NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 12, 2025--
Neutral car colors are massively popular. For decades, paint colors have been trapped in grayscale. About 80% of today’s vehicles are some shade of gray, silver, white or black – up from 60% in 2004 1. Meanwhile, blue vehicles accounted for just 9% of sales in 2024 2. In a world where people crave individuality – custom sneakers, personalized playlists and a return of bold colors in pop culture – why are most cars colorless?
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Nissan is bucking the trend – offering a brand-new blue for 2025. Debuting on the all-new 2025 Murano, Aurora Blue Metallic 3 is the perfect fit for the redesigned crossover’s crisp lines and muscular rear haunches.
Yasuhito Oba, a color designer in Nissan’s Advanced Design Department, specializes in creating colors for the North American market, which is the primary target for Murano. Oba was a key player in developing the new paint – a process that takes over two years. He said that just like the rest of the all-new Murano’s design, Aurora Blue Metallic was inspired by nature.
“The Murano name comes from an island in Italy, so something inspired by the ocean made sense,” Oba said. “This color shares shades of blue found in the sea.”
Creating an all-new color is a complex process, especially for one with as much depth as Aurora Blue Metallic. Designers create countless versions of the color to get it just right. They make samples and see how they look in a wide variety of light conditions, on different materials, and during different times of day. Look closely, and you’ll see Aurora Blue Metallic features greenish-blue highlights and reddish shades. Oba explained that to achieve this, designers added two special pigments to the paint.
“A blue aluminum flake enhances the depth of the blue, while a color-shifting flake brings out reddish shades,” he said.
Indeed, the paint looks remarkably different depending on the time of day, sunlight, its location on the vehicle and the viewing angle. Midday in the sunshine, it appears as a bright blue. In the evening, however, the blue transforms into a deep and dreamy shade.
“Even in dark conditions, it has nuance,” Oba said. “It looks like an intense, dark blue – again, reminiscent of the ocean.”
Oba’s team in Japan collaborated with Nissan Design America (NDA) to ensure the color-shifting elements in the paint looked correct at all angles. The NDA team then traveled to Nissan’s assembly plant in Smyrna, Tennessee to validate the paint’s appearance on pre-production units.
When creating the 2025 Murano, Nissan designers worked closely with engineers to shrink gaps between body panels and create a more seamless, high-quality appearance. Aurora Blue Metallic helps emphasize that attention to detail.
“It works really well to enhance that uniform look – on both the sharp and smooth lines in the bodywork,” Oba said.
Murano offers available features like climate-controlled massaging front seats, 64-color interior ambient lighting and 21-inch wheels. The color team wanted Aurora Blue Metallic to emphasize those upscale components.
“We wanted to provide a premium yet light impression,” Oba said.
Aurora Blue Metallic is just the latest example of how Nissan is moving to provide drivers with options that defy convention. In fact, every vehicle sold in the U.S. is available in a shade of blue.
“Some are deep, some are light – but each model has an option,” Oba said. “It was important for us to offer customers choices beyond the norm.”
In addition to Aurora Blue Metallic, the 2025 Murano is available in 12 colors, including two-tone options that feature a contrasting black roof.
Much like the northern lights, Aurora Blue Metallic looks like it’s constantly changing color. It’s an effect that took years of refinement, but Oba says it was time well spent.
“We wanted to remind people of the magic moments in nature. This color does just that,” he said.
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1 Source: iSeeCars study, 2023
2 Source: Kelly Blue Book, 2024
3 Aurora Blue Metallic is an extra-cost option on Murano SL and Platinum grades.
Neutral car colors are massively popular. For decades, paint colors have been trapped in grayscale. About 80% of today's vehicles are some shade of gray, silver, white or black – up from 60% in 2004. Meanwhile, blue vehicles accounted for just 9% of sales in 2024. In a world where people crave individuality – custom sneakers, personalized playlists and a return of bold colors in pop culture – why are most cars colorless? Nissan is bucking the trend – offering a brand-new blue for 2025. Debuting on the all-new 2025 Murano, Aurora Blue Metallic is the perfect fit for the redesigned crossover's crisp lines and muscular rear haunches. (Photo: Business Wire)
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump said he’s dropping — for now — his push to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, a move that comes after legal roadblocks held up the effort.
“We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again - Only a question of time!" he said in a social media post Wednesday.
Governors typically control states' National Guardsmen, and Trump had deployed troops to all three cities against the wishes of state and local Democratic leaders. He said it was necessary as part of a broader crackdown on immigration, crime and protests.
The president has made a crackdown on crime in cities a centerpiece of his second term — and has toyed with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to stop his opponents from using the courts to block his plans. He has said he sees his tough-on-crime approach as a winning political issue ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Troops had already left Los Angeles after the president deployed them earlier this year as part of a broader crackdown on crime and immigration.
In his post, Trump said the troops' presence was responsible for a drop in crime in the three cities, though they were never on the streets in Chicago and Portland as legal challenges played out. When the Chicago deployment was challenged in court, a Justice Department lawyer said the Guard’s mission would be to protect federal properties and government agents in the field, not “solving all of crime in Chicago.”
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson’s office in a statement said the city’s reduction in crime was due to the efforts of local police and public safety programs. Chicago officials echoed the sentiment, saying in a release Tuesday that the city had 416 homicides in 2025 — the fewest since 2014.
Trump’s push to deploy the troops in Democrat-led cities has been met with legal challenges at nearly every turn.
The Supreme Court in December refused to allow the Trump administration to deploy National Guard troops in the Chicago area. The order was not a final ruling but was a significant and rare setback by the high court for the president’s efforts.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker wrote on X Wednesday that Trump “lost in court when Illinois stood up against his attempt to militarize American cities with the National Guard. Now Trump is forced to stand down.”
Hundreds of troops from California and Oregon were deployed to Portland, but a federal judge barred them from going on the streets. A judge permanently blocked the deployment of National Guard troops there in November after a three-day trial.
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said in a statement Wednesday that her office had not yet received “official notification that the remaining federalized Oregon National Guard troops can return home. They were never lawfully deployed to Portland and there was no need for their presence. If President Trump has finally chosen to follow court orders and demobilize our troops, that’s a big win for Oregonians and for the rule of law.”
Trump's decision to federalize National Guard troops began in Los Angeles in June, when protesters took to the streets in response to a blitz of immigration arrests in the area. He deployed about 4,000 troops and 700 Marines to guard federal buildings and, later, to protest federal agents as they carried out immigration arrests.
The number of troops slowly dwindled until just several hundred were left. They were removed from the streets by Dec. 15 after a lower court ruling that also ordered control to be returned to Gov. Gavin Newsom. But an appeals court had paused the second part of the order, meaning control remained with Trump. In a Tuesday court filing, the Trump administration said it was no longer seeking a pause in that part of the order.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Wednesday ordered the Trump administration to return control of the National Guard to Newsom.
“About time (Trump) admitted defeat,” Newsom said in a social media post. “We’ve said it from day one: the federal takeover of California’s National Guard is illegal.”
Troops will remain on the ground in several other cities. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in December paused a lower court ruling that had called for an end to the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., where they’ve been deployed since August after Trump declared a “crime emergency.”
Trump also ordered the deployment of the Tennessee National Guard to Memphis in September as part of a larger federal task force to combat crime, a move supported by the state’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee and senators. A Tennessee judge blocked the use of the Guard, siding with Democratic state and local officials who sued. However, the judge stayed the decision to block the Guard as the state appeals, allowing the deployment to continue.
In New Orleans, about 350 National Guard troops deployed by Trump arrived in the city's historic French Quarter on Tuesday and are set to stay through Mardi Gras to help with safety. The state's Republican governor and the city's Democratic mayor support the deployment.
Ding reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press reporters John O'Connor in Springfield, Illinois, Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, Jack Brook in New Orleans and Adrian Sanz in Memphis contributed.
FILE - A protester confronts a line of U.S. National Guard members in the Metropolitan Detention Center of downtown Los Angeles, Sunday, June 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Eric Thayer, File)
FILE - Protesters stand off against California National Guard soldiers at the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles, during a "No Kings" protest, June 14, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Vogel, File)
President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, Monday, Dec. 29, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
