What Color Is Preferable For Your Car? Part I

Street traffic is a dynamic kaleidoscope where the palette of colors changes every second. Even on a short length of road the eye of a driver catches numerous pictures painted in different colors. It is important to learn that colors influence the safety of traffic greatly.

The statistics of traffic accidents state that only dark-colored vehicles are involved in 61,3% of crashes, both dark and light-colored cars – in 32,6%, only light-colored ones – in 6,1%. The analysis of traffic accidents in Sweden showed that black cars (6% of all number) were involved in 22,4% of crashes, dark-blue, blue and dark-grey (41,3%) – in 61,2%, red ones (6,5%) – in 2,4%. The American investigators revealed that dark-colored cars were the participants of 57% of accidents occurred with the control group’s vehicles while light and bright-colored were involved in 43% of cases. Moreover, the interrogation of 147 pointsmen was conducted in Belgium and 47 of them mentioned that it in their opinion it is possible to increase the safety of street traffic with the aid of cars’ color.

According to the results of several researches the coloration of a car also affects the estimation of its speed and the distance from it. For instance, it seems that a red car is closer and moves quicker than in reality and blue and green ones vice versa. Visual illusions caused by color also include the distortion of object size perception. For example, dark-colored cars seem to be smaller than light-colored ones. Wrong object form perception is also possible and in some cases it’s hard to notice the vehicle because of its color.

All in all, color is an important element of street traffic both for drivers and pedestrians. In the second part of the article we will describe the advantages and disadvantages of each color separately.

~ by carrangement on November 22, 2007.