White displaces silver as the most popular car colour in Japan and North America while the Europeans prefer black.

As the world's largest supplier of automotive paints, DuPont has a natural interest in studying trends in colour preferences evinced by customers for new cars. It has published its data every year since 1952 in the annual Global Automotive Color Popularity Report. In 2006, 19% of all new cars in North America were painted silver, compared against 16% white, 13% grey and 13% black. Elsewhere, silver was even more preponderant: 28% in Europe; 27% in Japan; 26% in South America; 24% in China; and 21% in South Korea. However, the popularity of black in Europe has been steadily edging up from 17% of new vehicles in 2004 to 24% in 2006, to 25% in 2007 and 26% last year. Medium/dark grey has …