Study On The Development Of Automotive Exterior Paint Colors

There is a famous "seven seconds of law" in color marketing that people would decidewhether he’ll buy a production in the first seven seconds. Color plays a large role in thatseven seconds.As the automotive was the perfect combination of science and art, exteriorcolor is becoming one of the most important factors which affected consumer’s behavior.Most of foreign automotive companies have a perfect process of colors research anddevelopment, such as the collaboration between Audi and Global Color Company, thecorporation between Toyota and Nippon Color Research Center. In China, the importance ofcolor design did not arouse sufficient attention, color&trim Design like the invisible tradesin car styling. Color design is finished by internal and external decoration designers. So thepurpose of this paper is analysis the development of automotive exterior paint and thefactors influencing the color change, in order to predict the future trend in color.This paper first analyzes the principle of automobile color. Firstly, I think that theautomotive exterior color commonly were several inherent color. Secondly, automotiveexterior color design also affected by the safety of traffic and the target of consumer,different levels of car preference for the use of color is not the same. Thirdly, color andshape are closely related, good color and shape should express the specific style of carcompletely.Then, I choose United States, Japan Europe, China this four regions to study thechanges and trends of the external decoration color. Europe is the birthplace of automotive,the United States of America is the place that a luxury car becomes commodity, Japan hasbecome the number one of automobile industry in the world in a few decades, and chinawas the world’s most potential auto market in recent years. I discussed the similarities anddifferences in each area and find out the causes of the changes.In the third part, I summarized the main factors that affecting the changes ofautomotive exterior paint, including the development of coating technology, effects of other social fashion and the difference of region environment and the culture.Through the Interaction of these three factors, the color variation of each regionshowed their characteristics.Next, I summarized the color of Audi and Volkswagen in2000-2010and analyzedthem in two aspects, a popular trend in the ten years of each color and the brightness changetrend of all colors. And then predicted the popular tendency in future years on the basisof the analysis.Lastly, after social survey analysis and competitor’s analysis, I applied theory to colordesign of FAW–Volkswagen.Color is a seemingly simple design elements, but we need more consideration andinvestigation if we want to use it properly, I hope that the research results can providecertain support for the automobile color design.