville. The tally: 14 black autos, 7 white, 3 red, and 19 gray. Getting numbed by the sameness I yearned for anything… perhaps a John Deere parked along the road…then I saw it! As I neared the Passavant exit I saw a dark blue van approaching! Yes! ….No. It turned off into town. Okay, maybe this was just a freak jaunt. I pulled into the parking lot of County Market. Perhaps the gastronomic crowd at Tom Glossup’s food shop would show a great sense of daring. It was even worse…gray upon gray upon white upon black upon gray. DuPont does an annual poll of car color popularity and alas, my fears were confirmed. In 2011, North American car color preferences read 23% white, 18 % black, 16% silver, 13% gray, and 10% red. Figuring that dark silver is pretty much light gray, that puts gray in the lead with 26%. What’s happened to our automotive imagination? According to DuPont, these results have held steady for the past six years because, “it conveys a clean, mechanical image that mirrors technological advances and modern life.” That’s a nice way of saying “sterile and dull.” The British Medical Journal says that if you drive a silver car you’re 50% less likely to get in an accident than if your buggy is white. The least safe cars are brown, black, and green. Maybe that’s because meeting a color with actual color is such a shock that it causes other drivers to lose control. I guess it’s a generational thing. I remember bringing home my first white Buick and my dad saying, “What’s the matter? Couldn’t you afford to have it painted?” Dad drives red…red, red, red. He owns a red truck and a red car. A Pittsfield car dealer once put a new red auto out on the highway from Perry with a sign saying, “Hey Elmer! Look at this!” He bought it. But I can remember some pretty cool colors that have ridden under my seat over the years. ….a hot 1967 Mustang fastback that was the best chick magnet in Pike County. My cousin Mike had one just like it and I well remember cruising to the Ozarks together, being the envy of everyone on the Missouri highway. Okay, I was imagining the envy, but I know it was there. Then there was the burnt orange Pontiac Fiero….sweet. It had a permanent indentation in the hood where I used it as a study hammock at Lake Jacksonville trying to memorize the spring sky for IC Professor Pilcher’s astronomy class. Dad once hauled us around in a blue 1963 Buick Invicta. This was before his “red phase.” Remember the ’63 Buicks? Horizontal tail fins that resembled an F-16 fighter jet at low altitude? I once owned a brown Firebird. Okay, brown’s not cool, but it was a Firebird, and were it not for the Olympic ski slope known as the Arenzville hill, I’d still be Firebird-ing today…brown or not. I’ll never forget my dark blue Willy’s Jeep! It had no floorboards, no workable windshield wipers, no locks on the doors, and no acceleration, but that baby had color! And whatever happened to the two-tone car? Have we become so cool and metallic that we no longer drive a car bearing more than a single color? As I zipped by the Westwinds subdivision I saw a two-toned red and white pickup. I tipped my hat in honor of such colorful audacity. Maybe cars don’t matter as much to us these days and thus we care little about their color. Even the names… “Sport Utility Vehicle,” and “Crossover” don’t carry the adventurous connotation of “Barracuda!” and “Jaguar!” I can’t picture myself pulling up to the stoplight at Morton and Diamond, rolling down my window and shouting, “Hey buddy! Wanna race my Mazda La Puta?” When I got to Jacksonville I saw one yellow Mustang in the County Market parking lot. If it hadn’t been parked near the front door I’d have knelt down and kissed it. Instead, I crawled into my gray Honda and drove back to Arenzville.