Danger - Red Car

In the 70s, things were simpler – and a bit more brutal. Cars were sprayed with paint and that was it. No lacquer, no protective top coat, just straight colour on metal. A bright red Escort or Marina would fade to pink in a few summers flat, the pigment chalking under the sun like seaside deckchairs. But at least the paint wore out honestly – you could polish it back, bring up some shine, maybe even look smug about the “patina.”

Then, in the 80s and 90s, manufacturers trumpeted progress: the brave new world of basecoat and lacquer. The pitch was seductive – a colour layer sealed under a clear coat that would stay glossy for decades. Only, for red cars, this promise turned out to be about as reliable as a BL indicator stalk.

Red pigment is fragile, cooked alive by UV light. Add to that the fact red panels soak up heat like a pizza oven, and you’ve got thermal stress constantly making the lacquer expand and contract. Worse, factories often sprayed red with a thinner coat of lacquer – it looked vibrant straight out the booth, so they saved time and money by not laying it on thick. That worked fine for the first few years – long enough for the warranty – but once that lacquer started to dry out, it didn’t just lose gloss. It cracked, peeled and flaked in ugly, scabby patches.

Other colours get clear coat failure too, but red does it spectacularly. Black goes dull, silver just gets a bit flat, but red? Red throws a full‑blown tantrum – the lacquer peels like sunburnt skin, the panels patchy and raw, the car slowly mutating into the scrapyard exhibit you’ve seen outside every Halfords.

And that’s why there’s a preponderance of red cars with peeling lacquer. In the 70s they simply faded. In the 80s onwards, the lacquer arrived – but too thin, too fragile and too stressed – and now entire generations of red hatchbacks, saloons and coupes are out there shedding their skin, victims of a chemistry lesson gone wrong.

So if you’re looking at a used red car, the highest‑risk window is anything built between about 1985 and 2005. Those are the cars most likely to have lacquer peeling off the bonnet like filo pastry, unless they’ve been garaged, pampered, or resprayed. Even some into the 2012s are very suspect.