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One thing I feel like we discuss rarely here is cars.
I drive a late 90s/early 00s German sedan. When I made less money, I spent a good amount of time wrenching on it. I wanted to have some minimal competence and understanding of the car, and it was a great way to save money.
It still would be a great way to save money - I won't kid myself there - but the stress of preparing for a maintenance job, buying the specialized tools/parts, and working in my extremely cramped garage has lost some magic. I still feel accomplished doing little things but when I'm constantly under pressure to be doing work or parenting, there's less magic in DIY. Bike maintenance provides a similar dopamine hit with far less commitment.
That said, I just picked it up from the mechanic this week after a month-long absence and some significant work being done. I truly do not understand how people put up with newer cars.
This thing is absolutely sublime. It strikes a perfect balance between the precision and feedback from all of its systems while driving and what you'd define as "luxury" and comfort. I splurged on an aftermarket exhaust that fades into the background on the highway and absolutely rips when I'm driving like I stole it late at night on more empty roads.
Not to mention how it looks. Of course, any car you see as a teenager is what you base everything else on, but the slightly angular design language of this period right before everything turned into aero blobs for fuel efficiency and crash standards just really gets me going. I absolutely still look back at it when walking into the office and find myself getting excited when I step back into it after a long day.
Whenever I'm on the road watching hundreds of drones driving dirty shitboxes without using their turn signals or trying to drive efficiently, I fall into such a superiority complex. How could you care so little about something you do so much? For a country supposedly in love with its cars, it would be tough for Americans to give less of a shit about how driving feels and how they perform at it. For all I'm made fun of about the time and money I've invested in an older car, when I spread that out over the time I've used it and the joy I derive from it it seems like an obvious trade.
Speaking of identical shitboxes with insufficient lighting. Is it just me or are there also absurdly fewer colors of cars on the road now too? Even if they were less common you used to see a variety of colors on new cars being sold. Raspberry colored Honda Fits, bright orange Mini Coopers, Forest green Subarus, golden yellow Scion xBs, etc.
Now it seems like the vast majority of cars are some shade of grey/silver. There's something so bleak about seeing a never ending stream of grey cars, driving on gray pavement, with a backdrop of grey concrete buildings, all under a grey sky. It's especially bad contrast when people refuse to turn their lights on when it's raining.
Checking a few random 2024 models it seems like cars are only manufactured in ~4-5 grayish colors (black, grey, white, silver, and bluish grey) and red for some reason. What happened to just regular blue cars? I could have sworn that even 10 years ago every make had a blue option. Then even if the manufacture offers a non-grey color it's a $1k up-charge.
It started with the supply chain issues after COVID. Dealers didn’t want colored cars, because they wanted to avoid a situation where they only had three cars of a certain model in stock and two of them were niche colors that most buyers wouldn’t want. So they started ordering only gray, white and black models. The manufactures took note of this and started making more gray, white and black models and fewer brightly colored models. This in turn made the colorful ones more expensive and harder to find, and so even fewer people bought them. So now most cars on the road are gray, white and black.
But I’ve seen reports that the average age of cars on the road in the U.S. is ~13 years old. Assuming that this is referring to the median (and despite finding countless articles repeating the “13 years old” statistic, I haven’t found one that specifies if the average in question is a mean or median), then this suggests that post-COVID-lockdown effects on the distribution of colors among cars on the road can only be marginal at best. And even if the statistic refers to the mean, I doubt that outliers have too much of an effect here.
Of course, your explanation does perfectly answer the other part of your interlocutor’s question, why new cars only come in grey.
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