An Australian study found that during the day black cars are 12% more likely than white cars to be involved in an accident. At dusk the risk increases by a whopping 47%.
I am curious if that data changes at all if headlights are on. I’d think that with headlights raising visibility of the black cars the incidence of accidents would start to get closer to the same for both colors of cars, but that’s just my uneducated opinion.
I had the same thought. Australia doesn’t require daytime running lights, so it’s be interesting to see if there’s data from Canada (where we require drl) to compare against.
My first car was tan. I used to have people pulling out in front of me all the time and I would get so mad about it. Then I started turning my headlights on all the time, even in the middle of the day. Suddenly people stopped pulling out in front of me and the amount of near misses I had from other drivers doing “stupid” things went to near zero. Apparently even tan cars can look like the road in the right conditions. DRL should be mandatory everywhere.
They’re not mandatory but I think it would be pretty tough to find a car less than 15 years old that doesn’t have them.
They’re relevant to safety ratings and so on, and all the cars sold here are sold in other jurisdictions where they’re mandatory.
Also relevant to safety ratings. It would be daft to sell cars without them.
The study does call that out.
The results from the analysis using the induced exposure study design, presented in Section 4, are generally intuitive. Vehicle colour effects on crash risk were greatest in daylight hours compared to twilight or dark times. This makes intuitive sense since use of vehicle lighting in twilight and at night reduces contrast differences between different vehicle colours. Use of daytime running lights or headlights during the day in Australia is not common hence visibility differences between vehicles would be left largely due to the colour of the vehicle.
The study was authored in 2007. Since 2011 almost all new cars have had DRLs even though they’re not mandatory.
It might also be coincidental. Maybe reckless drivers prefer black cars for some weird reason.
I think I read something about that but with red cars and tickets. The question though was are red car drivers more likely to speed/drive wrecklessly, or just more likely to get noticed doing it and ticketed?
Honestly? When I said humans should stop being racist towards each other, I wasn’t implying that we instead START being racist towards cars…
We race at a local race track. Lots of drivers have dark colored cars because they look cool. My brother is our driver. He said you have a fraction of a second to decide if you’re moving somewhere based on what you can see.
Cars the color of the asphalt aren’t very easy to see. Incidentally, neither are the white cars because that’s the color of the wall. You know who’s easy to see and rarely gets bumped? Him. Because him and I decided on a bright yellow car.
Other than two orange cars in different divisions, he’s the brightest car out there.
As a side note, racecars don’t have headlights. You really don’t want glass on a race track. You also have a black window net on your left and roll bars on your right. Plus you’ve got a helmet and generally your seat comes out around your head to keep you from moving around too much so there’s not much seeing left and right that you’ve got.
GT cars certainly do have headlights and road cars haven’t had glass lenses in a decade.
Road cars hadn’t had glass lenses in a decade, a decade and a half ago.
I don’t remember the last car with glass lenses I saw, but it must’ve been an 80’s or early 90’s model.
Let me correct myself, asphalt 1/4 mile tracks in Wisconsin require you to remove your headlights except in certain events.
I’ve been looking at car ads and noticed black cars are listed as salvaged much more often than other colors. Yes, there are a lot of black cars on the road, but it didn’t seem to be nearly enough to explain the number of salvaged vehicles being advertised.
At least one study confirms that black cars do have more accidents, and far more accidents at dusk.
If you think about it it makes sense. Being a black car means less visibility at night so they get chop shopped. The same goes for accidents.
Why is it that the world rejects an engineering mindset when it comes to cars, despite them being an engineered product (and service)?
To illustrate my point, let’s treat the network of all motorways globally as an engineer-provided service/product to the wider public. Which it is; but cars are also designed, sold, and owned by businessmen, unlikely to apply the “engineering philosophy.”
- So suppose engineers notice this tidbit, that black cars are salvaged more, suggesting more accidents.
- Road networks as a unified system are made less efficient when car crashes occur, actually coming to a temporary delivery standstill around the area of accident
- Any inefficiency can be designed away; either with a different system or streamlining the system. (A different system is good if you reach a dead end in further development of existing system or realise it would be, by default, better in some holistic way)
- in this case, a train network would be replacing with a different system, but simply removing black cars from the roads would be streamlining efficiency by reducing the number of crashes.
This is simply the logical way to approach an important, fatality inducing machine like the highway network.
I could theorise that business leaders sell black cars because it allows for
- increased insurance premiums, and in turn increased sales price
- satisfaction of increased demand for “executive-looking” cars
- increased demand for repairs due to the increased accidents
But who knows.
Yet another case of small number * small number = small number.
I wonder how much black BMWs skew the data.
Around here BMW’s aren’t nearly as bad as black pickups.
Different demons of the same layer of hell
Audis and Nissan Altimas too
It seems to vary depending on where you live. In SoCal I haven’t noticed many Audi and Altima drivers causing issues, but late model Camry drivers can be aggressive as hell. Camry drivers use to be the most relaxed, sedate drivers around but no more.
Driving a black car in Australia seems like a recipe for hot interiors, any safety issues aside.
IMO this is because of peripheral vision you lose most of the colour cuz of the angle the light is hitting your eye. Making dark vehicles really hard to see.
I’ve seen one accident and experienced one near miss caused by a fast moving black vehicle not being visible to a shoulder check. In my case they flew past me right when I had committed to a U-turn. I did shoulder check, but it was confirmed by a pedestrian that they SUV sped around the blind corner with less than a 2 second window to have seen them.
That is interesting!
I wonder if it’s normalised for other factors, insurance companies would know.
Do drivers of black cars drive more aggressively?
Is black a more common colour for higher performance cars?
Anecdotally, I have had two charcoal colored cars that have both been totaled in wrecks but have had basically no wrecks in my cars that were other colors.
likely different percent based on how much snow a place gets. the reason red and yellow are used in emergency vehicles so much is visibility.
Yeah. I’m in a place that barely snows and is hot for most of the year. I picked white for my car because of that.
Black car owners like to dark tint their brake light and turn signal lenses because you wanna be STEALTH when you brake or turn.
Is this just an Australian thing? The only car I’ve had a wreck in was red, 2 different cars, 2 wrecks.
Burgundy, brown, gray, black, blue green, dark gray. Lots of cars and 40 years of driving. No wrecks.
Those are individual data points from a single source. You are one person out of many.
You can’t just say because your personal experience goes against what’s most likely, doesn’t change the statitcs. For example:
Gingers are more likely to get skin cancer, I’m a ginger that has never had skin cancer, while living in the skin cancer Capitol of the world, and I personally know a person who is not a ginger who had skin cancer. Does that mean the statistics are wrong?
Yes I know. My question was is this just in Australia?
I was only pointing out that my personal experiences were the opposite of this study.This was the only study I found that was in the USA, and if I’m reading it right, white cars were in more crashes than black.
You didn’t read that study very thoroughly did you?
The difference between black cars and white cars was less than 1%.
Beyond that, the study you linked is looking at all car crashes, whereas the Australian study is specifically comparing daylight, dusk/dawn, and dark. Dusk and dawn are the periods of the day where visibility is lower but not completely gone and not every driver is putting their headlights on appropriately considering the light conditions.
The amount of times I’ve seen a car without headlights on, right when it’s really starting to get dark or early in the morning is concerning. And under these conditions it’s harder to see a black car without headlights than most other colours.
Our eyesight works the same no matter where in the world you are. So there’s no reason this would be much different country to country unless circumstances were different (e.g. headlights being mandatory at all times.)
Also, there is someone else in this thread stating their personal experience is exact opposite to you. Which is why we don’t use a single source of data points to reach conclusions.
“Black luxury cars are involved in more accidents than white fleet vans, look it up” -Jontron
