Axalta’s 70th Annual Global Automotive Color Popularity Report 2022 indicates that blue is the only top-five chromatic color for new cars since 2007 in Europe. In 2022, blue was the fourth most popular color in the old continent with a share of 11% in new car sales, after gray (27%), black (22%) and white (21%).
Around 2,200 BC, around the same time as the ancient pyramids, the Egyptians created what is considered the first synthetically colored pigment, Egyptian blue. “blue” is a word that could come from the Old High German word “blao” meaning shiny and bright. According to the symbolism of traditional Chinese culture, blue is associated with longevity. It is also one of the three primary color pigments in traditional color theory: red, yellow, and blue. But on the internet it’s ugly.
diversity
The color blue has the widest range of any ink color, with over twenty thousand different variations, from pale blue to midnight blue, among others. According to Axalta’s analysis, these thousands of colors encompass the breadth and complexity of the blue spectrum, which includes highly saturated blue, aluminum blue, and even blue with colored glass particles.
With all these varieties of blues on the way, European body shops will see more color repairs. But blues, especially blues, are easily repaired. This is where Axalta’s cloud-based digital color management comes in. According to Olav Adamek, the company’s Brand Manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, “targets no longer have to rely on the human eye to match colors. Our digital color management technology allows factories to manage the entire color matching and matching process digitally and 100% wirelessly, something to We introduced the industry for the first time in 2019.”
Technological precision in the factory
Refiners obtain vehicle color information by acquiring Color Alliance, Axalta’s digital spectrophotometer, which wirelessly transmits readings to the company’s online global color database, which fills approximately 20,000 global color formulas, including blue, for scanning, selected formulas and mixed color; for any shade and effect to create combinations. For more colors it is not necessary to compare them on the screen.
Olavi Adamek adds “those days of color paper, emissions, PCs and color screen verification are long gone. It’s really as simple as spectrum reading, reading and mixing. Axalta Digital Color Management is at the forefront of digital services that make factories more realistic, more efficient and making it more efficient to spend time and optimizing physical factory workflow”.
Axalta has announced its 2023 automotive color, Techno Blue, “an ethereal, complex and ultra-modern blue with various color effects, delivering a transition from the real to the virtual world,” notes the manufacturer. “The color blue has a deep, rich and important history,” concludes Adamek. “So much so that, to this day, it still maintains its popularity in our country as a new car color. From his longevity, and from those who, from antiquity to Picasso, sought a way to work with and display these heavy, but unusual and different pigments. At Axalta, as an experienced global color company, it is our responsibility to ensure that our factories are not able to remodel any shade of blue.”
