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It started with the supply chain issues after COVID. Dealers didn’t want colored cars, because they wanted to avoid a situation where they only had three cars of a certain model in stock and two of them were niche colors that most buyers wouldn’t want. So they started ordering only gray, white and black models. The manufactures took note of this and started making more gray, white and black models and fewer brightly colored models. This in turn made the colorful ones more expensive and harder to find, and so even fewer people bought them. So now most cars on the road are gray, white and black.
Started way before covid.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/37001/this-graph-shows-how-car-paint-colors-have-gotten-more-boring-over-the-years this is article from 2020
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But I’ve seen reports that the average age of cars on the road in the U.S. is ~13 years old. Assuming that this is referring to the median (and despite finding countless articles repeating the “13 years old” statistic, I haven’t found one that specifies if the average in question is a mean or median), then this suggests that post-COVID-lockdown effects on the distribution of colors among cars on the road can only be marginal at best. And even if the statistic refers to the mean, I doubt that outliers have too much of an effect here.
Of course, your explanation does perfectly answer the other part of your interlocutor’s question, why new cars only come in grey.
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