Every vehicle carries the paint list its own manufacturer published. Keep scrolling to walk through them.
Colour is the first thing a person processes on a listing and the last thing most catalogues get right. The failure is rarely dramatic. It is quiet, and it happens three times.
Someone configured a car in Blood Orange and the listing shows the silver press image. They scroll past their own vehicle, because on a results page you recognise a colour before you read a word.
They drove over for the car in the picture. It is standing there in a different finish, and now the conversation starts with an apology instead of a sale.
"Colour shown may differ" under every car is what a business writes when it has given up on the images. It reads as an admission, and it is the cheapest trust you will ever throw away.
Photographing one car in eleven colours means buying eleven cars. So nobody does it. They photograph the one on the forecourt and hope the customer is not particular.
Rendering removes the arithmetic. The vehicle is described rather than owned, so the eleventh colour costs the same as the first, and a paint that has not been built yet is available the day the manufacturer publishes it. That is the whole difference, and everything else on this page follows from it.
The parameter takes the factory name: ?color=Amaryllis%20Red%20Metallic. Not a hex value, not an internal id, the string a customer would read on the order form they fill in afterwards.
That is a deliberate limitation. A hex value is a screen colour. Real paint has a flake, a depth and a behaviour in light that a flat fill cannot stand in for, and a metallic rendered as #96202c looks like a toy. Asking by name means the render knows what kind of paint it is dealing with.
If a vehicle does not carry the colour you asked for, it does not silently become something close. It falls back to the standard finish and the response tells you which colour was used, so your page can decide whether to say anything about it.
The whole point of a configurator is that the picture follows the choice. If the paint step shows the same silver car with a swatch next to it, the step is decoration and customers treat it that way.
The offer goes live months before the vehicle is built. There is no car to photograph, and the colour is exactly the thing the customer is choosing between two otherwise identical offers.
Stock changes weekly and the photographer does not. Rendering the actual colour of the actual car in stock takes a request, not a slot in someone's calendar.
Ask a vehicle which colours it has, then ask for the vehicle in one of them. The list is the same one the manufacturer published, so your picker never offers a paint that cannot be ordered.
// what does this car come in?
const { colors } = await get('/api/Volkswagen/Golf/2024/Basis/base/colors')
// render it in one of them
const img = await get(
'/api/Volkswagen/Golf/2024/Basis/base/front_left' +
'?color=' + encodeURIComponent(colors[3])
)From the paint list the manufacturer published for that model year. They are not our names, which is why they look like factory names: Amaryllis Red Metallic rather than "dark red".
It falls back to the standard finish and the response states which colour was actually used. Nothing is silently swapped, so a page never claims a paint the factory does not sell.
No, and on purpose. A hex value is a screen colour, not a paint. Metallics and pearls behave differently in light, and a flat fill of #96202c is not Amaryllis Red, it just sits next to it.
There is a house line that works on every vehicle in the catalogue, and a set of wrap finishes for dealers who sell the wrap rather than the paint. Both are requested the same way.
Each combination is generated once and then served from cache, so the second visitor asking for the same car in the same colour does not wait for anything.
Tell us a handful of vehicles and the finishes your customers actually order, and we come back with those exact cars in those exact paints. Then hold them next to what is on your site today.
