Britain’s car buyers keep saying they want something different, then they go and buy grey. Again.
Grey was the UK’s favourite new-car colour for an eighth year running in 2025, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) reported.
A total of 558,050 grey cars were registered, up 2.7% and enough for a record year for the shade. That also meant more than a quarter of all new registrations, at 27.6%, arrived in what is essentially the colour of a winter sky.
Black stayed the runner-up, but it was the one doing the sprinting.
Registrations rose 9.7% to 464,369 units, its highest volume since 2019, the SMMT said.
Blue held on to third place for the second time and remained the most popular pick outside the monochrome comfort zone, rising 4.9% to 306,349 registrations. Put the top three together and they accounted for 65.8% of all new cars joining UK roads in 2025.
White kept fourth place. Silver, which once ruled Britain’s roads in the early 2000s, squeezed back into the top five for the first time in nearly a decade, hinting at a nostalgia cycle that finally reached car paint.
Red, by contrast, continued its long slide and dropped to sixth with a 5.8% share, the lowest since detailed records began.
The plot twist came in green. It stayed seventh, but volumes jumped 46.3% to 99,793 registrations, the most since 2004, the SMMT reported. Even more telling, green-tinted battery-electric vehicles nearly doubled, up 95.2% year-on-year to 23,249 units.
That worked out to about one in 20 new BEVs, compared with just one in 300 the year before. Grey still led among BEV buyers, with 131,984 registrations.
And if you are holding out for maroon, pink or turquoise, Britain remained Britain: those three managed just 342 registrations between them.
SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes said monochrome choices stayed dominant, while the surge in green tracked the growing popularity of electrified cars as the market decarbonised.
