Key Takeaways
- Premium colors for the 2024 Ford Mustang come at an extra cost.
- Majority of new car buyers opt for white, black, gray, and silver, leading to bland-colored cars on our roads.
- Ford’s inclusion of racing stripes in various colors adds a fun touch, but at an additional price.
Henry Ford famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” While not quite that restrictive today, the only no-cost exterior paint options for 2024 Ford Mustang are Iconic Silver, Carbonized Gray Metallic, Oxford White, and Shadow Black. Note the lack of colors shoppers can order without having to pay a premium.
To get any of the more interesting hues, you now have to spend more money, according to the Mustang configurator. The $295 paint colors include: Race Red, Atlas Blue Metallic, Grabber Blue Metallic, and Vapor Blue Metallic. For $495, buyers can opt for Dark Matter Gray Metallic and Rapid Red Metallic Tinted Clearcoat, while Yellow Splash Metallic is priced at $995. Though the availability of colors on the Mustang Dark Horse is slightly different, the prices are the same. Customers can select a matte finish to any color, but it’s expensive at $5,995.
Is This A Trend?
We typically refer to the collection of white, silver, gray, and black as the “German Rainbow,” due to the tendency of German automakers to only offer dull hues rather than bright or exciting ones. Porsche offers some stellar colors, but usually at a tremendous cost. Swedish automakers are also guilty of this trend; Volvo, for example, only offers the sporty V60 Engineered by Polestar in black, white, silver, and gray. Polestar is similar, offering the Polestar 2 with a single blue called Midnight, priced at a whopping $1,250.
Related
How Much Does It Cost To Paint A Car?
Depending on what you want, painting your car can cost a few bucks or as much as another whole car.
Tesla famously flip-flops between offering white or black as a no-cost color, making red or blue cost extra. The recently updated Model 3 Highland bucks this trend by offering Stealth Grey as a $0 option.
There’s an easy explanation for why some automakers are choosing to make colors cost more; most customers aren’t buying them anyway. White, black, gray, and silver account for a staggering 77% of the new car market based on data from iSeeCars. Red is the next most common, only accounting for 10.3%. Since dealers stock what sells quickly, their lots are filled with cars from the German Rainbow.
Does It Matter?
Adding $295 to the price of a new car is not the end of the world, but will doubtless result in even more plain-colored cars on the road, sports cars included. Dedicated customers may go out of their way to find the Mustang in the color they want, but the vast majority will take whatever the local dealer happens to have in stock, resulting in less diversity.
We are happy that Ford hasn’t given up on colors completely, even offering “Over-The-Top” racing stripes in Matte Black/Red, Black/Gray, or Opacity Fade. They do add $495 to the price, however.
