The safety and popularity of car paints in 1968
In ADAC Motorwelt 10/1968, car colors and their popularity were discussed. A survey (in Germany) showed that white was by far the most popular color with 30.9%, followed by grey/silver (14.6%), blue (14.4%) and red (12.9%). Gold followed in next place with 10.9%.
What bothered the Motorwelt writers was that safety colors were not exactly in demand. And they identified yellow as a color that is conducive to road safety. Mercedes-Benz had apparently also once painted an SL bright yellow (first picture) with this in mind, but was obviously not so happy about it itself. And AMS editor-in-chief Wieselmann, who drove the yellow Mercedes for a while, was also quoted: "Passers-by stopped to shake their heads, older gentlemen grabbed their brains, women winced at the sight of it and made a face as if they had bitten into a lemon."
If you look at the (from today's perspective, thin) color palette that Saab offered for the safety-oriented Saab 99 in 1968, then they obviously had at least a good nose for what people liked.
But whether the individual colors such as the chosen shade of blue ...
... or black went down well with the public was, of course, another question.
And whether the chosen colors were conducive to safety was probably only a marginal concern for the marketing people.
Further interesting stories from the history of the automobile can be found in the more than 250,000 digitized pages of the Zwischengas magazine archive.
