Black car. Should I get one?

[davester]

Lew Zealand wrote:
As far as heat in the summer goes, it doesn't matter what color you get. If it sits out for a half hour or more in the sun with the windows up of even cracked a bit, it'll come to a similar temp as a white one. I bought a white car to minimize this without doing any tests but a friend of mine a few years later did the test in the dealer's lot. IR thermometer to all 8 Odysseys' side windows in the lot (6 different colors including dark blue and white) in the sun for a few hours and temps were within 2°. He bought dark blue.

The IR thermometer reading is irrelevant. It's only showing you the temperature of the outside surface and is not indicative of the rate of heat absorption and the amount of heat present in the materials that make up the car's interior. What's happening to that heat on the surface is what's important. Basic thermodynamics tells us that black (low emissivity) objects absorb vastly more heat energy than light (high emissivity) objects given the same surface temperature. This is borne out by personal experience working in the desert for years. A black vehicle is absolutely unpleasant to work out of. A white vehicle vastly more comfortable.

I agree that black or dark blue vehicles look very sharp when perfectly clean. The rest of the time they look ugly as heck and are horribly uncomfortable to get into (or touch the exterior of) in a sunny climate. For that reason I always rule them out completely when buying a car. That definitely makes it tough for the used car buyer (which I have been very recently) because black has been the main color pushed by the dealerships as the "cool color to have" for the last decade.