I'm not sure it's just due to cost-cutting. Certainly here in the UK there has been a very noticeable shift from bright colours of cars to multiple shades of grey and other colours which to my old eyes look drab and sludgy. My impression is that this is the current fashion.
The auto industry occasionally goes through phases where they intentionally make cars ugly. I don't know why. I think we're in the early days of such a phase right now.
I dunno about early. Look at all the huge holes in the front of cars, fake grilles and black plastic everywhere - it’s been getting worse and worse for years.
I remember reading somewhere, that the predominant car colours of a certain time are associated or correlated to the economic outlook of the day. Maybe that's what's at play here?
I'd wager in bad economic times if someone can afford a new car, they would buy something more subdued as to not stand out. In good economic times they wouldn't feel that same social pressure?
Kind of like choosing an outfit for a funeral vs a birthday party.
Posted right at the time of the release of the Renault 5, sold with the default color Iconic Yellow, and available in Green Pop (also very flashy)... :)
When a hurricane hits, I’m not waiting on a government-directed bus.[1]
When my kid needs an emergency room, I’m not going to take a tram.
When I need to get a week’s worth of groceries for a large family, I’m not carrying them on a bus.
When I need to tow a load of motorcycles to the race track, I’m not going to take them aboard train.
If I want to go mountain biking in the wilderness, I’m not taking a city bus.
This irrational hatred of personally owned cars is puzzling.
Even if you took every car off the road, deliveries still need to be made, construction still needs to happen, refrigerators still need delivering. Shall people return to the horse and buggy days? Or perhaps we can just pay poor immigrants to carry building supplies from the quarry to the factory then to the customer?
> This irrational hatred of personally owned cars is puzzling.
The reasons don't seem that puzzling. Road traffic accidents are the cause of 1.2 million annual deaths (largely pedestrians and cyclists), the leading cause of death for ages 5-29, in addition to being a huge source of pollution.
The flipside of some of your points (like cars being good because you need one to get groceries) is that designing cities/etc. around cars and having insufficient public transport is a major cause of that need in the first place - particularly to the detriment of the many who can't afford or are otherwise unable to drive a car.
I don't think we can just rip cars out entirely, and definitely not all road vehicles as you seem to be implying ("poor immigrants to carry building supplies from the quarry to the factory then to the customer"), but I do think it'd be beneficial to minimize their use to where it's necessary, instead of as a default with associated costs subsidized by the general public.
Data I'm seeing[0] has pedestrians alone at ~35%. I think "largely" is justified, particularly when it's more than car drivers and passengers combined.
I don't agree with the GP, but I also think youre going too far the opposite way.
You've identified a number of things that 'need' a car, but im guessing you, as well as everyone else uses their multiple household cars for other things.
And you could set up society so it doesn't actually need a car for a lot of these things.
> I'm not so sure this is the reason. If you look at houses, current trends are black and white or a combination of the two.
> I think it's more just current tastes than anything.
I guess I was wrong about what I thought a trend was, because my understanding was always that the general populace dictates trends. When I go through neighborhoods where people have freedom to choose their exterior color, the new colors I'm seeing are not white, black, or gray, but a vibrant selection across the spectrum. I'd love to see these color choices backed up by actual data, because my unqualified belief (since we're all kind of doing that here) is that the people who are choosing boring colors for new construction are not surveying consumers to find out if they actually like those colors.
Exterior coloring on homes is actually an interesting thing to look at. There are some colors that won't blend in the neighborhood. Some colors affect heat profile. Yellow attracts wasps... On and on. It turns out there's a limited spectrum of "holds value, doesn't look stupid, won't have negative effects" colors for houses.
Buyers these days can go on the Internet and read about all of this. So can Builders, and you can bet Real Estate agents have numbers to tell them what sells for just-that-little-bit-more.
