Are Cars with High Impact Colors Ticketed More?
Many of us on this forum own Challengers with high impact colors.
Before I bought my Hemi-orange SRT, some well-meaning friends warned me about buying a car with a "loud" color because "the police will be lying in wait for you."
There are lots of theories as to why this might be true. Maybe high impact colors are more eye catching and the police are more likely to notice you on a crowded highway. Or maybe that Hemi-orange or Tor-red paint job has a psychological effect on drivers, inspiring them to push harder on the gas pedal. Or maybe the type of person who likes these type of colors is also the type of person who likes to speed.
Well, you can forget all those explanations, because there's no evidence that drivers of cars with high impact colors get speeding tickets any more often than the law of averages would suggest.
For example, police have denied for years that they target red cars over other colors. The urban legend site Snopes.com debunks this myth by pointing to an informal survey in a 1990 issue of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, where a reporter counted the number of red cars (as well as all other colors, too) in the area and then looked through police records to see what color cars had been recently ticketed. The percentages were almost exactly the same.
The same survey showed that gray cars are actually statistically more likely to get tickets and that white cars are less likely. So if you don't want speeding tickets, buy a white Challenger, but you don't necessarily have to avoid high impact colors.