Completely agree with you concerning black cars! Never again either. I find silver and white stays 'cleanest' looking for longer and particularly resistant to showing summer dust.
Agree, silver is an easy and quite forgiving colour to maintain; it ‘hides’ the dirt well, and also does a good job of hiding swirl marks if a safe wash method isn’t used (e.g. the many £5 hand wash set ups or free complementary dealer service washes).
Car colour choice is a very personal thing and we have our own reasons for choosing or not choosing certain colours, which is a good thing - if we all liked the same things then life would be very boring! I personally wouldn’t have a silver car though as historically, it’s reputed to be one of the more difficult colours to get an accurate colour match between the original factory paint and newly repainted areas if you’re unfortunate enough to need bodywork repairs. I’ve seen many silver cars with ‘patchwork’ paint where there are distinct shade differences between original and new paintwork when a car has needed body repairs - even where the new paint had been blended into the original paintwork on adjoining panels.
I used to have a contact in an insurance company who handled post-vehicle repair issues from customers, and they told me they had more customer complaints with colour matching on silver coloured cars than any other colour car - they also cited solid red as being a difficult colour to match (repainted panels can look orange in certain lighting conditions).
With modern spectrophotometer paint matching technology, it might not be such an issue these days to get a 100% accurate colour and shade match. However, I have car OCD, so if after paintwork repairs, the colour or shade match was slightly out, I’d notice it every time I looked at the car and I couldn’t live with that!
I must go and book those car OCD therapy sessions..................