Originally Posted by mmarshall

One thing I don't understand is this preoccupation with orange/red lighting on "sport" oriented vehicles. Audi, Mazda, BMW, and Pontiac, for example, have long used red-orange lighting on most, if not all of their models. Supposedly, it's easler on the eyes at night than other colors, but I'm not convinced. When I was a pilot flying general-aviation planes, they also taught us in flying school that red instrumentation lights were also easier on the eyes than white...but again I was not convinced. A number of the planes I flew had a switch that allowed you to choose either red or white......almost without exception, I found white dash lights, even in aircraft, easier to see and read at night than red or orange (in aircraft, you also train for emergencies when you lose your electric power and have to read the instruments by a flashlight sitting in your lap, or, in some cases, with no light at all).


So, my take on it is that auto companies just consider red dash lights to be "sporty" and use it as an image factor.