Whenever I have bought a car, I tend to choose the color purely on the basis of how it looks and, of course, on my personality. Given the dullness of the latter, it should be no surprise that my choices in the past have been either steel gray or more recently dark gray. I had never considered the issue of how color relates to crash frequency. It appears that white cars are the least prone to accidents while black cars are the most.

Black cars are notably more dangerous to drive than white cars for reasons of visibility already. A study by Monash University Accident Research Centre in Australia, which studied crash data across the country from 1987 to 2004, found that compared to white cars as a baseline, crash risk was higher for just about every other common color, including red, blue, silver, green, gray, and, yes, black. Black performed the worst by every measure: In daylight, the chance of crash is 12% higher than that of white cars. At dawn and dusk, that jumps to 47%—though your relative risk of getting into an accident at that time is lower at those hours, the authors point out. Monash’s study was consistent with at least one other, from the University of Granada, which determined that yellow was a safe alternative to white.

I was surprised that black was worse even in daytime.

My dark grey car looks black at night which means that my choice was not good as far as accidents go. To be frank, I just do not like white or any of the other colors so I may just have to stomach the increased risk and hope that careful driving partially compensates.