What's The Obsession With Brown Cars?
I realise that I’m probably lining myself up to be lynched, but I just don’t get brown cars. Not seriously, anyway. To me brown is a colour you give to a car that you want to be joked about. It’s a colour for an old Lada or something that crumbled five minutes after leaving a British Leyland factory.
But it’s back in, these days. The first inkling I had of what was happening was back in 2011, when I went to the launch of the Mercedes SLS AMG Roadster. A few other journalists and I were standing beside a Mercedes events staffer debating the merits (and otherwise) of a brown SLS that was on display. We asked this young Italian woman which colour she’d have, and before we’d even finished the question she said “brown, definitely,” with a succinct nod. I was stunned.
Since then, manufacturers have been drip-feeding the market with brown cars, and suddenly they’re everywhere, from cheap Fiats to very un-cheap Porsches. Am I the only one who wants it all to quietly go away?
I’ll concede that the dark days of the 1970s brown era, which should have been enough to kill the colour off for good, have long gone, and the latest metallic painting technology means that modern brown efforts shimmer in the sunlight in a way that the sad, drab efforts of yesteryear could only dream of, but even the manufacturers secretly seem to know that brown isn’t a great shade to be painting a car.
What I mean by that is that ‘brown’ almost never features in colour names. It’s always ‘mocha’ this, ‘bronze’ that. But whether it’s Coffee Nonsense or Awful Oak the end result is brown, and brown is an undesirable thing to name a colour. Brown, the colour of earth, associated with simplicity and humility. Desirable qualities, perhaps, in many walks of life, but on your car? Please. Give me a proper colour, any day.
Fortunately no one is forcing me, or anyone else, to buy one, so I know I shouldn’t really be moaning. But that doesn’t stop me throwing up in my mouth a bit every time I pass a brown car. The one mitigating factor I’d offer in brown’s defence is that at least it’s not white. White is the colour you choose when either you don’t want to pay for the optional metallics or you have literally zero imagination. Okay, some cars look decent enough in white, but show me a car that doesn’t look better in a red, a blue, an orange, a yellow or a green, etc. Even the Fiat 500, which pulls-off white pretty well, still looks far better in bolder paint.
Let’s not forget, either, that white is second only to black on the list of colours not to choose if you ever want your car to look clean for more than five minutes. At least dust and dirt tends to be camouflaged among the depression of a brown car.
That’s just my tuppence, anyway. Tell me: am I right, or do I need to find a safehouse until this all blows over?
Comments
Brown is cool.
I like white on cars that have especially beautiful lines. I think white tends to show off those lines more than other colors.
I’m gonna be honest, I hate yellow on a car. Bright pee yellow that Ford offered for the newest gen mustang (not the up coming one) My ex’s dad had bought a brand new mustang and I immediately fell out of love for it when I saw it’s yellow painted body. Yellow is good on car but is the lowest on my list. Brown would have been way better on that mustang. It would be easy on the eyes until the yellow strain of a car his mustang is
Stain*
Anyone remembers the brown Aston from TGT? XD
Personally I think brown cars just look like a turd on wheels
i like them very much!
I think one of the reason brown has to exist is probably because during the R&D stage when the final form of almost every car was decided, it was shown in brown, brown industrial clay. Despite the fact that grey could pretty much do the same thing, brown is just way more interesting than boring grey.
So much brown hating here. I like brown cars! Don’t forget brown is also a colour that appears on wood, leather, chocolate, spices and coffee, things that commonly represent luxury, richness or wealth. To you it represents dirt, to others, including myself, it represents something else completely.
urr…. my dads car is even brown
Darker or subtle colors have always been a go to if you want a luxurious, comfortable car. There aren’t many baby blue S-Classes rolling around, they are marine blue. Not many hi-vis green, they are forest green. And not many scarlet, they are maroon instead. That or white with slight hints of said colors.
It is only logical that at some point brown would be used. Brown is the color of wood, it is smooth, elegant, somewhat old fashioned. You can transform any car by making it metallic brown, getting dark brown or black leather interior and wooden trims.
You are also missing the key information: you are not going to buy that SLS. The guy who will is 50 and trying to figure out wheter to buy this or yet another weekend house in an european capital city and will most likely buy both anyways. He doesn’t need to catch your attention or get your approval, he just wants a nice car for himself. And in every single day to day situation the drak car comes out on top. The bright one will be pulled over “randomly”. The bright one will have people swarming around it and be photographed. And those things get broing very quickly.