When choosing a car one might consider many factors like style, speed, trend, safety and colour. Mot would not think that the last two safety and colour are linked any way. Research shows they are and there thee is a correlation between colour of car and car accidents. See my previous blog: Car Colour And Its Impact On Car Accidents
When choosing the colour of your car you might like to know that it’s been linked to personality types and these reflect how likely a person is to be involved in a car accident. Red and black being highest up on the list and pink and white further down.
Another study reports that the colour of your car at different times of the day will impact the chances of your being involved in a car accident.
So if you didn’t think the color of your car was a safety feature think again, a light color can reduce your chances of being in a car accident, and a dark color can increase your risk of being in a car accident. A study conducted in Sweden found that across all car body types, the lowest car accident rates belonged to pink cars, and black cars had the highest accident rates.
If you just can’t see yourself driving a pink car, consider silver. New Zealand researchers found that in car accidents the rate of injury for drivers and passengers of silver cars was significantly lower than for any other color. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, also found that occupants of black, brown, and green cars suffered the highest rates of injury from car accidents.
A follow-on study out of the Monash University Accident Research Centre in Australia looked at more than 800,000 serious car accidents and evaluated risk and damage from the perspective of visibility and available light. Using white cars as their comparison standard, researchers looked at car accident rates for cars by color. They examined rates for cars in the colors red, yellow, green, blue, grey, brown, black, maroon, orange, pink, and purple, and compared the car accident rates for cars of each color to that of white cars.
Not surprisingly, they found that in daylight, colors that ranked lower on the visibility index were at greater risk for car accident involvement. Black and gray cars were at a particularly significant disadvantage compared to white cars of being involved in a car accident. Black cars had a 12 percent greater risk, and grey cars an 11 percent greater risk than white cars did of being involved in a car accident. Silver color did not offer much protection from car accident involvement; silver cars were 10 percent more likely than white to get into car accidents.
At dusk and dawn, when visibility is poorest, the risk for black cars shot up to a 47 percent greater chance than a white car for a car accident. Silver cars’ risk increased modestly, to 15 percent of being involved in a car accident. In full darkness, the risk difference between colors and white was much less, with red cars being 10 percent more likely to have a car accident, and silver 8 percent riskier of having a car accident.
Factor this into your car buying formula and save yourself a car accident or have two cars: One for day and one for night 