April 4, 1998
By: Robert Leidy

My very first vehicle was a black 1980 MGB special edition that my father purchased for me in 1984. I loved that car, and that old MGB had a lot to do with my decision to purchase the BMW roadster. However, I learned at an early age that black cars are always in one of two states. The first state is Clean the second state arrives an hour after you wash it Dirty. Sometime during the three years I owned that car I vowed not to own another black car again.

Flash forward to 1991 and we find Robert purchasing a brand new black Ford Explorer Sport. Somewhere between 1984 and 1991 I must have forgotten my vow. However, I took comfort with my decision by saying, "the Explorer looks so good in black, and hey it's a truck, who cares if it's dirty."

Now flash forward to August 1996. A BMW salesman has just loaned me a Montreal blue 1.9 Z3 for the weekend, and it's just too much fun. I decide I have to own one. Later in October of that same year I took delivery of a silver 1.9, remembering my anti-black vow and resisting to acknowledge how good the black BMW roadsters looked in the brochure.

By the following spring I had made many "Internet friends" on a BMW roadster message board. It was through this board that owners started noticing a trend that the black BMW roadsters seemed to be picking up more chips than the silver ones. The theory seemed to hold water, and was broadened a little to also include dark green in the "chip prone" category. People were trying to speculate why one color would be more prone to chipping than another color, but we really never came to a real conclusion. In my mind, I acknowledged that this theory might be true, but since we were just talking over the Internet it was hard to see the evidence.

Over Labor Day weekend later that same year, several of us drove to South Carolina for the first BMW roadster homecoming. It was there that we started re-discussing the paint chip issue. I saw with my own eyes Ulrich's black roadster with lots of small paint chips on the hood. It was just as he described over the Internet, but it still wasn't concrete evidence. I jokingly asked if he worked at a gravel pit, but the point was his daily route may be much different than mine. Despite all the evidence, I still couldn't convict the black paint as "guilty".

Flash forward to March 1998, I have sold the 1.9 to a friend and I am currently waiting to take delivery of a new 3.2 liter BMW roadster. While I am waiting for the new roadster to show up, the salesman is loaning me a 2.8 liter model so I can have the experience of driving each of the three engine configurations. As fate would have it, the loaner 2.8 turned out to be a freshly cleaned and waxed black roadster. The black looked really good as I pulled out of the dealership and it reminded me why black was such a popular color. Two days later I was already washing it, but it looked so good I really didn't mind. One week and a thousand miles later the black 2.8 already had six very noticeable paint chips on the hood. The evidence is just stacked too high now; I am firmly convinced that the black paint is not only more prone to chipping, but the chips are also more visible.

I would strongly suggest that those considering the purchase of a BMW roadster avoid the black paint available on the Z3. If the lure of the black is just too strong, then I suggest you talk your salesman into throwing in some BMW touch-up paint because I think you are going to need it.