Demand for white cars surges

The popularity of white cars continues to grow, outpacing every other colour with more being driven on Britain’s roads now than ever before.

Despite this, black is still most most popular car colour overall, according to data seen by RAC Insurance, following a freedom of information request to the DVLA.

Looking at every car registered for road use in Britain as of March 2020, the number of white cars rose by 269,314 compared to a year earlier, making a total of 4,395,922.

Since 2016 white has enjoyed stellar growth with more than 1.5m (1,522,838) more white cars now on the road, taking its percentage share of all the country’s 32.6m cars to 13.5%. It is now the fifth most popular colour – a place it’s held since 2018.

While black remains the most popular car colour on Britain’s roads, accounting for one in every five cars (20%) with 6.5m (6,578,946), its growth rate is far lower with just under 12,000 (11,806) added in 2020. In March 2019 the figure was 112,035 and in 2018 it was 132,641.

Even so, there are still 822,411 more black cars than its nearest rival silver which has 5.7m (5,756,535, or an 18% share of all cars). There were 363,485 fewer silver cars on the roads in 2020 than there were at the same point in 2019, and more than 1m fewer than in 2016 (1,084,780).

Blue is the colour in third spot with 5,593,298 – down 87,865 on 2019 but still accounting for 17% of all cars on the roads, with grey in fourth on just under 5m (4,954,510, or a 15.2% share of all cars) – down 236,027 since March 2019.

Red takes sixth spot behind white with 3.5m (3,486,735, or 10.7%) cars licensed and is the last colour with significant volumes over a million. In seventh place green only accounts for 667,000 cars, representing 2% of the whole car parc. Orange (8th), beige/buff (9th) and brown (10th) complete the top 10 colours, each only making up under 1% of all cars.

Pink is the least popular car colour with 22,728 but that has increased very steadily since 2017 when there 19,959 – only multicoloured cars are less popular with just 6,724 down from 7,455 in 2017.

“While black continues to top the car colours popularity chart, the appeal of white is still very much on the up,” said RAC Insurance spokesman Simon Williams.

“It remains to be seen whether white will make its way into the top five car colours however. If it does, it will have to depose grey, blue or silver.