It is important to mention that manufactures carefully monitor the changes in customers’ preferences. The practice shows that preferable colors are not the same for different car types. For instance, 25% of luxury cars produced in North America in 2006 were white or pearl, 22% - black, 16% - silver. In the sport and compact category silver-colored cars were at the top with 18% while white and pearl ones came only in sixth place with 10%. Still they took a convincing revenge among SUVs, tracks and vans where they were 11% ahead of their silver rivals. Blue, red and grey cars were not on the leading positions but got around 10% in every category.

Leatrice Eiseman, the author of Color Answer Book, says vehicle color reveals about its owner’s personality. For example, black is the color of authority and power and those who choose it usually love elegance, appreciate classics and are not easily manipulated. That’s why it’s not surprising that black color is mostly popular among the lucky owners of luxury cars. Sunshine yellow car owners are joyful and young at heart while those who love comfort and will pay for it prefer yellow gold. Dark green car silently witnesses that its owner is trustworthy and traditional. Confidency and credibility are the main qualities of dark blue car owners. Vibrant red is an ideal choice for sexy, high-energy and dynamic persons just as orange car color is perfect for talkative, trendy and fickle people.

Jaguar has conducted a substantional improvement of its plant in Castle Bromwich which aimed to provide new XF with better quality of assembly than even Jaguar S-TYPE, famous for its reliability, had. Jaguar XF will be put on the market in 66 countries. The sales will start in March, 2008.

After the presentation at Autosalon Frankfurt in September, 2007 Jaguar XF has already grabbed several awards from the most influential British magazines for its amazing new design. Among these prestigious prizes are Autocar’s annual “Design Award” and “Interior of the Year Award 2007″ from CAR magazine.

Most experts were confident that BMW drivers exceeded the speed mostly but unexpectedly it appears that the owners of german cars are not so reckless as it seems to think they are. By some obscure reason Ford models settled down the first two places: the owners of Mondeo became the “winners” and Focus drivers took the second place. The third step of this dubious podium was occupied by Vauxhall Vectra. Volkswagen Golf and Volkswagen Passat came in fourth and fifth place.

Even if to consider makes in general the first three places would still belong to Ford, Vauxhall and Volkswagen while Peugeot, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Renault followed them.

The cars from the bottom of reliability rating and the ones with bad crash tests results, large number of recalls and low resale cost were included in the list. A new generation Chrysler Sebring was improved to become more spacious and more attractive for the customers, but the number of its recalls is enormous. It has been recalled six times already because of various troubles from faulty bonnet lock to defective air bags and disabled engine cooling.

The statistics of traffic accidents state that only dark-colored vehicles are involved in 61,3% of crashes, both dark and light-colored cars - in 32,6%, only light-colored ones - in 6,1%. The analysis of traffic accidents in Sweden showed that black cars (6% of all number) were involved in 22,4% of crashes, dark-blue, blue and dark-grey (41,3%) - in 61,2%, red ones (6,5%) - in 2,4%. The American investigators revealed that dark-colored cars were the participants of 57% of accidents occurred with the control group’s vehicles while light and bright-colored were involved in 43% of cases. Moreover, the interrogation of 147 pointsmen was conducted in Belgium and 47 of them mentioned that it in their opinion it is possible to increase the safety of street traffic with the aid of cars’ color.

According to the results of several researches the coloration of a car also affects the estimation of its speed and the distance from it. For instance, it seems that a red car is closer and moves quicker than in reality and blue and green ones vice versa. Visual illusions caused by color also include the distortion of object size perception. For example, dark-colored cars seem to be smaller than light-colored ones. Wrong object form perception is also possible and in some cases it’s hard to notice the vehicle because of its color.

All in all, color is an important element of street traffic both for drivers and pedestrians. In the second part of the article we will describe the advantages and disadvantages of each color separately.

All the auto novelties appeared on the german market during the last 12 months were divided into four categories: small cars, compact, medium/executive and SUVs.
The winner was chosen among the five finalists in every category after the series of tests and assays. The criteria of selection were: style, design, comfort, riding grade, safety, ecological friendliness and quality. Peugeot 308 was voted the best in 9 of 15 criteria and won the fist place in its category.

Peugeot 308 also proved itself to be an ecofriendly vehicle. This was achieved by applying innovate technologies capable to reduce fuel consumption and gas blowout.

Simultaneously a limited series of the sports car Ford Focus ST500 will appear in Great Britain. Each of 500 vehicles is modified only in outward appearance. Black metallic with grey bars imitates the colouration of Ford GT40 which has recently won in Le Mans 24 Hours, sport seats from Recaro are installed in the saloon. Among the technical features of the sports car are xenon lamps, antidazzle driving mirrors and rain sensors.

The production of the first generation of Volkswagen Passat started in 1973 and the factory in Emden began the assembly of this car four years later. Since that time more than 9 million of Volkswagen cars have been produced by this plant and 5,9 million of them were Passat vehicles. Nowadays Volkswagen is putting out the sixth generation of Passat model. This cars are produced worldwide on 13 different assembly enterprises.

Its victory in Auto Trader Used Car Awards premium was secured by the readers of the magazine and also by the audience of the Used Car Roadshow on ITV4 channel. The spectators were asked to name their favourite cars. Since it appeared in 2003 XJ family was supplemented with new extended wheelbase modification, special limited XJR Portfolio series, iron-clad XJ and also recently represented Jaguar XJ 2008 with the renewed design.

Production of the novelty will start at the beginning of next year on the factory in Portugal where cabriolet Eos will be assembled as well. As far as both these models are worked out on the same platform, it’s quite possible to expect a new “open” version of Scirocco with folding roof appear soon. The line of engines proposed for the Scirocco model by the german engineers starts with 1,4 litre turbine engine and ends with 3,2 litre V6 set already used in Golf R32.