Black Friday is Here but White and Silver are the Most Popular Car Colours in South Africa
“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black.” This is a famous Henry Ford quote and suggests that the mass-produced Model T was only ever available in this colour. However, when the Model T first hit the American market in 1909, Model Ts were available in grey, green, blue or red. It was only in 1915, when Henry Ford realised that black was the fastest drying paint, that he said these famous words.
More than a decade later, in 1926, Ford began to broaden the choice of paint colours to what it is today. This vast palette of colours today includes the unique Saber Orange, available on the Ranger Wildtrak, which resembles the coat of the mythical Sabertooth tiger, with its deep warm orange and golden blonde highlights.
On this year’s Black Friday, more than a century after the Model T and Henry Ford’s moving assembly line revolutionised the industry, Ford Motor Company of Southern Africa (FMCSA) is celebrating its two newest Ford Rangers to be fitted with distinctive black detailing. The Ford Ranger Thunder features a black grille, black wheels and black sports hoop while the Ranger XL Sport Pack follows suit with factory-approved accessories such as new 17-inch black alloy wheels, gloss black grille and a black sports bar to give it that exclusive, sporty appearance.
In the Middle East and Africa, the hotter climates make lighter colours more appealing. A study conducted by Berkeley Lab Environmental Energy Technologies Division and published in the Applied Energy journal, proved that lighter coloured cars reflected much more heat than darker coloured cars and kept the interior as much as 11-percent cooler than an identical model in black.
“In South Africa, white and silver cars are the easiest to resell, so they’re the most popular colour for new cars,” says Johan Fourie, Area Manager – Paint Shop at FMCSA. “In Europe, darker colours are favoured over lighter ones, and because two-thirds of the vehicles we build locally are destined for export, there’s a diverse mix of colours coming off our assembly line.”
As someone always looking to provide his customers with the highest quality product as well as the most efficient production, Henry Ford would certainly have approved of the new Paint Defect Detection System in the Silverton Assembly Plant’s Paint Shop. This autonomous system uses a specially developed light tunnel equipped with 21 high-resolution cameras, and is able to capture over 3000 images in just 15 seconds to create a detailed three-dimensional image. This highlights surface impurities by detecting where the surface is not smooth. The technology can detect an outward or inward deflection from the surface.
“The launch of the Paint Defect Detection System was a major milestone for our Silverton plant, as it significantly ramped up the quality of our Paint Shop,” Fourie says. “The new system resulted in significant gains in final quality and improved customer satisfaction for all of our locally assembled Ranger and Everest models.”
If your Black Friday is more concerned with the delivery of goods than the colour of the car itself, a new survey done by Ford suggests that shoppers in Germany and the UK would prefer to receive online deliveries transported using electric-powered vehicles.
For those in the UK, 58-percent would prefer their delivery service used an electric-powered vehicle, while this was true of 54-percent of those polled in Germany. More surprisingly perhaps, 49-percent of those in the UK would be prepared to wait longer for greener deliveries, with 38-percent in Germany also happy to receive parcels later. The number of shoppers who would be prepared to pay extra for more energy-efficient deliveries was fewer – but still totalled 28-percent in the UK and 21-percent in Germany.
Ford has already begun introducing electrified versions of its best-selling vans for businesses in Europe, and will be significantly increasing the number of all-electric vehicles, including passenger cars and light commercial vehicles, in the next couple of years. In light of COVID-19 lockdowns, today’s Black Friday is expected to drive an increase in traffic delivering goods to customer doorsteps.
