I was never what you’d call a car person (or a cat person, for that matter), but I used to be able to tell most models of cars apart. Or at least, many.

Now? Just a few. Very few, actually. I already knew it had a great deal to do with safety regulations, but this article explains the situation in depth, including the law of diminishing returns and unintended consequences—such as, for example, how fuel mileage regulations for regular cars have encouraged the proliferation of SUVs that use much more gas per mile. Nice going!

My particular pet peeve is how the regulations concerning body integrity make the windows tinier and tinier and ruin the sightlines.

But none of it explains Americans’ preference for black and gray and white cars. What a bore parking lots are these days! Whatever happened to the wonderful car colors of my youth? Gone, gone—or at least, rather rare.

Here’s an article on that, too:

Cars of yesteryear (if we accept yesteryear to mean the 1960s through the early 1980s) were often painted in bright, popping colors—supersaturated pigments in hues that don’t appear on most modern vehicles. But the appeal of these paint jobs has to do as much with the way the paint looks on the car as it does the color of the paint. Older paints sat flat on the surface of the car; there was no swirling iridescence to give an illusion of movement below the surface. And the finish, though not quite matte, was a lot less glossy than the finish on modern cars.

These vintage paint jobs were almost certainly the result of either acrylic lacquer or enamel paint technology. Acrylic lacquers dominated from the late 1940s until the 1960s. Lacquers were high solvent paints that dried very quickly, to a hard and shiny finish (though not nearly as glossy as we’ve become accustomed to). Lacquers were often highly pigmented, allowing for rich colors. But that hard, shiny finish became brittle with age and exposure; lacquer didn’t play well with water or UV rays, which tended to fade its vibrant colors. And, although this wasn’t a prevailing concern at the time, lacquer’s high solvent composition meant that these paints gave off a ton of environmentally unfriendly volatile organic compounds. Acrylic enamels, developed in the 1960s, were a lower solvent alternative; these paints took a bit longer to dry, but they were more durable and weather-resistant, and they gave off fewer VOCs. Best of all, acrylic enamels looked very similar to lacquers.

Because factory testing standards in the 1970s were less stringent than they are today, car companies were able to get away with using highly pigmented paints that were brittle and not very durable. To make matters worse, acrylic lacquers and enamels were single-stage paints, meaning that these paint jobs weren’t even protected by a clear top coat. They didn’t wear well. According to Jerry Koenigsmark, who has worked at PPG, one of the main automotive paint companies, for 30 years, a lot of the colors that were used back then simply wouldn’t pass muster today. “The saturation and depth of color was a lot better,” said Koenigsmark, “because they didn’t have a lot of the specs that we have now—adhesion testing, gravel chip testing, engineering tests. If I had the exact same pigmentation of a highly saturated color from the ’60s … that paint would be brittle.”

Picture a modern car: If you look at one in the daylight, it almost certainly has a gloss on it so shiny that the paint seems to swim under the surface. What you’re looking at is a polyurethane based clear-coating technology that accounts for much of the difference in appearance between cars of the 1960s and 70s and cars of today. Modern technology uses a base coat, which carries all the pigments, and a clear coat, which adds a deeply glossy layer on top. It creates an effect a bit like looking at a bright color underwater—the experience of the color is interrupted, and sometimes dulled, by the reflection off the surface of the paint.

But as you move around this imaginary car, you’ll notice something else: The paint shimmers and sparkles, and its hue seems to change as you look at it from different angles. That iridescent quality is the result of the other major technological change that came about in the early 1980s: the development of mica-based effect paint. Metallics were available before the 1980s, but they were made by adding aluminum flakes to paint. These first-generation metallics gave a very flat and reflective surface…“Mica,” says Jane Harrington, the manager of color styling at PPG, “gave colors a more of a luster or gem quality”—a pearlescence that is difficult to describe but obvious when you see it…According to Harrington, these days a lot of colors are blended with aluminums and micas, with variously-sized flakes that add to the dimensional quality of the paint. These effect paints are applied over the pigmented base coat, and below the glossy clear coat. They add depth to the paint, but they also tend to diffuse color. In some form or another, they have become nearly omnipresent in modern paint jobs.

True. I’d noticed that weird Las-Vegas-casino-like shimmer, but I never knew what it was about or why it was so ubiquitous on modern cars. Then again, that still doesn’t explain all the white and black and gray, because they still are capable of making bright ones. You continue to see the occasional red car, for example.

Maybe I’ll get a red one next.

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