Why Porsche takes up to four years to approve every single new exterior colour?

Black, white, red or grey might have been dominating the automotive world as the favourite colour options for the consumers when it comes to choosing paint themes for cars or two-wheelers. However, the world of car colours is changing fast and adopting new paint options. The automotive world is witnessing the emergence of new and unique colour options lately.

While choosing the right colour for their new vehicles is a tough task for the consumers, it is no less tedious for automotive designers and brands. To select the new range of car colours an automobile company may take three to four years time. For instance, Porsche that announced a wide range of new generation colours for its future cars under the Paint to Sample program, took up to four years time to select the new paint options.

Finding, selecting and testing the new paint colours for the future cars was a hard task for the German luxury car brand than one can imagine. In a report, Carscoops quoted one of the Porsche designers, who said that the designers have to think years ahead of trends in order to ensure that the colour on one's car matches the colour that is popular.

The reason behind such a long time to choose the new colour options is that consumer demands are changing constantly at a fast pace. The colour that is popular today, might not be as preferred by the buyers after three to four years. Hence, the designers have to think years ahead of the current period. They need to assume what colour would be preferred by the car buyers after three to four years.

Each and every colour must pass through a wide range of tests before being selected. The colours not only have to be visually attractive but they must withstand exposure to weather. To ensure this, the paint is applied to test panels that are placed in bright sunlight for two years in Florida. After this, the test panels also go through a wide range of tests including fire safety, saltwater, stone impact etc. These sample test plates are known as ‘colour frogs’ and they appear like small Porsche 911 models.

As the Porsche designer said, they tend to look outside the automotive world for inspiration. They usually use interior design, architecture as sources of ideas for choosing new colours.