It takes nothing more than a glance at a busy parking lot or a quick scroll through a handful of online car configurators to see which colors are the most popular for new cars in America. For those who relish the full spectrum of the rainbow, it’s dire. The most popular color, according to data provided by iSeeCars.com, is white, followed closely by black. Then gray, then silver. It’s all very monochromatic. These grayscale tones constitute 77.1% of the total.

The first vibrant shade to make an appearance on the list is red at No. 5 with just over 10% of color share. Blue is next at 9%, and then things fall off dramatically. To put the lack of color into perspective, we put together this quick pie chart. Naturally, each slice is colored to match its automotive hue.

We know some of those slices of pie are pretty dinky, so here are the numbers:

  1. White, 23.9%
  2. Black, 23.2%
  3. Gray, 15.5%
  4. Silver, 14.5%
  5. Red, 10.3%
  6. Blue, 9%
  7. Brown, 1.4%
  8. Green, 0.7%
  9. Beige, 0.4%
  10. Orange, 0.4%
  11. Gold, 0.3%
  12. Yellow, 0.2%
  13. Purple, 0.1%

Note that these data come from model years 2014-2018, and we honestly wouldn’t be surprised if things were even more skewed in the direction of grays by now. It seems automakers are really diving into the not-black well with shades like graphite, titanium and tungsten. And we don’t put the blame for boring shades on the car companies, because we’re sure they’d gladly paint their cars any color that customers want to order.

Lest you think this is an issue solely with Americans, check out this post from the dataisbeautiful Reddit community. As you can see from their much prettier chart, the black-white-gray brigade is just as strong in Poland as it is in the United States. According to automotive paint supplier PPG (via The Drive), it’s the same story all across the globe.

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