Silver is the new black
posted by admin in Window CleaningIf it hadn’t been for the former race-team manager at Mercedes-Benz we
wouldn’t be living in the monochromatic automotive car park we find ourselves in.
Everywhere you look these days, there are vehicles painted silver, grey, white and black.
But mainly silver. Mostly silver. Predominantly silver.
Late last century, the best-selling colour was white.
All those corporate fleets and government departments played safe and, as a result, white appeared on more than three in 10 of all
vehicles on Australian roads.
Perhaps it’s the swing to userchoosers, but now it’s silver, silver, silver. Once an expensive rarity on prestige cars, you can get
silver on $15,990 small cars. You can get it on lumbering soft-roaders and even utes.
It’s on almost one in three new vehicles and, with white still claiming a market share of more than 20 per cent, these two “colours”
speak for more than half of all vehicles sold.
Throw in black and grey, each around 10 per cent, and we have seven out of 10 vehicles with not a real hue between them.
The first real colour, blue, accounts for one in 10 of all vehicles compared with 17 per cent 10 years ago.
It’s clear the monochromes, led by silver, have triumphed, and there’s good reason to blame Neubauer, with a little help from chaos
theory.
In this case, the flap of the butterfly wings happened on June 2, 1934, in the pit garages at the Nurburgring in Germany.
The first race under the new racing rules was to be staged the next day. The most important rule under the new formula was a weight
restriction, a maximum weight limit.
No car was to weigh more than 750 kilograms. It was a misguided attempt by rule makers to curb power and speed by making the cars
smaller.
However, when the W25 Mercedes-Benz race cars were weighed on June 2, they were about one kilogram over the limit. There was no time
for the usual sort of weight-saving, so Neubauer ordered the mechanics to scrape off the white paint - then Germany’s national racing
colour - and reduce the cars to their natural aluminium metal.
The polished aluminium finish that resulted was so spectacular that Mercedes-Benz ditched white and painted all its race cars silver
thereafter.
Germany’s national racing colour was also changed, giving rise to the pre-war spectacles where silver-coloured Mercedes-Benz and Auto
Union formula one cars dominated grands prix around Europe.
In the 1950s, Mercedes-Benz, and Herr Neubauer, picked up where they left off in the late 1930s and, with the help of the most famous
drivers of the day, Juan Manuel Fangio and Stirling Moss, silver became the colour of success.
Mercedes-Benz soon had it available on production models and it became synonymous with the three-pointed star. And prestige.
“For Benz, it is a heritage colour,” says Rhys Wakefield, manager of sales planning for Mercedes in Australia.
“It’s what people expect a Benz to be.”
Mr Wakefield says silver accounted for more than half of all Mercedes in Australia.
In fact, the new C-Class has been launched with three different shades of silver in the colour range, although it could be more,
depending on where you draw the line with some of the metallic colours.
It’s not just a local phenomenon, according to Winston Nel, who manages the automotive paints business for PPG Industries, the
largest paint supplier to the local car industry.
“Across the world, silver has jumped and very surprisingly, black is up with it,” says Mr Nel.
“You find the real car connoisseurs like black, even though it is so hard to keep clean because you can’t wash your car so frequently
any more.”
The mania for monochromes could be the result of consumers being overwhelmed by the number of decisions to be made when buying a car,
says Stephen Ogden- Barnes, program director for Monash University’s Australian Centre for Retail Studies.
“It could be a step towards conservatism,” he says. “You can see some fantastic and wacky colours in the showroom, but it could be a
case of too much choice.
“In supermarkets, they call it the tyranny of choice. Choice isn’t always a good thing.”
Mr Ogden-Barnes says the tendency for people to be overwhelmed by the options put before them feeds into what is known as “luxury
fever”.
“People are buying goods way beyond their basic functionality, because they want to indulge themselves; and they can afford to.”
So they are lining up to buy BMWs and Saabs, with all that means about options and specifications, instead of a sensible $A14,990 ($NZ17,409)
runabout that would do the job just as well.
“People are spending in a less obvious way. Where the money used to go into flash paint jobs, now the vehicles are more quietly
appreciated on their internal specifications. That’s where you spend most of the time, anyway,” says Mr Ogden- Barnes.
He reckons there could also be an element of “asset protection” behind the choice of silver as a colour.
It would be easier to sell a used car if it was in a popular colour like silver.
“You might be hard-pressed to sell a pea-green Commodore SS ute in five years,” he says.
You’d think the predominance of silver,
white and black would make a colour and trim designer’s job really simple, but the rest of the colour range commands a lot of
attention because it can have a disproportionate effect on the image of a particular model or even the manufacturer, according to
Debbie Pascoe, colour and trim manager at Ford Australia.
“We have a hero colour strategy and, while we don’t expect them to generate large volumes, they’re our fashion colours, our mannequins
in the window,” she says.
Most of these are reserved for the XR range and the Ford Performance Vehicles models. They carry names like Octane (orange),
Toxic (green) and Bionic (blue).
“They appeal to people who want to make a statement, but they also send a message that Ford cares about fashion.”
So much so that Ms Pascoe is a member of a colour forecasting organisation, which has 800 members around Australia; people who design
almost every imaginable product, from mattress ticking to zippers to greeting cards.
“We get together twice a year and literally fight about colours. We all put up the colours we think will be popular and then we debate
red, orange, yellow, green; every single hue until we come up with a pallette,” says Ms Pascoe.
The importance of colour and timing can’t be overstated, she says. “Colour sells. If you don’t have the right colour at the right time,
you’re done.”
Ms Pascoe says there is no such thing as a bad colour (she is too young to remember all those purple XA Falcons) although she says
each colour can be seen in two lights: positive and negative.
White is simple and pure on the good side, but can be seen as clinical.
Black is sophisticated and classic on one hand, but sombre and serious on the other. The dominator of the moment, silver, can be seen
as modern and clean on the one hand. On the other, it is just plain conservative, she says.
But there may be a ray of hope out there for those who are all silvered out.
Ms Pascoe reckons white is gaining favour around the world as the new colour you choose if you want to stand out.
“White is the new black for sports cars,” she says, days before Ford Performance Vehicles launches the new F6 R-Spec in . . .
Winter White. The FPV launch was the latest in a series.
Last year, BMW launched the red-hot V10 M6 in white and more recently the M3 was revealed in white.
Lamborghini unveiled its Murcielago LP460 roadster in white and Maserati chose pearl white as the hero colour for the launch of its
GranTurismo coupe at Geneva.
Back in Australia, all the advertising shots for the sportier new C-Class Mercedes-Benz are in white.
With more of the hot cars and prestige models being presented in white, it probably won’t be long before the buyers of the shopping
trolleys and people movers start to order white in order to get some rub-off from the high-profile models.
In a few short years we could be back to square one, with white on top of the charts again. It’s enough to make Alfred Neubauer turn
in his grave.
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