We’ve been buying a lot of cars the past few weeks, building up inventory for the 2009 program.

When I take delivery of a car, I often get asked several questions from the dealer: What do you do with the cars when you’re done? (We offer for sale first to the employees, otherwise we trade them in.) Do you crash test the cars? (Not intentionally.) Does it really matter what color you buy?

Well, yes and no. Obviously the color doesn’t matter when it comes to evaluating the performance of the car. But cars “pop” more in photographs and videos when they’re bright colors. That’s why, when we get the chance, we try and buy cars in unique bright colors. It’s why five of the nine cars in our October sporty car group were bright blue, two were shocking yellow, one was red, and one was orange.

There are limits to this. Getting a car with proper equipment – we want cars to line up with their test group – is more important. Some car classes, like luxury sedans, offer only somber colors. (When shopping, we’ve seen more silver than at Tiffany’s.) There has been more than one test group with almost all gray, silver, or dark blue cars. 

Timeliness also plays a role. We might ask for a dealer to “locate” a properly-equipped car from another dealer in a more photogenic color. But for some cars, especially those with low availability that were recently introduced, we’re lucky to get whatever we can find. As a rule of thumb, if we buy a black car, you can assume that it was hard to get.

Nothing better illustrates this than the two recent black cars in our stable: a base Honda Fit automatic and a VW Jetta TDI. It’s no surprise that we had to take what we could get of these high-fuel-economy models. (Luckily, we found an orange Fit Sport.)

See how the Honda Fit and Volkswagen Jetta TDI performed in their group tests.

—Tom Mutchler

To clarify, all cars are purchased anonymously, but the dealership discovers who we are upon delivery due to the name on the big check.