Currently reading: The UK's most popular new car colours

Car buyers in the UK are beginning to fall out of love with white as demand for black increases for the first time in a decade

The UK’s most popular car colour for new registrations is white, according to sales data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).

White remains the most popular colour choice for UK new car buyers for the fourth year running, and accounted for 552,329 sales in 2016, though this is a drop of 2.1% from the previous year.

Look at the best-selling cars in Britain here

Registrations of cars painted black increased to 542,862 to account for 20.2% of total sales, only 0.3% behind white. Sales of black cars increased for the first time since 2007.

Other colours on the rise include pink with an 82.7% leap in sales in 2016 to 3527 units and bronze that took 8902 sales to be 44% up on 2015. Yellow is also back on trend in the top 10 with sales of 12,431.

Take a look at the colour options for the new Ford GT

Losers in the colour chart are brown, which slipped 40.1% to ninth overall, and silver with sales down to 273,220, compared to its peak of 843,870 in 2004.

Jane E Harrington, colour styling manager of paint manufacturer PPG said: "Colour choices naturally change over time, though conservative shades such as silver, black and white tend to dominate. The important thing is for car makers to be responsive to the tastes of buyers as they come into the market and shift between vehicles types as they have families, buy a second car or want something more personal to them.’

Alisdair Suttie

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whalefish 23 January 2017

A graph?

A simple graph of these data would've saved a lot of repetitive text.
poon 20 January 2017

Stealth Grey.

That stealthy flat grey mostly seen on RS6 Avants and Focus RS's is a great colour. Also seen on the Mini Coopers. Moonwalk Grey best with a black roof and mirrors.
typos1 20 January 2017

Black and white arent

Black and white arent actually colours. Not that long ago reds, blues and greens would have featured strongly, sad that boring greys, silvers blacks and white dominate now.