He's doing a frame-off media-blast resto on an FJ40 right now and what we've discovered is you can't get paint done. If it isn't an insurance job, they don't want to touch it. The places that will charge in excess of $8k. Yeah, there's Earl Scheib, but c'mon. It isn't about the paint. It's about the environmental regs for spraying them, and those are the exact same for iridescent silver as they are for bright red. Psychologically, the more color you commit to the more mentally at ease you feel. Staid, conservative blacks and grays are all about discomfort; garish shades are all about peace of mind. Cars - at least the cars listed in this article; my wife's 2009 Honda is a bright f'ing blue - for the middle-of-the-road consumer are in grays, whites and blacks for the exact same reason there are a lot of shows about fairy tales on the air right now: people are unsettled.
In Portland there are more then a few "art cars." These are cars with murals, thousands of glass beads, hundreds of stickers or action figures glued on to the surface. There is a tower of evil skulls about 4ft or so high on the roof of a particular Volvo, that is maybe the wildest car I see. Art cars make lime green paint seem tame.
I've gotta say that the matt finish on this S-Class that they reference looks pretty sharp though: http://www.autoevolution.com/news-image/mercedes-benz-offeri...
'cuz that's what it said on the damn can. You put that color down before you put a real color down, because while you could rattle-can a decent shade of primer onto something (and even sand it!) making a decent-looking paint job required a weekend with a spray booth. I owned a few cars in "primer." The fact that you can now buy an S-class in "primer" and think you're badass-looking says a lot about the world we live in. Here's the exact same car in a not-shitty paint job: http://wikicars.org/en/Mercedes-Benz_S-Class