The topic of automotive color comes up here from time to time. The topic seems to be becoming irrelevant in this modern world of silver, white and black cars (which aren’t really colors at all, now, are they?) However, for those of us who pay attention to cars from earlier eras , color is a topic of major importance, whether we like to admit it or not.
We have seen endless debates here at CC about whether a certain car looks best painted light or dark, vivid or conservative. Some colors have become ubiquitous for a few years, and others have appeared very infrequently. Jim Grey’s CC piece on this Fairmont reminded me of this perfect example of late 1970s FoMoCo awfulness, at least when it comes to the color.
Really – did some designer open the refrigerator to see a three-day-old bowl of butterscotch pudding that needed to be thrown out because one of the kids had left it uncovered, and exclaim “THAT’S IT!” Or was it Phil in Vinyl Development who figured out how to tint plastic to match the puddle of dog-barf on the kitchen floor, then got his buddy in the paint shop to mix up a special color to go with it? However this came about (and it would have been impossible in any decade but the ’70s), I hereby nominate this car as the most awful car color combo of all time.
I believe that Ford called it “Light Chamois”, and am prepared for maybe three our our readers to tell us that this was their favorite automotive color ever. Understand, however, that any positive testimonials will have to be accompanied by recent drug tests before they will be taken seriously by the editorial staff here at CC.
OK, maybe I am overstating things a bit, and there is certainly the matter of individual taste at play here. So, this is where we open this topic up to the commentariat: What is the worst color combo you have ever seen on a car? There are decades of unattractive colors and odd color pairings to choose from, so let’s see which ones left you particularly cold?
My first car was a ’65 Impala in the (in)famous “Evening Orchid”, kind of a purply-pink metallic. A dozen years in the sun and the same number of winters left it a faded, chalky rust flecked mess, but it couldn’t have looked much better new. Ugly as sin.
I also recall a car that turned up at the Chev-Olds emporium my Dad worked at back in ’79 or ’80. A women came in and special ordered a Z-28, 4 speed with almost no options in a horrible light green pastel colour. It was a factory colour, but it looked like something from 1956. She put down a sizable deposit at the insistence of the sales manager. By the time the car arrived her financial situation had taken a turn for the worse and she bailed on the deal. Presumably she lost her deposit, and that car sat for a long, long time. Eventually some one got a heck of a deal and took it home, but it was one ugly car.
Any car whose paint color starts with “Kandy” or has “flip-flop” in its title…
We have a good friend of the family who worked as a salesman for a big Cadillac dealer in Providence for over 30 years in the 60’s through 80’s. He said he saw many salespeople come and go. One assistant manager in particular hated the sales manager and was going to quit. Before he did, he ordered a loaded to the max 1979 Fleetwood Brougham d’Elegance, with everything from Fuel Injection to a power moonroof. The color combination he ordered was a horrific yellow exterior with a green interior and black vinyl top. GM built the car and it got sent to the dealership. He said it sat for over 6 months until finally they decided to change the vinyl top color to match the yellow exterior. As soon as they did an older gentleman that lived in Florida in the winter and RI in the summer went into the dealership and fell in love with the car. He bought it and kept it for almost 20 years until he died. The car was serviced at the dealership for nearly all of its life and was always known as the ugly duckling!!
I thought the teals and purples of the ’90s were pretty hideous. And deep gold several offered back then.
I like the current Kia tan and Subaru gold-silver. And anything maroon, which shows off silver trim most spectacularly.
I am red-green colorblind, and my theory is that people with this genetic quirk don’t see colors as vividly as people with normal vision. Thus, it’s often hard for me to discern certain colors, so many potentially ugly combos don’t jump out at me.
However, there is a brand-new 2013 gold Corolla in my office building that is HIDEOUS. It makes an already ugly car even more unappealing (no comment on the “Coexist” sticker plastered on the back bumper).
Hope to God they don’t offer this color on the new 2014 Corollas. Retirement Gold really should have retired with the late ’90s Chryslers.
A friend I used to know was colorblind. He was looking for a new car and wanted the cheapest one he could find. He was on the phone with a salesman over a Neon. The salesman said I can cut some more money off on a magenta car we have on the lot. My friend asked “what’s magenta.” He told me that the salesman’s reply was “a kind of red.” Because of the colorblindness, the car looked to him like many others and he bought it.
I think Jack Baruth told that same story before, except he was the car salesman.
I’m not sure about the Infiniti G35, but its JDM cousin the V35 Nissan Skyline was available with a somewhat violent orange leather interior. The seats have black beading, the carpet and interior plastics are in shades of black and grey, and the roof lining is cream. Mind you, the fake wood trim was orange…but in a different shade to the seats and trimmed with chrome edging… The pics below are the best I could find, but in real life it looks worse. The worst I saw was a V35 Stagea station wagon, looking towards the front from the open tailgate, the combination of oranges, blacks, greys, cream and chrome was simply awful, and made worse by the exterior colour of wine red (which is otherwise a nice colour).