Selecting the next big thing in car paint schemes is a difficult task that companies like color specialist PPG Industries Inc spend a lot of time and money in researching. All areas of design are looked at including fashion, architecture, and consumer goods, as well as experimentation with new paints and applications. After compiling all the results, one conclusion always comes out, that silver is the most popular.

The latest range of vehicles will come in varying shades of the metallic color including different hues and tints. However, there’s a slow movement towards colors, such as brown, green, blue and gold. Jane Harrington, manager of color styling at PPG, told Detroit News in an interview "we're going to see a lot more browns and graphite colors, as well as blues emerging in the future."

At PPG's studio, examples of painted sheet metal hang on display with 34 colors that make up the North American color palette, while Europe makes do with 42 different colors. Color schemes are just an after thought of vehicle design either, with different colored paints playing an important role in vehicle selection and especially in resale values. Flashy colors that grow quickly out of favor, such as purples and hot pink, can easily diminish resale values, the difficulty in developing the right color is having to pick what will be popular in three or four years time.