In the last few years I've seen a lot more of these "flat-ish" paint colors on new cars. They've got a gloss finish, but the color coat reminds me of a battleship, truck, tank, or other military vehicle. Initially they really stood out to me because they were different than the usual car paint colors / formulations (lacking any metallic element and being much less "shiny").

I know I report my car's paint color to the DMV when I registered it. (Paint colors are also encoded in many manufacturers' VINs, I believe.) It would be neat to make some kind of visualization of car paint color popularity over time using DMV data.

Indeed, the flat colors are just non-metallic and non-pearl coats. Its a sign of changing fashion trends -- flat coats used to be far more popular in the era before all paints had metallic flake (basically glitter). They only stand out because metallic paints became very common as opposed to being once rare.

Matte finish cars are almost always wraps, and the finish is often times very difficult to keep clean. They're popular with expensive sports cars specifically because they are "exclusive".

The article has a chart showing car paint color over time.

Below is the direct link to that chart. I thought the small surge of brown cars starting in 2010 was interesting.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car...

They'll stock the reds and yellows, but usually in the convertible, and the one parked out on the corner of the lot where it catches your eye.

The vast majority of the vehicles are ordered in colors that will sell. Some auto companies assign vehicles to dealers, others let the dealer pick the options on the ones they're getting, and the dealers know what will sell (and upsell).

Plus it's a huge computational problem, there's huge worth in having the car the customer wants configured just right for her, the day she walks into the dealership. It's an easier sell that much is true, but it's a better sell for her because she gets everything she wanted when she wanted it, which is worth more to her in money. End up splitting the difference. Otherwise it's like, order it (I think there's a paper options menu you tick boxes off of) and wait, wait two weeks, and maybe it won't even arrive in two weeks because of delays (more common now in the twenties) so it's a huge CPU-intensive task. Then also they rent a lot of GPUs to get real-time pixel-something...like rendering a car with all the options the tire-kicker wants so he can see the whole car when buying online. That's cool, that's tech, that's computationally difficult.

>wait two weeks

You wish. The situation is slowly improving but I had to wait 6 weeks for a car earlier this summer that was "in transit" (which I guess was to say it existed in the manufacturer's database someplace). This wasn't even a build to order vehicle. I suspect that would have been months.

I'm not sure where computational power enters into it. It's just that dealers want to mostly have cars on their lot which are acceptable to the greatest number of buyers who want/need a car right now which the model in hot pink isn't going to be for a lot of people.

Yeah I've never been to a dealership, let alone during covid. Yeah the wait times I have heard are super super long. Two weeks is like the best case these days. So mostly it's about uh...not getting a chargeback frankly. Something. Keeping you waiting.

An allegory.[1]

................

A random finds a fifty-dollar bill on the streets, exclaims, "Oh I'll go to a restaurant!" She gets there and is like "OK that chicken á la" squints "no not the French...the Adobe uh..." then waiter says "Adobado. That'll be $23.99." "Up front? Wait wai--" "Need the money to go buy the ingredients in the first place!"

.................

Yeah so they gotta mask that.

[1] Not claiming I'm any special anything, sticking to the true story I'm a slave of GOD, but that's irrelevant, anybody can say allegories. Maybe the parables are the ones that are for prophets only...maybe I'm thinking of that. Oh well. Best I can do. Used every other literary device by this point, in my attempt of elevating hn posts to an art form.

> There's a real tendency to stock the neutral white, silver, black, grey colors rather than brighter colors which I assume are more polarizing.

i think it's further up the chain than the dealership. when i've taken a look, most of the manufacturer colors were fairly neutral. there might be blues and reds, but they're muted. the dealership couldn't buy something bright unless they're selling kawasaki motorcycles.

Also, the more expensive cars get, the more boring the color options become. Small cars are sometimes available in fun colors, but big cars are only available in shades of grey.

I see a lot of teslas with crazy flat bright paintjobs, i assume aftermarket?