DATA - The streets in the Netherlands are becoming boring. In the early seventies three quarters of newsold cars had a bright color. These days three quarters of new cars sold are either black, grey or white.

All motorized vehicles in the Netherlands must be registered at the Rijksdienst voor Wegverkeer (RDW). A couple of months ago the RDW made a part of this registration openly available. With it you can download a set of records on cars containing the year they were first registered, the number of seats, the model, but also the basic color.

We picked 4 million records (roughly half the cars in the database) and plotted the distribution of the color through the years.

Here’s how it looks for the last forty years, starting in 1973:





For those not familiar with these kind of graphs: we counted the number of cars for each color for each year. Per year all the cars together are 100% and we divided it in groups representing the percentage of that color so you can see the dominant colors for each year. So black, grey and white together represented almost 80% of all cars sold in 2013.

With fashion it’s known that during economic bad times black and grey become more prevalent. But the “bland” periodes for the cars exceed economic depressions…. So what explains it?

We’ve also put the data starting 1950 in a graph:



Because the early years have relatively low numbers of registered cars left, the accuracy is less.

The colors registered are pretty basic. So colors like “silver” are translated to “grey”. Keep that in mind.

So, does anybody have data from other countries on this?