What your car color says about your personality?

Every so often Yahoo news comes up with the oddest articles. The latest to catch my eye was "What your car color reveals about your psyche". Oh, come on.

I don't know about you, but the color is often very low on my list of priorities when buying a new or used car. I'm far more worried about how dependable a vehicle it is, whether it has been wrecked, whether it has the features I need, how good is its gas mileage. Color doesn't even make the top four. Anyway, we've bought our share of used cars, where finding a specific color is highly improbable.

My car right now is a red Subaru. According to the article, you should be scared -- very, very scared. Aggressive, moody, high-speed driver with low self-esteem and confidence, that's what the color supposedly says. I was going for cheery, fun, upbeat and visible, but what do I know? I'm not a psychologist. Also, my very first car was a red VW beetle (my dad's pick, not mine), and I had not owned a red car since I was seventeen. I bought this one when I was turning 50. It seemed like a suitable gesture -- I joked that when a boring person has a mid-life crisis, they buy a red station wagon!

Anyway, if this color stuff has any credibility, a review of my car colors starts to look like multiple personality disorder -- red, blue, yellow, gray, blue, green, red. My husband's choices? White, white, maroon, white, green. (Hey, maybe he is more stable than me! LOL) I think it just says that I drove more on average to work than he did and wore out cars quicker, and that we bought what was on the dealers' lots. That was definitely the case with the yellow El Camino and the gray Sentra, although I did like the yellow El Camino because I like yellow. (The gray Sentra -- not so much. The color choices were dark gray and dirt brown. Ugh.)

My husband also buys bigger cars than I do and they seem to come in more sedate colors than my compact cars. My green Mazda was definitely a more exuberant green than his Q45, which is so dark it's almost black.

Anyway, most people buy what's available, and that's usually a pretty limited choice. The dealer isn't going to fill his lot full of red or bright yellow cars; he'll buy white, black, gray and other subtle colors likely to appeal to the most people. It also depends on the colors in vogue at the time. The powder blue VW and the yellow El Camino were from the 70's. The maroon and gray cars we bought in the late 80's, when those colors were fashionable. The blue and green Mazdas were from the 90's.

If you need a better predictor of driving style and personality, go with the vehicle model criterion. Personally, if I see a Hummer appear in my rear view mirror, I wince. Maybe it's only a local phenomenon, but my experience with Hummer drivers is that they are the most arrogant, pushy people on the road. And if the driver of a vehicle so big that my roof cargo rack is even with his door handles wants to drive aggressively -- well, I get out of his way and give him the road. Which is what he wanted, all along.