Your Car's Color Can Keep You Safer

The color of your car might not seem like a safety feature, but a light color can reduce your chances of being in a crash, and a dark color can increase your risk. A study conducted in Sweden found that across all car body types, the lowest 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 crashes and collisions 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.

A follow-on study out of the Monash University Accident Research Centre in Australia looked at more than 800,000 serious motor vehicle accidents in which the vehicle had to be towed (i.e., it was so badly damaged that it could not be driven), and evaluated risk and damage from the perspective of visibility and available light. Using white cars as their comparison standard, researchers looked at 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 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 accident involvement. Black and gray cars were at a particularly significant disadvantage compared to white cars. Black cars had a 12 percent greater risk, and grey cars an 11 percent greater risk than white cars did of being involved in an accident. Silver color did not offer much protection from accident involvement; silver cars were 10 percent more likely than white to get into 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 an accident. Silver cars' risk increased modestly, to 15 percent. In full darkness, the risk difference between colors and white was much less, with red cars being 10 percent more likely to have an accident, and silver 8 percent riskier.

Many factors besides color are involved in accident risk, such as vehicle speed, driver intoxication, driver fatigue and distraction, weather, road conditions and vehicle malfunction. Good drivers understand that they can't control all the factors, particularly those involving the other car and the other driver. They focus on the ones that are in their control. The color of your vehicle is one of those factors that is within your control, and it's worth thinking about choosing your vehicle's color to improve the odds of you and your passengers coming home whole.

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