Perhaps you've heard this advice from a well-meaning friend: Beware of buying a red car because the police will be lying in wait for you. They just love to give speeding tickets to people in red cars.
There are lots of theories as to why this might be so. Maybe red cars are more eye catching and the police are more likely to notice them on a crowded highway. Or maybe that bright red paint job has a psychological effect on drivers, inspiring them to push harder on the gas pedal. Or maybe the type of person who likes red cars is also the type of person who likes to speed. Well, you can forget all those explanations, because there's no evidence that drivers of red cars get speeding tickets any more often than the law of averages would suggest. Police have denied for years that they target red cars over other colors. The urban legend site Snopes.com debunks this myth by pointing to an informal survey in a 1990 issue of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, where a reporter counted the number of red cars (as well as all other colors, too) in the area and then looked through police records to see what color cars had been recently ticketed. The percentages were almost exactly the same. The same survey showed that gray cars are actually statistically more likely to get tickets and that white cars are less likely. So if you don't want speeding tickets, make your next car a white one. But you don't necessarily have to avoid red.
Courtesy of Discovery
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