Cars and Drivers

The Most Expensive Cars Are This Color

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: April 28, 2021 10:18 am

Car prices can be sorted by brand, engine size, technology features, interior design and brands. They also may be sorted by color. Cars with brown exteriors sell for more money than any other color.

iSeeCars reviewed car colors and ranked cars with each color by price. They looked at over 6 million new and used cars between 2017 and 2020. The average price across all colors was $37,144. For brown cars, the average price was $42,369, or 14% higher. The research offered no explanation for this.
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However, iSeeCars Executive Analyst Karl Brauer did give some advice:

A vehicle’s color is among the primary considerations after shoppers have decided on a make and model. With resale value being the single biggest factor in how much a new vehicle “costs” over the course of ownership, consumers should carefully consider their color choice.

Here are the average new car prices by color:

• Brown, $42,369
• Gold, $39,868
• Black, $39,447
• White, $39,167
• Yellow, $37,742
• Purple, $36,159
• Red, $35,295
• Gray, $35,096
• Blue, $35,061
• Silver, $35,026
• Green, $35,012
• Orange, $30,714
• Beige, $28,487

Brown may garner the highest new car price. Yet, brown is not good when it comes to how much the price of a car decreases over time. The three-year depreciation rate on a brown-colored car is 42.1%, the second worst among all colors. The only color that was worse was gold, which was down 45.6% over the same period.

Click here to see read about the slowest-selling new car.