PAINT COLORS AS AN OBSESSION
Almost every vehicle has it, and few things can change the impact as quickly or as much. It’s paint. And it’s a bit of an obsession around here.
We use a lot of Mercedes-Benz “Tobacco Brown” here at Autology. It’s a color that gets a lot of repeat requests ever since we first shot it onto a Defender many years ago. But Porsche’s “Togo Brown” is sadly overlooked by comparison. Rich, deep and natural, it’s slightly lighter than Tobacco Brown. More of a “milk chocolate” hue and absolutely gorgeous.
Not so much in terms of pure quality. We love good paint quality, but we also try to keep things lean, and our preparation and materials at Autology Motors bends toward well-prepped, driver-quality paint that hits you with impact, hold up well over time, and generates the kind of curb appeal and owner enjoyment which last for years and years. As much as we love million-hour, multistage, show-winning paint jobs, that’s not our jam. It doesn’t suit the vehicles we build and it doesn’t suit our typical price points. No, our obsession is more directed at the colors we choose.
And trust me, that’s obsession enough.
Paint says a lot about a car. It says a lot about the owner, as well. From the chrome-orange Lamborghini parked in front of the nightclub to the murdered out Defender 110 5-door to the hand-flamed T-bucket hot rod, a choice of color speaks pretty clearly to the world what you’re about. It showcases what drives you every bit as much as it showcases what you drive, and that means color choice, during one of our builds, is a particularly enjoyable and even illuminating stage in the process. Choosing the right color - the one that sets the vehicles off in exactly the way YOU want it to - is not a process to be taken lightly. Many manufacturers had amazing color choices over the years, and we’ll probably highlight some of them in future posts, but for the purposes of focus here, today, we’re going to look at just one manufacturer. Porsche.
Few colors can be as polarizing as non-traditional reddish hues. Usually skewing pink or orange, they can make some people cry foul, which, because we’re contrarians at heart, is probably why we love them so much here at Autology Motors. Porsche’s “Terra Cotta” from the 356 days is too lovely for words.
Porsche could have played it safe over the years with their color options. They would have been excused if they had, because the quality of Porsche engineering would have easily carried the day anyway. But they didn’t. Porsche pushed the envelope with their paint colors, even in the early days, every bit as much as they pushed it with their performance and engineering chops, and their colors did an amazing job of reflecting the prevailing trends in society and culture during the time periods they were offered. As a small, boutique manufacturer, Porsche could have played it safe in the 1950’s and 1960’s with straight-up-the-middle reds and silvers. And they offered those colors, to be sure, but they also offered “Terra Cotta” and “Golden Green” and “Togo Brown” and “Lido Gold.” Their now famous “Skittles colors” of the 1970’s were a punch in the face to conformity, and included “Hellgrün” and “Berber Yellow” and “Laguna Blue” and “Ravenna Green.” And they kept on punching, even through the leanest of years for Porsche, the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when, with sales down to a trickle, most companies would have been playing it as safe as possible. But not Porsche. They threw “Mint Green” and “Rubystone” and “Maritime Blue” at us. And later, “Miami Blue” and “Ipanema” and “Nordic Gold Metallic.” Playing it safe just ain’t in the Porsche DNA.
So when it comes to choosing a paint color for your custom build, confining yourself exclusively to Porsche colors turns out to be not much of a confinement at all, and so many of their shades are as fetching on a squared off Series IIA 88 as they are on a long hood Porsche 911 or 356 Carrera.
Gray, it seems these days, is all the rage. Configure any new car online today and you’re likely to see options like white, some kind of red, two different blacks, and six or seven different grays. When did car companies lose their courage, en masse, so completely? It’s tragic! How many gray cars does the world need, and haven’t we already produced far in excess of whatever that number is? Where are the funky greens? The polarizing oranges? The trippy ambers? Where are the colors that aspire to more than just blending into the morning fog? Remember the early 1990’s when every other car off the assembly line, from all the American manufacturers, seemed be some kind of teal green? Now that color seems dated as hell, a byproduct of too many cars being built in the same color during the same time period, and I suspect we may come to feel similarly about the, kind of… “Audi Nardo Gray” look. Time will tell.
In the meantime, however, visit www.rennbow.org and dive into the wonderful world of Porsche colors, past and present. It’s a scene, man.