What color is a Morgan?
Colors
Green and Red are over half of everything.
- 965color names
- 5,246cars with a color
- 697on a single car
Owners describe their cars’ paint in their own words, from familiar factory shades to names unlike any other.
965 different names across 5,246 cars. Choose a color in any chart or list below to find the cars wearing it.
51%Green or Red
51% of every car with a recorded color is one or the other — 1,385 green, 1,109 red.
Of every car with a color the census can place · See the century →
The palette over time
A century, in one river
Each band is a color family; its thickness is how many cars from that year wear it. Scrub across to read any year.
The Chromatic RiverAnnual volume and color flow · 1912–2024
What the census shows
What stands out
Every line here is computed from the same records the charts draw.
- Black, Brown, Silver and White are 29% between them None of them is really a color so much as the absence of one, or a metal — and together they outweigh every hue here except Green and Red.
- Green outnumbers Orange, Purple, Pink combined, 45 times over 1,385 cars are green against 31 across the three rarest families put together.
- Green led 3 straight decades, the 1990’s to the 2010’s No other family has ever been the single most common color for longer.
- Names got longer, decade by decade In the 1930’s, 77% of owners wrote their color as a single word; by the 2010’s only 39% did. “Red” became “Corsa Red”; “Green” became “Connaught Green”.
Decade by decade
A century of color
Grouping owners’ many paint names by how they look — Red, Green, Blue and so on — reveals how Morgan’s palette changed decade by decade.
How to read it: Each row is a color family and each column is a decade. Larger dots mean more cars. Decades with fewer than 100 cars are marked in grey, rather than suggesting the same certainty as a larger sample.
Coverage: 319 cars have a color name that cannot be confidently placed in a family; 652 more have no color recorded. Hover or select a family or dot for details.
In the owners’ words
The Owner’s Paint Box
Beyond factory codes, owners write in their own names for a color. A selection of the most distinctive, each one a real car.
The archive
The most recorded paint names
The 48 most common owner-written names, by the number of cars recorded under each. Every name links to its cars.
- Red 600
- British Racing Green 421
- Green 369
- Blue 290
- Black 276
- Connaught Green 217
- White 148
- Yellow 129
- Royal Ivory 113
- Corsa Red 93
- Indigo Blue 79
- Ivory 77
- Silver 72
- Red, Black 71
- Silver, Black 55
- Le Mans Green 50
- Dark Blue 49
- Cream 48
- Yellow, Black 44
- Burgundy 43
- Signal Red 40
- Green, Black 38
- Westminster Green 37
- Maroon 35
- Old English White 33
- Primer 32
- Grey 29
- Gray 27
- Burgundy, Black 25
- Rosso Red 25
- Brg, Black 24
- Brunswick Green 21
- Cream, Brown 20
- Blue, Black 19
- Brown 19
- Light Blue, Dark Blue 19
- Kingfisher Blue 18
- Broken White 14
- Orange 14
- Silver, Blue 14
- Dark Green 13
- Deep Brunswick Green 13
- Ming Blue 13
- Light Blue 12
- Maroon, Black 12
- Midnight Blue 12
- Cream, Black 11
- Dark Red 11
Showing the 48 most common owner-written paint names. If your car’s color isn’t recorded, tell me!
The long tail
A sample of 24 owner-written paint names, each recorded for one car.
- "Irish" Racing Green
- Aston Martin Storm Black
- Bentley Silverlake Blue
- Blue Schwarz
- Bright Red
- Chameleon Reflex Green
- Cream, Biscuit
- Dark Green, Black
- Evergreen, Black
- Gas Light Blue
- Grey,Maroon
- Ivory, Tan
- Jaguar XK Battleship Grey
- Lotus Steel Blue
- Mercedes Azurite Blue Metallic
- Metallic Ruby
- Nile blue, Cream
- Panhard Red
- Primrose Yellow
- Resale Red
- Saxe Blue, Black
- Silver, Polished Aluminum
- Sun Beige over Burgaundy
- Warvik Gray
The swatches are my best reading of each name. Where I can’t place one, I leave it uncolored rather than guess.