Classic Car News: What Does Your Car Say About You?

Classic Car News: What Does Your Car Say About You?

March 18th, 2010 by Katie Norton

Choosing the colour of your car may be a matter of personal taste or a conscious decision to either minimise or maximise the attention you and your vehicle get on the open road – or you could simply want to restore your vehicle to its former glory by matching the colour as close to the original as possible.

A century ago, selecting colour schemes for your pride and joy would have been pretty straight forward as the variations were fairly limited compared to today’s wonderful array of paint colours to choose from. According to SifyNews.com “choosing a car’s colour these days presents a veritable menagerie of options: Anaconda Green, New Sable and Truffle Mica, to name a few”.

Today’s colour palettes are purposely engineered to “reflect a specific aesthetic and then tailored to a vehicle’s exact size, style and segment” or merely owners interests, reports SifyNews.com – which begs the question what kind of person drives a canary yellow Ferrari? A bird lover perhaps?

Reactions to the Aston Martin V12 Vantage RS concept car were universally the same across the motoring press: “awesome car, strange colour choice”, according to Autoblog.com. For such an aggressive styled and powered supercar you would expect “dark silver or British racing green”, but Aston went with a baby blue hue instead – later revealing the reasoning behind such an unusual colour choice was that Aston were “reviving the classic Gulf racing livery for its Le Mans-challenging DBR9’s” – the same racing machine that donated its engine to the Aston Vantage concept.

The huge response from the bizarre car colour provoked Aston to open up a contest to “name that hue”, with the winning name chosen as “Mako Blue”, which is not only the name of the fastest most agile of sharks, but also the Maori name for “blue lightning”, which obviously is “descriptive of both colour and car – a very befitting name”, according to AstonMartin.com.

Modern day society allows us to express ourselves, whether it’s through our clothes, music or colour of our car and it has been noted that “people are tired of the same old mood of what’s been going on for the last few years, so they’re going to want to express themselves in new and unique ways”, according to Sify.com.

In some cases, car colour names are often synonymous of the brand heritage, for example, Maserati’s Bianco Eldorado, which was named after a famous race car from 1958, the “Stirling Moss”, which incorporated the Eldorado Ice-cream company logo on it, with a beautiful eggshell white exterior.

While car colour says a lot, so does car insurance. Call Sureterm Direct free on 0800 999 2030 and get quality classic car insurance to match your taste for vintage vehicles. Alternatively visit www.sureterm.com for an online quote.