09:01 09-12-2025

How carmakers use color names to market the same old grays

If color names once at least hinted at the shade, today the palette more often reads like a candle shop display: Meteor Shower, Wind Chill Pearl, Destroyer Gray, Chalk. In reality, these are still the same grays and whites, but the pitch has turned mood-driven. There’s no mystery here: carmakers are not selling paint, they’re selling an image. Call it pearl white and it lands dry and forgettable; call it Wind Chill Pearl and it suggests a cool gleam, a breath of freshness, a premium aura. This kind of vocabulary works like a mini story—easy to picture and pleasant to say.

It shows most clearly with gray, the mass favorite and the trickiest color to romanticize. Saying merely metallic gray won’t make anyone want it, so the industry reaches for space and strength. Toyota names its shades as if they were science-fiction artifacts: Meteor Shower, Underground, Lunar Rock, Cement. Some land with a flourish, others invite debate. Lunar Rock steers the imagination toward cold stone and dust, while Cement, frankly, conjures a shopping-mall parking deck rather than a dream. But the goal is obvious: pull familiar gray out of the utilitarian zone and give it a personality.

Stellantis takes a similar route, leaning harder into aggression and wordplay. Destroyer Gray clicks perfectly with the image of high-powered Dodge variants: the shade amplifies the sense of metal and menace, even if the vehicle itself is just a family SUV. There are playful wins, too, like Bludicrous—by sound alone it signals not a modest blue but a loud declaration.

Then there’s the opposite tactic, when a name hooks you less with emotion than with sheer oddity. Porsche’s Chalk—known as Crayon in some places—is a case of an expensive option likened to something you’d instinctively brush off your hands. The paradox is that choices like this stick in memory. A clumsy name can outlast a sensible one, and that’s the marketing core: you might forget a generic gray pearl, but chalk and destroyer are hard to ignore.