Grey is now the most-registered colour on a new car in Malaysia. It was only the third most-registered colour in 2018, behind white and silver. We counted every new car in the government's registration records since 2018, more than 3.53 million of them across the January-to-July window of each year, and the order at the top has changed.
The records come from JPJ, released monthly and free through data.gov.my. This is the government's car dataset, which counts the vehicles JPJ classifies as cars and so excludes motorcycles, lorries and buses. To compare like with like we filtered every year to the same January-to-July window, because the 2026 file is a part year. These are registrations, not sales: a registration can lag a purchase or cover a fleet order, so read the figures as what was newly registered, not what was sold in a showroom.
| Year | Total registrations | Grey | White | Silver | Black | Red |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 367,433 | 15.3% | 23.3% | 21.5% | 9.5% | 13.0% |
| 2019 | 353,334 | 18.7% | 22.5% | 20.5% | 8.2% | 13.1% |
| 2020 | 247,462 | 18.1% | 25.3% | 16.0% | 7.0% | 16.6% |
| 2021 | 266,681 | 20.2% | 24.0% | 14.4% | 7.0% | 18.6% |
| 2022 | 397,270 | 20.2% | 25.3% | 14.7% | 7.6% | 18.8% |
| 2023 | 449,833 | 23.0% | 23.5% | 14.8% | 8.7% | 16.8% |
| 2024 | 487,828 | 25.8% | 22.7% | 14.6% | 9.9% | 14.3% |
| 2025 | 472,395 | 25.6% | 21.6% | 15.6% | 11.4% | 12.9% |
| 2026 | 489,340 | 24.2% | 20.7% | 14.9% | 12.0% | 11.3% |
Table of Contents
Seven numbers, one baseline: 2018 against 2026
1. Grey overtook white. Grey rose from 15.3% of new cars in 2018 to 24.2% in 2026 and is now the most-registered colour. White, the leader in 2018, slipped from 23.3% to 20.7%. As the chart and table show, grey passed white around 2024, and grey has been the top colour in every year since.
2. Silver collapsed. Silver was almost the top colour in 2018 at 21.5%, a whisker behind white. By 2026 it was down to 14.9%, from second place to third. Nothing else at the top fell as far.
3. Silver shrank even as the market grew 33%. Total January-to-July registrations rose from 367,433 in 2018 to 489,340 in 2026. Over the same span silver fell in raw numbers, from 79,083 cars to 72,981. It is the only colour among the six most-registered to lose ground in absolute terms while the market around it expanded.
4. Grey and black now make up a third of new cars. Put the two darkest neutrals together and they went from 24.8% of new cars in 2018 to 36.2% in 2026. More than one new car in three is now grey or black.
5. Black hit a new high. Black is at its highest share in the period, 12.0% in 2026, up from 9.5% in 2018. The rise was not smooth: as the table shows, black first dipped to about 7% around 2020 and 2021 before climbing to fourth place, past red.
6. Red, the top non-neutral, eased off. Red slipped from 13.0% in 2018 to 11.3% in 2026. It remains the most-registered colour that is not black, white, grey or silver, but it is no longer in the top four. Red was actually registered more often in the early 2020s, peaking near 19% in 2022 in the table above, before falling back.
7. Earth tones nearly halved. Brown and beige fell from 3.9% of new cars in 2018 to 2.1% in 2026.
What the numbers can and cannot say
These are registration records, not sales figures, and they count new cars newly registered, not the colour of every car already on the road. We compared the same January-to-July window in each year so a part-year 2026 is never set against a full year. The colour labels are JPJ's own broad categories. We have not broken the figures down by state: 87.4% of 2026 rows (427,798 of 489,340) record the registration through a dealer partner portal, "Rakan Niaga", rather than a state, so any state-level split would describe only a small and unrepresentative slice, and we have left it out.
Read together, these numbers are our reading of a more neutral new-car palette. Grey, white, silver and black made up 71.8% of new cars in 2026, against 69.6% in 2018, while red and the earth tones gave up ground. This is Malaysia's own record, counted from the government source rather than taken from anyone else's report.
