Sometimes when I'm lying awake in bed, sleepless in the middle of the night, suffering through that 3-o'clock-in-the-morning frame of mind – the time of night when, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence" – eternal philosophical questions run through my mind.
Questions such as:
- Why is there something rather than nothing?
- Is our universe real?
- Do I have free will?
- What would it take for me to buy an orange car?
It's impossible to be neutral when it comes to orange automobiles. You love them or you hate them. You wouldn't be caught dead in one or you wouldn't be caught living in any other. This question was rekindled last week when Dodge announced it was reviving the colour Go Mango (which is orange) as an option for its 2016 Dodge Challenger and Dodge Charger SRT models. The colour was unveiled at the Festival of Spring in Irvine, Calif.
Go Mango was first introduced in 1970, back when Bridge Over Troubled Water was a hit song and Broadway Joe Namath was playing for the New York Jets and growing his Manchu mustache. It was last brought back in the 2006 Dodge Charger. If you're a fan of carrots, pumpkins and Cheezies, then Go Mango is the colour for you. It is very orange. Put it this way: Go Mango is the orangiest orange in all of Orangeland.
If Dodge considered offering it on Grand Caravans, I'd be tempted. You see, I've always been partial to orange cars. When you choose bright orange for your automobile, you're not trying to hide from anything. Orange is an unapologetic car colour. The folks who order 2016 Dodge Challengers and Dodge Charger SRTs in Go Mango are people who like their music the same way they like their lovers: loud and energetic.
This is not the first time that Dodge has brought back paints from the muscle-car colour wheel.
The company resurrected such psychedelic hues for their Challenger and Charger series as Plum Crazy (think: "purple" as conceived by Timothy Leary), B5 Blue (think: a shade of blue Stanley Kubrick considered too "future-y" and cut from 2001: A Space Odyssey), Top Banana (think: Yellow Submarine yellow) and Sublime (think: 1980s artist Patrick Nagel's favourite green, if he used green).
I'm not alone in pegging orange as the colour for drivers who have flair. Leatrice Eiseman heads the Eiseman Center for Color Information and Training and is also executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. She told USA Today in 2013 that orange is "one of the most interesting colours, because people who choose orange are usually very artistic, creative, original. And they're very individualistically charming."
Wow, orange really is me.
Then again, I may not be as unique as I think. I may just be another member of the herd. In 2014, iSeeCars.com conducted its Gender and Car Colour Preferences Study.
The company analyzed more than 25 million used cars for sale and scrutinized 200,000 used car consumer searches on iSeeCars.com. It found that orange had usurped red as the favourite colour for male drivers.
Artistic, creative, original, individualistically charming and masculine? That 2016 Dodge Charger in Go Mango is looking better and better.
Andrew Clark