Every time I drive around Bend, I marvel at the number of white vehicles I see.

Color me crazy, but it’s never long before I start seeing white, by which I mean the way white vehicles outnumber other colors. I never have to look far for evidence to prove the white car conspiracy in Bend. They’re everywhere.

Saturday, my wife, mother-in-law and I went for a walk at Shevlin Park, where what did I see but six white cars parked in a row.

Has this ever convinced anyone? No, not a soul. Even if they’re sitting next to me, and I am literally saying to them, “Look, with your eyes, there are four white cars waiting to turn left!”

What do I get for my ace observational powers when I note the prevalence of unpigmented vehicles?

Scoffing. Dismissal. Indifference. Which is fine, but I bet that if you passed four red cars side by side, you’d take notice.

Welp, to all the doubting Thomases who didn’t believe me about white cars — which, granted, is not that many people, but their ranks include a child or two of mine — get ready for your comeuppance. In early October, I got one of my semi-frequent emails from iSeeCars.com, a car search engine, imbued with the most eye-catching of all possible subject lines, at least if you’re a weirdo: “What are the most popular car colors in Bend?”

“Ooh, I know this one!” I thought to myself. “White. It’s white.”

And guess what?

“The most popular color is white, which holds 25.8% of the market,” my right-about-something-for-once eyes read in the email about the recent iSeeCars study that “analyzed over 10 million 1- to 5-year-old used cars across the nation, determined which car color is the most popular in Bend, as well as the total market share for non-grayscale colors.”

I was prepared to let the whole matter go, because supposedly the best revenge is living well. Then one day last week I sat down with my laptop and opened my Microsoft Edge browser, on which the homepage is full of clickbait “news” about dinosaurs, crime, UFOs and such. It’s delicious. Anyway, there was a Newsweek article headlined “Man encounters ‘Glitch in the Matrix’ as he leaves his home.”

The fact that Newsweek had written an article about a Reddit post in which a guy named Justin Bivona joked about spotting a glitch in the matrix because he saw several white SUVs parked in a row is either funny or depressing, considering that Newsweek was once a serious news magazine.

My eye was drawn to a photo of white SUVs parallel parked in a row, and I was soon in touch with Southern California-based Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars, about the prevalence of white cars in Bend and, apparently, everywhere.

“White has gotten more popular in the last 5 to 7 years, which blows me away because I didn’t think it could get any more popular,” Brauer told me.

He told me about a time a few years ago when he was driving home from his former job at Kelley Blue Book.

“There was a line of cars, they were perpendicular in a turn lane waiting to go, so I drove by all of them, my vision just swept across them all,” he said. “There had to be five, six seven vehicles there, and they were all white. Most of them were SUVs, too. I remember going, ‘Is there a government convention going on in town?’ Is there a fleet convention going on in town?”

“To me, that’s what white cars are … pure purpose, utilitarian, no fun, no emotion,” Brauer said. “’Stop thinking about cars as some kind of fun, frivolous, emotional thing, dammit. They’re functional items. They’re tools. They’re Swiss army knives with four wheels. And don’t be trying to get creative with them.’ That’s what I feel like the white car contingent must feel or think.”

Fleet buyers such as utility companies and rental car agencies love white vehicles, Brauer said, for reasons including how well white paint ages and hides dirt, and its price point is always cheaper than your reds, blues and other colors, according to Brauer.

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“You never pay more for white,” he said. Brauer also noted that gray cars are slightly more popular than black in Oregon. Usually, in descending order, it’s almost always white, then black, then silver and gray vehicles.

“When I’m driving someone else in the car … I’ll say, ‘All right, freeze! Find me a non-black, white, silver or gray car,’” he said. “I’ll get a kick out of watching their eyes scan and scan and scan. They look and look, and ‘Half a mile down, I can just make out a blue color in the middle of that next intersection.’ That’s what it’s like driving around. It’s a little depressing, a little spirit-killing, soul-sucking.”

He said this just as I was starting to think I’d get a white car next. I like color, too, but I also use my car only to get from Point A to Point B, not to undergird my personality. And you never pay more for white.