What Colour Are British Cars? 30 Years of Registrations
Key findings
- Britain’s cars went monochrome between 1990 and 2022. Grey rose from 8.8% of the 1990 cohort to 25.9% of the 2022 one — a gain of 17.1 percentage points, the largest of any colour.
- Red collapsed from 25.5% to 8.3%, a fall of 17.2 points. Among 1990-registered cars still in the MOT record the leading colour is red; in the 2022 cohort it is grey.
- The fleet as a whole is still more colourful than what is being bought. Across all 69,029,685 vehicles, blue remains the single most recorded colour at 13,159,201 vehicles — because the older, more colourful cohorts have not all left the road yet.
How we worked this out
Every MOT record carries the vehicle’s primary colour as held on the DVLA record. We read it for every vehicle in DfT and DVSA’s Anonymised MOT tests and results dataset — the bulk open publication on data.gov.uk, which contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence — and grouped by year of first registration. Every distinct vehicle_id appearing in a class-4 MOT test between 2005 and 2025, counted once, with its colour and fuel taken from its most recent appearance. That is 69,029,685 vehicles with a usable colour.
DVSA colour strings are inconsistently cased (“WHITE” alongside “White”), so we normalise case before counting. Records with no colour, or with the literal value “Not Stated”, are excluded rather than assigned.
We stop at 2022 on purpose. A car’s first MOT is at three years, so recent registration years are only partly present in MOT records: 2022 holds 1,660,949 vehicles, but 2024 holds only 8,613. A share computed on 8,613 cars would not describe the 2024 market, so those cohorts are dropped rather than plotted with a caveat.
Every figure is produced by scripts/research/04-fleet-composition.mjs and rendered straight from that script’s output.
What this data cannot tell you
- This counts cars that exist, not cars that were sold. A colour that was popular but scrapped early is under-represented in its own cohort. That is a real effect and it means these shares drift slowly away from the original new-sales mix as a cohort ages.
- Colour is a single free-ish field, not a paint code. “Grey” covers a wide range of factory finishes and “Multi-colour” is a real recorded value. There is no metallic/solid distinction.
- Recent cohorts are excluded, not estimated. Anything registered after 2022 is absent for the reason given above. This is not a forecast of current new-car colour preference.
- The 13 cohorts before 2003 show a surviving fleet, not a market. Registration years before 2003 are marked `censored`. The open MOT series starts in 2005, but that year is DVSA's computerisation ramp-up and is only fully covered from 2006, so those cohorts are seen only through the cars that survived to be tested that year. Old survivors are not a random sample of their cohort's colour mix, so those years show the shape of a surviving fleet, not the mix as new. They are marked with an asterisk in the table and we do not describe them as what was sold that year. The monochrome shift is visible on the uncensored years alone: grey runs from 7.4% of the 2003 cohort to 25.9% of the 2022 one.
- Nothing here says anything about resale value, insurance or safety. We measured which colours are common. We did not measure what colour is worth, and we do not imply it.
Correction, 28 August 2026 — the counts have changed; the trend has not
When this page was published on 18 August 2026 it reported the colours of 21.8 million vehicles. That load was truncated — only 29.62% of the intended records were present. Re-derived from DVSA and DfT’s open Anonymised MOT tests and results dataset, the analysis now covers 69,029,685 vehicles, and every absolute count on this page has risen accordingly.
The trend the article is about survives intact: every colour share we published sits within 2.9 percentage points of the re-derived figure, and no colour changed rank at either endpoint. We have also marked the pre-2003 cohorts as censored, because the MOT record sees those years only through the cars that survived to be tested, and relabelled the source: this analysis is computed from the open dataset published under the Open Government Licence, not from our DVSA MOT History API records.
Walk down a British street and the cars are grey, white and black. It was not always so. The MOT record holds a colour for every vehicle, and grouping those colours by the year each car was first registered turns an impression into a measurement.
1990 against 2022
Share of each registration cohort, for the ten most common colours in the data.
Colour share by registration year
| Year | Blue | Silver | Black | White | Grey | Red | Green | Yellow | Orange | Beige | Vehicles |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990* | 22.5 | 7.8 | 7.1 | 18.9 | 8.8 | 25.5 | 5.0 | 0.4 | 0.1 | 1.3 | 383,227 |
| 1995* | 25.5 | 6.5 | 5.6 | 12.6 | 5.2 | 24.5 | 16.9 | 0.5 | 0.1 | 0.1 | 1,495,870 |
| 2000* | 24.3 | 24.4 | 8.3 | 6.8 | 4.5 | 14.3 | 13.1 | 1.0 | 0.6 | 0.3 | 2,395,419 |
| 2005 | 21.8 | 30.2 | 18.9 | 5.8 | 10.7 | 7.2 | 2.6 | 0.5 | 0.3 | 0.9 | 2,635,209 |
| 2010 | 15.7 | 20.4 | 23.1 | 13.4 | 13.6 | 9.7 | 1.2 | 0.5 | 0.3 | 0.8 | 2,130,486 |
| 2015 | 14.1 | 11.4 | 18.6 | 24.0 | 15.4 | 11.5 | 1.2 | 0.5 | 0.8 | 0.4 | 2,815,331 |
| 2020 | 16.1 | 7.7 | 18.9 | 20.9 | 24.1 | 8.6 | 0.9 | 0.4 | 1.4 | 0.1 | 1,763,872 |
| 2022 | 15.7 | 6.3 | 19.3 | 19.3 | 25.9 | 8.3 | 1.8 | 0.7 | 1.2 | 0.3 | 1,660,949 |
Percentage share of each first-registration cohort. Every year from 1990 to 2022 is in the underlying dataset; the table shows five-year steps for readability. An asterisk marks a cohort registered before 2003, which the MOT record sees only through the cars that survived long enough to be tested — read those rows as the colour mix of the survivors, not of what was sold.
The fleet is more colourful than the showroom
Counting every vehicle rather than every cohort gives a different answer, because Britain’s older cars are its colourful ones and they have not all gone yet.
| # | Colour | Vehicles | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Blue | 13,159,201 | 19.06% |
| 2 | Silver | 12,209,505 | 17.69% |
| 3 | Black | 11,074,188 | 16.04% |
| 4 | White | 9,679,395 | 14.02% |
| 5 | Grey | 8,460,217 | 12.26% |
| 6 | Red | 8,369,162 | 12.12% |
| 7 | Green | 3,570,838 | 5.17% |
| 8 | Yellow | 411,008 | 0.60% |
| 9 | Orange | 384,219 | 0.56% |
| 10 | Beige | 357,950 | 0.52% |
| 11 | Purple | 347,678 | 0.50% |
| 12 | Gold | 335,077 | 0.49% |
| 13 | Brown | 243,539 | 0.35% |
| 14 | Bronze | 145,977 | 0.21% |
| 15 | Turquoise | 95,712 | 0.14% |
That gap between the fleet and the recent cohorts is the same effect our survival analysis measures directly: cohorts leave the road slowly, so what you see on the road today is a blend of thirty years of taste, not this year’s.
The colour on the record should match the car in front of you
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Cite this research
harvardUse this citation when referencing this report in articles, papers, or blog posts. Refreshes the access date each time the page loads.
MOT Checkup (2026) 'What Colour Are British Cars? 30 Years of Registrations'. Available at: https://www.motcheckup.co.uk/research/what-colour-are-british-cars-2026 (Accessed: 3 October 2026).
Using this research
Journalists, researchers and site owners are welcome to reproduce any table or chart on this page with attribution to MOT Checkup. Our analysis, tables and charts are released under CC BY 4.0. They are computed by MOT Checkup from the DVSA/DfT “Anonymised MOT tests and results” dataset published on data.gov.uk, which contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The CC BY grant covers our aggregation and presentation; the underlying records remain under the OGL. If you need a cut of the data we have not published — a specific model, a different age band, a regional split — email hello@motcheckup.co.uk and we will run it.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most common car colour in the UK?
Across every vehicle in this analysis — 69,029,685 of them, spanning three decades of registrations — blue is the most recorded colour with 13,159,201 vehicles. That reflects the whole surviving fleet. Among cars first registered in 2022, the leading colour is grey at 25.9%.
Have British car colours really become more monochrome?
Yes, and the shift is large. Among 1990-registered cars still in the MOT record the top colour is red at 25.5%. By 2022 grey had risen 17.1 percentage points to 25.9%, while red fell 17.2 points to 8.3%.
Where does this colour data come from?
Every MOT record carries the vehicle's primary colour as held on the DVLA record. We read it for every vehicle in DfT and DVSA's open "Anonymised MOT tests and results" dataset, published on data.gov.uk under the Open Government Licence, and grouped by year of first registration. It is a count of cars that exist, not a count of cars sold in a given year.
Why does this differ from SMMT new-car colour figures?
SMMT reports colours of cars registered new in a given year. This counts vehicles still present in the MOT record, grouped by the year they were first registered. The two diverge because cars are scrapped and exported at different rates — and because our most recent cohorts are incomplete, which is why we stop at 2022.
Does car colour affect resale value or insurance?
We have not measured either and this analysis cannot tell you. What it does show is which colours are common, and a colour that is common in a model year is generally easier to sell than an unusual one. For anything about a specific vehicle — its history, its advisories, its mileage — the MOT record is the evidence to look at.
Sources and further reading
- 1.DVSA/DfT — Anonymised MOT tests and results (the open bulk dataset this analysis is computed from) — Primary data (Open Government Licence)
- 2.Open Government Licence v3.0 — Licence
- 3.Department for Transport — vehicle licensing statistics (VEH0 tables) — Official statistics
- 4.SMMT — new car registration statistics (the new-sales comparison) — Industry statistics
- 5.MOT Checkup — free MOT history check by registration — Tool
- 6.MOT Checkup — how long UK cars actually last — Related research
About this research
MOT Checkup publishes original analysis of UK vehicle data. Every figure on this page was produced by a script committed to our repository and run against the source records described above — we do not publish estimates, modelled figures or numbers we cannot reproduce. Where an analysis did not hold up, we dropped it rather than soften it. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct the page and note the correction.
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