If you were purchasing a new car, what color would you choose? The common ones are black, white, silver, blue, red, and gold/yellow. Maybe you’ll decide based on which your favorite shade, or which can hide scratches, or which will last the longest. However, the color of a vehicle is more than an aesthetic. Research shows it can actually affect its visibility and perceivability, and thereby its safety.
What’s the most dangerous car color?
A well-cited analysis from 2010 published in Safety Science found that black is the most dangerous car color, followed by silver and grey. These shades are extremely popular because they are sleek, neutral, chic at times, and can hide scratches and other minor damages. Moreover, this study indicates that yellow is the safest shade, followed by white, although no color leads to a significantly lower risk of injury. Visibility seems to be the primary factory when it comes to paint shades. Black cars can be harder to see since they can blend into backgrounds, especially at night. The same logic applies to silver and grey cars, especially darker hues. They are less noticeable.
What’s the safest car color?
Blue cars follow the same pattern, with navy being harder to spot. But light blue cars aren’t necessarily the best choice either. Many natural surroundings, such as the sky, are blue, which makes them harder to differentiate compared to the other colors. Then there’s green, which can blend into things like grass, road signs, hills, and even buildings. Meanwhile, red has less accident risk because of its vibrancy. And finally, yellow and white are considered the safest car colors because they are the most visible. There’s a reason cabs are as bright as dandelions; it makes them easy to spot in most environments.
Dark colors vs light colors
There’s also the 2023 study that seems to agree with this one, concluding that dark vehicles increase the probability of accidents because drivers have poorer perception of them compared to lighter colours. The researchers found that white provided the best visibility, followed by lead/silver, red, and black being the least visible.
Read More: Is the Move to Ban Gas Cars a Risk to Personal Liberty?
Visibility vs perception
A Korean study from 2013 pointed out that visibility is only one aspect of color. Different shades have a different retraction index, meaning they affect the appearance of objects’ locations. For example, a black car can look smaller and farther than it is, while a gold one looks closer than it is. So drivers are more inclined to give the gold a wider berth compared to the black. Following this reasoning, warm colors like yellow and red stick out more, while cold colors like blue and green look farther away. Therefore, the authors concluded that yellow/gold is the safest color, followed by brown, then silver, then black, then red, then white, and then green. And the riskiest color was blue. Despite these findings, they concluded that “more consideration of other properties should be researched further.”
It’s not black or white
Meanwhile, a 2019 study from the University of Dayton disagrees with the notion of a particularly dangerous car color. It concluded that their “negative binomial regression model results showed that there was no statistically significant relationship between the vehicle color and crash risk.” It further clarified “the model revealed that there was no evidence to say that there is a color that is safer or riskier than the baseline color, white, in terms of crash risk.”
Read More: The Truth Behind 7 Popular Electric Car Myths
All cars are dangerous
The overall research on the association between car color and accident risk is still ongoing, with larger and more involved studies on the horizon. Automobiles are intertwined with most people’s daily routines and yet they are also dangerous, causing about 1,670,000 deaths worldwide every year, according to a 2024 publication in the Journal of Transport Geography. As a result, many experts are investigating ways to make transportation safer for people and the environment.
Drive safely in any color
So if you are befuddled from the aforementioned studies and their contradictions, keep this in mind: The color of your car can reduce the likelihood of being in an accident, but it’s only one small factor in the grand scheme of road safety. Meanwhile, factors strongly associated with the risk of traffic collisions include: aggressive driving, distracted driving, fatigued driving, driving under the influence, as well as poor weather and road conditions.
Keep yourself and others safe
Although you can’t control the climate, traffic, potholes, etc., there are many things that you can. For example, avoid multi-tasking while driving. It may take only a few seconds to send a text or take a bite of food, but that’s a few seconds of your eyes off the road and your hands off the wheel. “In just five seconds, you travel the entire length of a football field at 55 miles per hour,” says the NIH.
Many people drive by rote and are comfortable engaging in unsafe activities such as speeding, texting, and not wearing the seatbelt because they “were fine” when they did it in the past. However, it’s important to stay vigilant for your sake, the sake of those in your car, and the sake of everyone else around you. The scary reality is you only need one mistake to become a statistic.
Read More: Why Those Tiny Dots on Your Windshield Are More Important Than You Think