TechCrunch Mobility: Blue-green is the color of autonomy
Every autonomous vehicle company seems to have raided the same paint aisle. Teal, cyan, a watery blue-green that reads as calm, clean, and vaguely oceanic. The title of this newsletter issue nods to that palette, and honestly, it's the most consistent thing about the industry right now. Waymo's fleet, Zoox's boxes, even the concept renders from startups I've lost track of, they all converge on this one hue. It's a deliberate choice, meant to telegraph safety and approachability before a single sensor does any work.
I think that uniformity is worth paying attention to. The hardware and software stacks under these vehicles are wildly different, but the exterior branding has collapsed into a single visual language. That tells me the companies have done their consumer research and found the same answer: people trust a car that looks like a friendly gadget, not a machine. Whether that trust survives contact with a real road, with a real pedestrian crossing in front of a robotaxi, is the open question.
What I'd want to know next is whether the color actually moves adoption numbers, or if it's just an industry-wide tic. The palette might matter less than the behavior. But as a marker of how the sector wants to be seen, the blue-green wash is a useful tell.