Orange Is the New Red? Car Color Preferences by Gender

BOLD RIDE

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Posted by George Kennedy

                              
 

Does gender have an effect on what car color you choose? If you got in an argument with your significant other regarding that whole blue/gold dress meme from a few months ago, you might have a strong opinion on how different genders perceive color. But we prefer science over anecdotes.
 

That’s why we turned to the folks at iSeeCars. According to their most recent study, more men than women prefer brightly colored cars. Car colors like orange and yellow saw a big leap in popularity among male drivers in the last year, while women still err on the side of neutral colors.

iSeeCars looked at over 25 million used car listings, and 200,000 consumer inquiries from the 2014 calendar year. The study looked at not only the most popular colors, but percentage of increased or decreased popularity–broken out by gender.
 

The study looked at which cars men preferred more than women, and vice versa. These are not the outright most popular colors for each gender, but the colors that have an overwhelming preference by a particular gender.

Orange had the strongest gender bias towards males (25%), followed by brown (9.8%), and yellow (6.3%). The orange and yellow are obviously associated with sportscars, but it is something of an inside joke among us younger gearheads that the ultimate enthusiast car is a brown, German station wagon, with a performance pack, and a manual transmission. Perhaps those of us who think that finally have the cash to buy a funky, brown performance wagon.

Red and black used to be two of the top colors for males, but fell off in a big way. iSeeCars attributes this to the growth of orange as a preference in the muscle car segment. Orange as a preference for muscle cars grew 73.3 percent, while red fell off 30.2 percent.

The colors with the highest preference bias among women are gold (11.2%), silver (7.1%), and beige (5.6%). Overall those preference bias percentages are lower, meaning even the colors they prefer more than men are closer to the mainstream of color selection.

If you want to be totally backwards about it, basically we men continue to buy loud, obnoxious cars as a hopeless attempt to attract a mate. But we’d like to hear your thoughts on these results. Why do you think these color preferences ended up like this? Tell us in the comments below.

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