AIMS: will Toyota's 86 make white fashionable again?

No shortage of exotic paint jobs on show, but the big surprise is a white Toyota with a 15-month waiting list

The local chapter might be selling more cars than ever, but times are tough for the global auto industry. The top end of the local market has seen a drop of around 20 per cent in sales year on year, helping account for the relative absence of truly startling or groundbreaking fare at this year’s Sydney motor show. Yes, Ford and Lexus have served up some attractive concepts, Lamborghini came good with a Sesto Elemento, Jag showed up with its stunning F Type and someone lent the organisers their $2m Aston One 77, but really that’s about it. But behold while groundbreaking cars may be in short supply, we have no shortage of interesting paint jobs.

Take Toyota. Alongside the ’81 Corolla in original yellow with aftermarket tan roof, they’re displaying an 86 in... white. Now if you’re thinking that is just sooo not worth mentioning, consider this: if you want an 86 GTS (that’s the $35K upspec one) with a manual gearbox in white, you’ll be waiting till the end of 2013. That’s right: a white Toyota with a waiting list Ferrari would be proud of. We kid you not. (Although late-breaking news has it that some relief might be in sight with a boost in allocation.)

White is still the commonest colour on the nation’s roads, taking up 22 per cent of the market, with silver on its heels at 20 per cent. We say “commonest” rather than “most popular” because a goodly proportion of that white goes to corporate and public sector fleets, and to consumers who buy out of resale anxiety rather than desire (a resale anxiety turned self-fulfilling prophecy…). Voxpop a bunch of Gen Ys and you’re not likely to hear about their desperation for anything in vanilla.

Until the 86 came along. That waiting list suggests that Toyota’s oh-so Gen Y sportster has elevated white from object of default to desire.

Past that, the show reflected (so to speak) that other rising trend in duco – the matte, or “satinised” finish. At the last Sydney show two years ago, Benz rolled out “Blackbird”, an SLS in matte Night Black with badging and other normally-chrome bits in red. A one-off created to mark the 1000th AMG sale in Australia, it was one of the show’s great drawcards, overshadowing (so to speak) the C 63 in another special-edition hue, an orange tone named Jaffa.

This year, Benz left the black-and-red motif to Lamborghini. Most apposite it is too for the Sesto Elemento, a work of origami that looks like nothing so much as a stealth fighter with the wings torn off. It’s only a matter of time before Michael Bay snaps it up for a place in the Transformers franchise.

Benz, meanwhile, has swung the opposite way this time round. It used an SLK55 AMG to display a vanilla frosting effect it calls “Designo Magno Cashmere”. Beautiful it was at the show, and beautiful they’re making sure it stays, with a couple of blokes hovering nearby with clean cloths and squirt bottles of Gloss Boost ($25 for 500ml).

Yes, matte’s big, and it’s not just at showtime. If BMW had turned up there’s a good chance it would have been with its new CLS-busting 6 Series Gran Sport coupe in Frozen Bronze (a surprising $700 option). To show just how un-BMW that option price is, even Hyundai’s billing more for its take on matte. Here, it takes the form of a militaristic looking grey they’re calling Young Gun. At $1000, however, it’s hardly the stuff of bankruptcy proceedings. True to form, the Korean giant is going above and beyond the call of duty to bring stuff once reserved for the big end of town downmarket.

Which brings us to the also-absent Audi. Ingolstadt’s serving up its R8 in matte Sepang Blue, for which they want an extra $10K. That’s more like it.

A chat with a couple of people overseeing the matte-finished show cars revealed that it’s easier to maintain than one might think. We suspect they speak from the perspective of SLS and R8 buyers, people we can safely assume are well past the mortgage struggle and well able to tuck their precious ones away in well-appointed automotive bedrooms by night.

Nevertheless, the book of washing instructions is a good deal thicker than that of normal finishes. Wherever you go, the area should be cleared of bird-life for some considerable radius, but if worst comes to worst and the car is touched by avian waste matter, one must drop everything to clean it ASAP. And under no circumstances can that be done with the help of a commercial carwash. Absolutely not. Should one take it to a hand wash café, ensure it’s washed by someone who knows what they’re doing – standard car polish will ruin it.

And so on. We suspect matte isn’t destined to become the new white any time soon. So, perhaps, does AMG. Because the costliest paint job at this year’s AIMS isn’t dull. Indeed, the “coarse silver” coat on its SLS may take the cake for the shiniest object at the show – thanks in part once again, we’re sure, to those guys wielding the polishing cloths. This one amounts effectively to a super-hard lacquer infused with extra large metallic flecks. For the pleasure, they’re asking $23,000.

It’s pure Tinseltown. In every way.

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AIMS: will Toyota's 86 make white fashionable again?

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