BASF's color palette for 2022 combines technical utility, visual aesthetics

Hues of gray, blue, white and black emerged as the top color picks for the 2022 model year from automotive paint supplier BASF Coatings, as the need to "keep it real" with technological advancements becomes a reality.

The collection of 65 global colors is centered on balancing the digital age's quest for perfection, with human qualities. The collection also aims to embody the sweeping change underway as the automotive market embraces new forms of mobility.

Paul Czornij, head of design for BASF Coatings North America, told Automotive News that factors such as fashion and interior design trends and abstract factors such as societal moods influenced the supplier's latest selections.

The colors are created for model years four to five years in advance and will be seen on vehicles once U.S. automakers decide which they want to use.

"Colors are going to be influenced in the future by this balance between the increasingly digitized world where technology is pushing us in leaps and bounds into areas where it's difficult to see what might be real or what might be created on a computer screen, and that includes coloration, and how that's balanced by the human need -- the need to have physical objects and coloration of those physical objects," Czornij said.

BASF's color palette combines technical utility, to aid the reflectivity of lidar systems. for example, and sensors, with visual aesthetics and visibility.

"We want to use ... coatings technology to create colors that offer the traditional visual aspects to cars, but also as the technology increases, to increase the functional aspects of those colors," Czornij said.

The "keep it real" theme led the supplier to create three key colors that each highlight a trend driving color direction in different regions: Gray Ambivalence for the Asia Pacific region; Atomium Sky for the North America region; and The Urbanist for the Europe, Middle East and Africa region.

Other top North American colors in this year's report include Metal's Mettle, a dark gray; Kleur, a deep red; and Centripetal Blue, a deep, dark blue.

"It's a way to celebrate the advances in digital technology but also recognizing the importance from a human standpoint that we also need the physical things to go along with that increased digitalization" Czornij said.