The color of your car might not seem like a safety feature, but a light color can reduce your chances of being in a crash, and a dark color can increase your risk. A study conducted in Sweden found that across all car body types, the lowest accident rates belonged to pink cars, and black cars had the highest accident rates.

If you just can’t see yourself driving a pink car, consider silver. New Zealand researchers found that in crashes and collisions the rate of injury for drivers and passengers of silver cars was significantly lower than for any other color. The study, published in the British Medical Journal, also found that occupants of black, brown, and green cars suffered the highest rates of injury.

A follow-on study out of the Monash University Accident Research Centre in Australia looked at more than 800,000 serious motor vehicle accidents in which the vehicle had to be towed (i.e., it was so badly damaged that it could not be driven), and evaluated risk and damage from the perspective of visibility and available light. Using white cars as their comparison standard, researchers looked at accident rates for cars by color. They examined rates for cars in the colors red, yellow, green, blue, grey, brown, black, maroon, orange, pink, and purple, and compared the accident rates for cars of each color to that of white cars.

Not surprisingly, they found that in daylight, colors that ranked lower on the visibility index were at greater risk for accident involvement. Black and gray cars were at a particularly significant disadvantage compared to white cars. Black cars had a 12 percent greater risk, and grey cars an 11 percent greater risk than white cars did of being involved in an accident. Silver color did not offer much protection from accident involvement; silver cars were 10 percent more likely than white to get into accidents. Read the rest of this entry »