You may have spent a weekend in Mudgee, a few hours in Goulburn (on your way to the snow) and blazed through Bathurst, but there’s one thing about small Aussie towns you’ve probably failed to notice all these years.
This glaring oversight will instantly make sense to you though, as soon as you hear Maddie Gibbons – a Kiwi “Sydney girl” who moved to Bondi a few years ago, and decided to go bush – put it into words.
Taking to TikTok, Maddie said: “Genuine question for anyone who doesn’t live in a city in Australia. Riddle me this, what is with the white cars?”
She added: “Seriously it’s like The Truman Show around here, everyone’s in a white car. I’m not just talking farming utes. I’ll show you what I mean.”
Maddie then showed off multiple full carparks of white SUVs, 4WDs and normal cars, saying: “Deadset, I’ve only seen one other colour car and it was – god forbid – silver. Must be owned by the town crazy.”
“I am now trapped in a farm simulation.”
Commenters were quick to answer her query, with one writing: “They are cheaper to buy, cooler in summer and normally look cleaner for longer than a colour car.”
Another added: “When you live rural, they are the easiest and cheapest to source. Normally can get a bargain on dealer displays which are white.”
Another theory was that white cars are easy to see on the road and “it’s passed on from generation to generation that they’re superior.”
While one TikTok user questioned why this “cooling” logic didn’t extend to houses too (“wild everyone understands white cars stay cooler in summer but everyone has dark roofs on their houses …”) most people agreed that white cars were indeed a good choice. The quote that sums it up best for me though is this: “It’s the mum car colour and the tradie car colour and that’s most of us.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.
This article originally appeared on Escape and has been republished with permission
