For light vehicle buyers, it’s all about colour – paint colours that catch the eye and create excitement. We know that colour can play a big role in car buyers’ choices about which cars to buy. Our colours contribute to the pride new car owners feel about the vehicles they’ve bought and they reinforce those decisions every time owners get behind the wheel. 

Axalta colour shows hosted around the world present OEMs with colour palettes designed to showcase the latest colour and technology trends. On display are painted, contoured panels that represent colours for all vehicle types. Exquisite and sophisticated colours are designed for luxury and specialty brands while trending colours with global acceptance target mass appeal brands. Axalta’s global team of specialists design colour choices that anticipate and inspire colour preferences for automobile manufacturers for years into the future. 

We develop our colour palettes using advanced coating materials and systems. Axalta’s proprietary digital technology provides a virtual display of colour on vehicles. Digital colour rendering is a powerful tool that can help in the visualisation of colour design on a specific automotive body style in order to ensure the right colour is feasible in production as well as accelerate development time and help reduce the possibility of production delays.

To make our colour repertoire even more accessible to manufacturers, Axalta brings the latest digital technology to our colour shows. Touch screen displays enable users to choose a vehicle, colour and setting, and then rotate the image with 3-D realism. The effect is dazzling and the feedback immediate; customers can see their imagination come to life on screen with the touch of a finger. 

As part of our commitment to colour, Axalta is proud to publish its annual Global Color Popularity report, the largest and longest running report of its kind in the automotive industry. It is the only report that includes global automotive colour popularity rankings and regional trends from 11 leading automotive regions of the world. Each year a full report reveals the top 10 most popular colour spaces. The report also shows colour popularity by vehicle segments including compacts and sport vehicles, trucks and SUVs, intermediate and multi-purpose vehicles as well as luxury sedans and luxury SUVs. 

In suggesting which colours will best suit the future, it is sometimes necessary to reflect on the most popular colours of the past. In 2013, Axalta celebrated over six decades of colour popularity reporting. Our 60+ Years of Color Reporting looks back to the top five automobile colours in Europe, North America, South America and Asia. This historical snapshot of colour preferences shows the transformation of regional differences leading into today’s global automotive market.