The relationship between the color of the car and the safety of its passengers has long been the question of many who acquired a new car. “What is the safest color on the road?” they ask, but the answer to this does not come easily by any means.

First of all because there are multiple factors affecting the visibility of colors on the road, such as the time of day they are observed, background colors, the weather conditions and the “eagle eye” of the drivers, who in spite of testing for possible color distinguishing problems, can still have issues perceiving certain hues under difficult visibility conditions. Second of all, because there is close to none scientific study establishing relationships between the color of a car and the safety on the road. There are trials in the field, but unfortunately the authors have admitted that they were not able to draw clear conclusions or even conclusion with a high degree of generalization.

There are some conclusions shedding light on this topic, but they come from fields such as optometry, which has is for a fact that lime-yellow is one of the best perceived colors, as it is right in the middle of the color spectrum. Applied to car safety, they could be right, especially with modern painting techniques, which can provide special fluorescent coating. However, don’t take lime-yellow as the safest color, as against some backgrounds it can become undistinguishable. The same with the red color – generally perceived as one of the safest due to its association with firefighter cars and the Red Cross – but which is actually one of the hardest colors to perceive, especially at night, when it tends to be confounded with black. Read the rest of this entry »