Automotive Lemons! Ten Classic Car Ads Featuring Yellow Cars

retro-car-ad-8 — 1958 Chevrolet Brookwood

American car shoppers are something of a dull lot. We like our cars with four doors, we prefer traditional sedans, and when it comes to color, well, it’s snooze time.

According to DuPont, one of the globe’s leading producers of automotive paints and coatings, the top four colors chosen by American new-car shoppers for their vehicles are variations on black and white. Here’s the 2012 list of most popular car colors, as provided by DuPont:

White
Black
Silver
Gray
Red
Blue
Brown/Beige
Yellow
Green
10. Everything else

So, what gives? I blame our apparent collective penchant for blandness for the sudden reemergence of Michael Bolton (thanks, Honda).

Of the colors that made the list, it is yellow that interests me most. Here’s why: Though Americans do not seem especially fond of the color for things automotive, advertisers have been selling cars to us dressed in sunny hues now for decades.

It’s true. Do a Google search of vintage car ads and you’ll find that about a third of them–especially older ads–feature a yellow vehicle. Strange, no? Now most ads sport red cars, and that makes good sense. Red is sporty, and folks over the years have actually purchased red cars in reasonable numbers. But yellow? Yellow is a fringe color, an “outlier,” as marketing research folks like to say.

Here I have selected ten vintage car and truck ads sporting vehicles in the sunniest of hues. Let us know which is your favorite.

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