Although automotive cable color looks common, there are more meanings originally.
Almost automotive cables are made by PVC, XLPE, XLPO and silicon so on. These materials’ colors are actually transparent, light yellow, white etc., not colorful as we see. It’s called the natural color, no dyeing, no mix. The Variety of color as we see is processed by Masterbatch.
What’s the masterbatch? Masterbatch (MB) is a solid additive for plastic used for coloring plastics (color masterbatch) or imparting other properties to plastics (additive masterbatch). You can learn more on the wikipedia, the link as follow. In short, Masterbatch is pigment+carrier+additive.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterbatch)
As the increase of automotive appliance and equipment, the cable quantity is also getting huge. Usually we use different color cable for easy to repair. In general, we adopt single color for cable below 4mm²，and bicolor for cable above 4mm². The common cable colors have Black, Red, Brown, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Violet, Gray, White, Light green, Sky blue, pink etc. And many OEM simplify to abbreviation or number code.
It’ pretty difficult to mark the circle number on the wire harness. ( you can find the early mark list period as follow)
The cables have single color, bicolor and even tricolor. The marks are divided to main color, secondary color and color ring. The first two marks are often adequate to meet the need, the color ring is unusual to be applied. What’s more, we definite the range of main color and secondary. According the GM and Ford standard, the secondary color should account for 7%-15% of the insulation layer area.
In addition, OEM also have the request of the color level, such as Raul color card and Munsell series. We can check and confirm the certain color level according to these standard.
In the circuit diagram, there always are cable cross-sectional area, type and color. Commonly the specific color cable is used for the same function or certain automobile position, like black cable is for the ground wire, red cable is for the power wire. This normative definition make the design and maintenance more convenient.
