Following news that white has overtaken silver as the most popular global new car colour, it has been found that in the second-hand market, blue is the buyers’ favourite colour.

BCA analysed the colour spread of over 125,000 vehicles last year from a huge range of sources, hundreds of individual colours were recorded, ranging from antique green to Zambesi silver.

Once sorted into broad constituent colour groups, blue was most popular colour at 23.4%, just above silver at 23.3%.

Red, black and white followed in that order.

The most unpopular were orange (0.32%), beige (0.53%) and mauve (0.55%).

“While colour is a critical factor for new car buyers, our research shows it doesn’t rate nearly as highly with used car buyers when it comes to making a purchase decision,” said BCA’s UK operations director, Simon Henstock.

“BCA’s annual used car market report shows that when motorists chose their last used car, price was the most important factor (54%), with make/model (42%) and low mileage (34%) the next most important factors.

“Other strongly influencing factors included the age of the car at 23%, the body type at 20% and the specification and the insurance group both at 15 and 13% respectively.

"The colour of the car was only deemed important by 8%.

“In the wholesale market, however, whatever the age and mileage may be, the most important factors are condition, specification and presentation.

"Colour becomes important to professional buyers once the other factors are satisfied and while there are no hard and fast rules, the colour needs to match the car.”

As a general rule, good metallic colours always sell well, particularly when paired with a decent set of alloy wheels.

For larger executive and prestige models, stick to popular colours but in sober shades – metallic silvers, blues and greens for example.