23.1.10

the one i wrote about colors



Hi!

I'm new here, but until we make our way to the formal introductions, allow me to tell you something thing about myself: I like green.

Trees are green - but that's an easy association, right? Look out almost any windo- or ... wait a few months and then look out the window. Trees. Possibly trees and snow, and then a solid layer of ice (I love the Midwest!), but I digress ...

As I was saying: "green" carries with it a number of associations. Every color does, of course, which can vary by culture. In North America, for example, most people might tell you red stands for rage, orange means avarice, yellow represents fear, etc.

No, wait, that's DC Comics - but seriously, I want to know: what color is your car?

Yes, you. I can see you through the screen.

You may already know about a number of articles that try to connect the color of your car to your personality, but what if you don't want to just drive your car around "as is"? What if you intend to, I don't know ... make a few changes?

What you may not know is that your automotive color choice might have something to say about your personality, and might give your local tuning shop a clue about what you might - or might not! - be planning to do to it.

Look, I'm not the one that lowered my car two inches, added red neon lights under the dash so that the interior glows, tinted the windows dark purple, and put big shiny wheels on it, okay? Still, see if you can tell what color it is by the end of this handy guide.

So now, without further ado, the actual point of this post: based on exhaustive (not really) research of many leading aftermarket tuning firms (one), I present my unified theory of composite dynamics the following observations relating a car's color to its owner's tuning strategy.

Let's do this Roy G. Biv, shall we? Let's!

RED



YOU JUST KNOW HE'S WEARING A MAN-THONG


People with red cars are all about awesome cars, and they want their awesome cars to look awesome. Red cars are shiny and bright and there to be noticed. Red stands out more, and red cars are more than twice as likely to be pulled over. [citation needed]

Odds are, if someone with a red car is going to modify it, they'll focus on the outside. Red car owners might put on spoilers, shiny wheels, all that jazz with the more sound to draw attention. In brief: the car might (might!) not break any speed records, but it sure looks great!

ORANGE



DID YOU SEE ME CLIP THAT APEX


Orange is a look-at-me color, for sure, but those who buy orange cars want them light. Super light. Less (mass) is more (speed) on a track, and that's where the orange cars go to play. If your friend owns an orange car, he's probably been called a track-rat at least once or twice.

I'll be polite and say that orange cars are likely to be owned by "gentleman drivers".

YELLOW



PROBABLY NSFW


There's something weird about yellow. Everyone (by which I mean the cultures of the 20th and 21st centuries in North America) claims that yellow is a cheerful color, but if you put babies in a yellow room? So much more crying. Yellow is an energetic, highly visible color - but again, not quite the same as red.

I can't make many generalizations about yellow, except that there's always something a bit "different" about the owners of yellow cars that makes them want to stand out from the crowd.

Who do you know with a yellow car? Think about it.

GREEN



GREEN CARS


Yeah, I don't really have enough of a sample size to talk about green cars, but it seems like they're pretty rare these days, and you don't see too many green cars in tuning shops ... but if there is something a bit different about yellow and a bit racy about orange, then there is probably something seriously wrong with green.

BLUE



IT'S QUITE NICE ALREADY


There seem to be a lot more blue cars on the road than green cars - but we're talking about customized cars, here, and I don't have enough of a sample size to draw any conclusions. It seems like people with blue cars apparently don't want to do much to them, perhaps implying that people with nice, calm blue cars are content to soak in the sun and scenery, and feel little need to go VROOOM! down public roads ...



SOMEONE'S GOT THE BLUES


... but of course there are obvious exceptions.

PURPLE



BIENVENIDO A HIALEAH


Oh, come on! When was the last time you saw a purple car that didn't look like this?

Actually, I almost bought a purple Jetta, once - and Jo had a purple Dodge pickup back in the 90's. Oh well ... the few, proud people with purple cars. Yeah, they leave their cars alone.

BLACK | DARK GRAY



I REALLY WANTED A BATMOBILE


By far, the most common color you'll find on a car that isn't quite right when it comes off the showroom floor is black, followed closely by dark, gunmetal metallics. The people men driving these solemn dark unobtrusive colors generally have but one thing to say: once you go black, you never go back I want more POWER!

Power: the qualities most important to drivers black tuner cars.

The price of power? Irrelevant. If it makes it louder and faster and meaner, the owner of the power-trip black tuner car wants it ... now.

SILVER



IT SHOULD BE PRACTICAL, TOO


A bit of a peculiar color, silver is. Not quite gray or black, Silver is shiny and bright. The driver of the silver car wants power, too - but there's something unique about the case of the silver car.

The owner of this car is concerned with value for dollar.

How much bang for the buck will I get, you know? Also, let's do a good job but be sensible about it ... maybe let's limit the number of bucks because really, in the grand scheme of things, you run into diminishing returns, as long as it's shiny and performs, looks good, sounds good, does the job, a superstitious and cowardly lot, why go crazy with it?

In terms of the average silver tuner car, then, silver is a sort of compromise between black and red, which makes absolutely no sense from a visual perspective now that I actually think about it ... but this is a blog, after all, so thinking about any of this is probably a bad idea to begin with.

WHITE



TO SEE SIX MORE PAGES OF UPGRADES, CLICK HERE


White (to me) is even weirder than silver, or even yellow and green or green with yellow stripes and red ostrich interior. This is because the owners of white cars go one of two ways.

Case the first: they go all out. They don't change one piece at a time (as the owner of the black or gray car might), but completely all out right now, because if you're going to do it, then you should do it right, dammit! There is no sense in half-a**ing a job or doing it a dozen times.

Case the second: they do nothing at all.



IT'S REALLY QUITE NICE ALREADY


They may think about it. They may talk about it. In the end, however, the car's fine the way it is, really, so why start fixing things that aren't broken?

Which means, of course, that white is either equal to black + red, or else it's sort of the same or equal to blue (for large values of blue), which makes perfect sense ...

... I swear.

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