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The Great Color Cull
Everyone knows the road turned gray. The usual story blames buyers — the annual paint-industry reports count the share of cars sold in black, white, and silver. We counted something nobody had: what the factories actually offered. We hold the paint codes for every factory color across 36 makes, so we measured the menu, not the meal.
The menu shrank by almost half
Distinct factory paint codes offered per model year by the 13 platforms present in our data in both 2005 and 2018 (BMW, Chrysler group, Ford group, GM, Honda/Acura, Hyundai, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota/Lexus, Volvo). Source: factory refinish documentation.
Who cut, who didn't
Change in distinct colors offered, 2005 → 2018, per platform. Mass-market brands slashed; BMW and Hyundai went the other way — premium personalisation programs and a growing model range.
Mazda cut its palette by three quarters. Honda cut two thirds. Ford and Toyota roughly halved theirs. Meanwhile BMW expanded its offering 67% — Individual-program colors are profitable — and Hyundai's palette grew with its model lineup.
The part nobody counts: the palette is still colorful
In 2005, 33.8% of offered colors were grayscale (black, white, silver, gray). By 2018 it was 38.3% — a shift of under five points, in a period when grayscale's share of cars sold ran past 75%. Automakers kept designing color. Buyers stopped ordering it — and dealers stopped stocking it. If you've ever wondered why the used-parts market makes finding a Sunset Orange fender so hard, this is why: the colors exist, thinly spread over millions of cars.
Offered ≠ sold. Our measure is palette breadth from factory refinish sheets — the industry reports measure sales mix. The two together tell the real story: choice shrank AND concentrated.
Method & data
We derived counts from factory refinish documentation — the sheets paint suppliers use to mix repair paint — covering 25,000+ code/name/year records across 36 makes, 1991–2019. We de-duplicated formatting variants, restricted the analysis to the 13 platforms present in both 2005 and 2018 (avoiding coverage artifacts), and classified grayscale by colour name. Some low-volume and fleet-only colors may not appear in refinish sheets; that bias is stable across years.
Download: colors-offered-per-year.csv (per make, per year) ·
full code-level corpus: llms-full.txt ·
browse it by make and year: the paint code library.
Data is CC-BY 4.0 — free to reuse with a link to this page. Press: info@partspatch.com.
Why we have this data
PartsPatch matches used OEM parts to the exact car — and for painted panels that means the exact factory code. The lookup that powers this analysis is free.
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