White, black or beige: what the colour of a used car does to its price in Qatar

Ask anyone who sells cars in Doha which colour to buy and most will say white: it stays cooler in the sun, it hides dust, and it is what the next buyer will want. The second half of that is a claim about money, so we checked it against the asking prices on BuMotar.

How we measured it

There are 13,549 live listings on BuMotar today. Only one of the catalogues behind them records the exterior colour as its own field; the other mixes exterior and interior colour, so we left it out. From that one catalogue we kept used cars from model years 2010 to 2025, with between 1,000 and 500,000 km, an asking price of at least QAR 5,000 and a stated colour: 2,874 cars.

We put the colours into ten groups. White includes off-white. Grey includes dark grey and the matte and named greys. Red includes maroon. Beige, gold, brown and sand are counted together, because there are too few of each to read on their own.

To compare prices, we used only cars whose model and model year have at least eight listings, so that each car is compared with enough of its own kind. That leaves 1,125 cars in 64 model-year groups. In each group we worked out how the asking price falls as the kilometres rise, and measured every car against what a car of its model, year and mileage typically asks.

What the market is painted

Of the 2,874 cars, 1,110 (38.6%) are white, 652 (22.7%) black, 411 (14.3%) grey and 239 (8.3%) silver. Blue is 4.2%, beige, gold and brown together 4.1%, red and maroon 3.4%, and pearl and green 1.3% each. Three cars in every four are white, black or grey.

Some models lean further. 57.9% of the 475 Land Cruisers are white, as are 53.8% of 156 Nissan Patrols and 52.2% of 161 Lexus LXs. Range Rovers split almost evenly, 28.9% white and 30.9% black, and the GMC Sierra is the exception among the common models: 15.0% white and 31.7% black. Vans are the whitest body type at 66.0%.

What each colour is worth, after mileage

This is how much more or less cars of each colour ask than the typical car of the same model, year and mileage. The range in brackets is roughly where the true figure could lie.

• White — About 0.3% less (−1.9% to 1.3%). 513 cars.
• Black — About 0.9% more (−0.9% to 2.7%). 311 cars.
• Grey — About 2.9% more (−0.3% to 6.1%). 124 cars.
• Silver — About 2.3% less (−6.1% to 1.5%). 66 cars.
• Beige, gold and brown — About 7.4% less (−12.4% to −2.4%). 45 cars.
• Red and maroon — About 8.8% less (−18.2% to 0.6%). 17 cars.
• Blue — About 5.0% more, but the range runs from −6.2% to 16.2%. 20 cars.

The plain reading is that the common colours are worth the same. White, black, grey and silver all sit within about 3% of the typical car, and white and black within about 1% of each other, which is less than the uncertainty in the figures. The colours that do come with a lower ask are the uncommon warm ones: beige, gold and brown clearly, red and maroon probably, though on few cars.

We checked that against a stricter comparison, matching cars on trim as well as model and year where the catalogue records it. It rests on fewer cars, 567, but the picture is the same: white 0.0%, black −0.4%, grey +1.5%, silver +1.1%, and beige, gold and brown −4.1% on 14 cars.

Black cars ask a median QAR 149,000 and white cars QAR 92,000. Compared like for like, the difference is about one percent.

Why black looks expensive

Look only at the headline figures and black seems to be the premium colour. The median black car on this list asks QAR 149,000, against QAR 92,000 for white and QAR 74,995 for silver. But that is a difference in which cars are black, not in what black does to a car. Of the cars asking QAR 200,000 or more, 34.4% are black and 33.9% white. Of the cars asking under QAR 60,000, 40.2% are white and only 14.6% black. Black is the colour of expensive cars; it does not make a car expensive.

The Land Cruiser

The Land Cruiser is the one model with enough cars to look at colour on its own: 475 of them across 16 model years. There, white is worth 0.5% more than the typical car of its year and mileage and black 0.2% less: the same. Grey asks about 6.9% more (0.7% to 13.1%, on 34 cars), and silver about 3.4% less. Beige, gold and brown, on 15 cars, ask about 16.8% less (−25.8% to −7.8%). On a used Land Cruiser, whose middle asking price here is QAR 150,000, that is about QAR 25,000.

The Land Cruiser also shows the clearest change in what people buy. Among the 108 from model years 2010 to 2015, 71.3% are white and 10.2% black. Among the 131 from 2016 to 2020, 66.4% white and 16.0% black. Among the 236 from 2021 to 2025, 47.0% white and 34.7% black. The rest of the market moves the same way, more gently: across every other model, white falls from 39.7% to 32.9% over the same years and black rises from 16.3% to 26.0%.

We cannot tell from listings alone whether buyers have changed their minds or whether older black cars simply leave the market sooner, exported, repainted or kept. But on the cars for sale today, the idea that a Land Cruiser should be white is weaker than it was.

What to do with this

• If you are buying — Buy the colour you want among white, black, grey and silver; you will not pay noticeably more for any of them, and when you sell you should not get noticeably less. If you are offered a beige, gold, brown or red car, expect it to ask less than the same car in white, and treat the gap as a reason to look rather than a reason to walk away.
• If you are selling — Do not price a white car above a black one, or the other way round, on colour alone. Comparable cars in the other colour ask about the same. If your car is beige, gold or brown, the cars it is competing with ask about 7% less than the typical car, and about 17% less on a Land Cruiser. Pricing well above that gap is likely to mean a long wait.
• If you are holding — Colour is not worth changing. A respray costs money and a buyer will ask why it was done. Keep the original paint in good order instead. In an earlier article we found cars described as having original paint ask about 2% more, though that figure was not certain.

What we do not know, and what would change the answer. These are asking prices, not sale prices: a colour might not change the ask but still change how fast a car sells or how close to its price, and we cannot measure either. The colour is the seller's own description, and one person's pearl is another's white. The analysis uses only one of our catalogues, about a fifth of our listings, because the other does not separate exterior and interior colour reliably; it leans towards large SUVs, and the figures may not hold for small cars. Within a model and year we cannot always separate trim, and some colours come only on some trims, which may explain the grey premium on Land Cruisers. The ranges are approximate, about two standard errors either side, and the red, blue and Land Cruiser beige figures rest on fewer than 25 cars each. Shares by model year describe the cars for sale now, not the cars that were sold new in those years.

Read next

• “Accident-free”, “one owner”, “urgent sale”: what the words in a Qatar car listing do to its price
• Another 10,000 km takes 1% to 3% off a used car's asking price in Qatar. A year of age takes far more.