Do the Police really target red cars?

Great question, John - I'm glad you asked. I have often wondered the same thing while driving down the road in my gray, falling-apart piece of shit that has no air conditioner or cigarette lighter and a transmission that performs at whim and is just as likely to fall off the bottom of the vehicle in pieces as to shift a gear. That said, the issue of the coppers pulling over shiny red cars more frequently than their other-colored counterparts is one to consider before purchasing that bright-red Ferrari I have been eyeballing.

To answer this question, we must first consider the traffic patrolman. There is nothing in the Traffic Patrolman Rule Book that hints of automobile profiling by color. Speeders are speeders, they say. So, what motivates the auto-cop? Historically, donuts. So whether you are driving a yellow Mazda, a blue Nissan, a black Dodge or my red Ferrari, in my opinion, you are less likely to be pulled over if Johnny Law is mid-donut and likely to spill hot coffee on his uni should he hit the gas in pursuit.

My initial instinct is that the "Red Car" legend has been manufactured by red car owners in a desperate plea for attention. The mere fact that they need to drive a shiny red car (presumably a shiny red car that goes really fast) alone tells us that these drivers are slaves to attention anyhow. Red Car owners are less likely to look like whiny whelps and more like pitiable martyrs if they have the Red Car Legend to fall back on when others are beginning to speak resentfully about their own falling-apart, gray, no-air-conditioning, transmission falling apart piece of shit with no cigarette lighters. Just sayin'.

Now, for the science. This from Snopes, courtesy the World Wide Web: "In 1990, a reporter for The St. Petersburg Times conducted his own smallish survey of which color of cars were getting the most speeding tickets in his area. He first staked out four intersections in the two counties he was studying and made a tally by color of the 1,198 cars that went through them. He then leafed through the 924 speeding tickets issued in those two counties to arrive at a count of how many had been issued to each color of car. Last, he compared the two results to see if the resulting percentages closely approximated one another or were badly out of sync."

The results of the reporter's findings were that the percentages mostly lined up, with white cars actually getting less tickets than they should, for those of you in the car-market. Snopes' conclusion: The belief that red cars attract more speeding tickets - FALSE.

On a side note: "Gray cars were the ones that gained a greater share of the speeding tickets than they statistically should have: While they accounted for only 6 percent of the cars on the road, they pulled down 10 percent of the tickets issued."

Figures.

Good day, Sir.

For the entire snopes.com article, click below:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/law/redcars.asp