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Once again, or so the media exclaimed, silver is the most popular of car colors.

Well whoopie.

It's hard to bash consumers for favoring a "color" that is useful (digression: is silver really a color per se or a lack of color, along the same lines as black and white?). Useful meaning that it does hide the dirt, it's easy to touch up, hard to criticize as 'clashing', relatively cool in summer, etc. But on the other hand it labels the owner as a relative milquetoast.

"Well it was what they had on the lot."
"My last car was silver."
"I couldn't really decide on a color."

Excuses.

I hate it when people don't choose to use their brains to think. It's like "Well, I went to all the trouble to choose a manufacturer, and a dealer, pick out a model and haggle on the price but when it comes to color I'll just accept any old schlock." C'mon, it's your money don't you want something that looks different from all the other cars in the parking lot? So at least you don't have to read the license plate or look for the gum-wrappers on the floor to know its yours?

While there's a limited number of offerings, you'll note that car colors do vary, slowly yes, but they do. Back in the 80's blues and metallic blues were in. Late 80's saw the introduction of green. Maroons were all the rage in the 90s and then lately there's been a resurgence (thanks to the inevitable weirdness of aesthetics given to us by German brands such as Audi and Volkswagen) of grays, oranges and 70's era greens (avocado anyone?). Myself I was taken with the panzer-kampf-tanken-undercoaten color of the Audi TT's - truly a remarkable shade of gray that at once reminded one of the plastic in military models. Yes, it wasn't exactly a color - but unlike generic silver it was unique. It said something.

On one point alone I'll forgive silver-car buyers: insurance. Red and yellow cars are actually more expensive to insure, and silver is harder to track in traffic when they're trying to chase you down for speeding.

But still, couldn't you have chosen green or blue or maybe even beige?