The differences in vehicle color, especially between light and dark color options, have a much greater impact on fuel consumption than we think. Even if a direct effect is not mentioned, not ignoring this indirect effect can save you a lot of money.
You, like many of us, may not have pursued this problem. But the color of your vehicle plays a bigger role than you think in saving fuel when traveling under sunny weather. But how?
How does car color affect fuel consumption?
The fact that fuel consumption depends on the color of the vehicle may not provide a logical context for many people when they hear it. Because in general, the color of the vehicle seems to have nothing to do with the fuel of the vehicle, since it is an aesthetic element. However, research on this subject has found that the colors of vehicles indirectly affect fuel consumption.
For example, choosing a white car instead of black means gaining a range of 20 kilometers on one tank of fuel. If you drive a vehicle with a large surface area, this amount of savings can increase even more.
When choosing vehicle color, you can now choose not only according to your taste, but also according to fuel economy.
You might guess the reason for this: sunlight. Even in the clothes we wear daily, the reflection of sunlight makes a huge difference in terms of feeling cold and cooling down. The same logic actually applies to vehicles. A dark colored vehicle is exposed to more sunlight than a light colored vehicle. That’s why, if you’ve noticed, it gets hot as hell inside black cars in the summer months.
Although dark-colored vehicles reflect 5% of the sun’s rays, this rate goes up to 60% in light-colored vehicles, which is a very serious rate!
“So, what does temperature and fuel have to do with it?” Even if you say…
The exterior temperature of the car naturally affects the interior temperature, including the engine block. Tests showed that dark-colored vehicles needed to use 13% more air conditioning to reflect the same temperature values. So we can think of it as the exterior of our houses or our clothes.
Since the heat coming from the outside makes the engine compartment hotter, it naturally has an indirect effect on fuel consumption.
A study on this subject was conducted by researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies department.
According to this study, also published in the journal Applied Energy, it was found that vehicles painted with reflective coatings stay cooler in the sun and can be ventilated more easily to reach a comfortable temperature.
Ronnen Levinson, who carried out the study, said: “Solar reflective paints, which can reduce the air temperature inside the vehicle when it is parked in a sunny parking lot, can increase the fuel economy of the vehicle by allowing the manufacturer to install an air conditioner that is smaller and draws less power from the engine.” says.
As we already know, white, silver and other light colors are cool colors that reflect about 60% of sunlight. However, dark cool colors can also keep you cooler as an exception.
In the study, they parked two identical model Honda Civics on loan from the California General Services department in a parking lot.
One of the vehicles was gray and the other was black. The exterior coating of the black and gray vehicles had a solar reflectance of 0.05 and 0.58, respectively. During a sunny day, the vehicles were placed in the sun in similar cycles. Each cycle began with a one-hour wait with the air conditioning turned off, followed by a half-hour cooling period with the air conditioning at maximum.
The researchers continuously measured the roof, ceiling, dashboard, windshield, seat, door, air intake and cabin air temperatures in each vehicle, and also monitored the outside weather conditions in the parking lot. At the peak of the holding phases of the test, the roof of the gray vehicle was about 25°C cooler than the roof of the black vehicle.
Using the vehicle simulation called Advisor, the team also determined the effect of weather condition on vehicle fuel consumption and pollutant emissions.
These included an urban loop, a highway loop, and a temporary driving loop with increasing and decreasing speed. Combining these simulations with the thermal model’s output, they found that solar-reflective automobile paint saves potential energy for miniaturizing air conditioning.
The results were surprising. Replacing black paint on a vehicle with a cooler colored paint was found to increase fuel economy by 0.24 mpg (1.1%). This means reducing the power drawn from the engine resulting from the use of less air conditioning.
This change would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 1.1% while reducing other automobile emissions, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons by approximately 0.5%.
So which color consumes less fuel?
It is possible to make a sorting for this: white, grey, yellow, orange, red, green, blue, purple, brown and black.
As you can see, the colors in cars have been something that many of us have chosen solely based on our aesthetic taste. However, we have now seen that choosing lighter colors instead of black increases fuel economy by almost 2%. Maybe we should reconsider the importance of color when buying a vehicle. Because sometimes, small details can turn into big savings.
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