Tailight colours - regarding amber vs red turn signals, european cars.

Yuck!

They are north american specific. In the real world outside the insulated FMVSS lunacy, red rear indicators have been banned for many decades.

Similarly, front parking lights in the rest of the world are white not yellow, and the light patterns of headlights are far more effective.

Out of interest Rob, the red turn signals come from the earlier American cars which had huge light displays at the rear. One side would flash for a turn and both sides would come on when braking. Thus all rear facing lamps were red.

Cheers, Peter.

Oh I know where they come from, I see them every day on the thousands of American cars I see driving around.... Which is why I am disapointed to see some Euro cars going this route.

Marketing.

We do have laws for signalcolours

Yes, but the decision by EU manufacturers to make US-market red indicators when their rest-of-the-world amber ones are acceptable in the US market is purely about marketing.

The Volvo will actually cost less to insure than the Jetta

That is because of the drivers. The marketing of Volvos appeals to safety minded people who want a safe car they think is hot. Jetta marketing is to people who think a car is going to make them into race car drivers. Unfortunately some Volvo marketing has been in extremely poor taste also.

The advent of amber turn signals in the US was about the time I learned to drive. It amazed me (and still does now) that the turn signals weren't left red and the brake lights changed to amber. I'd rather have a stronger indication that the car ahead was braking than that it was preparing to turn.

The history of light colors is strange anyway. I assume the red taillights were a natural outgrowth of red lanterns on cabooses of trains. A book I read about WWI ("No Man's Land") explained the yellow headlights in France were to distinguish French cars from German cars, starting around the seige of Verdun.

Mike

Both cars seem directed at the same age group (young, just married or married in a couple years, getting their life going etc) - Yah there is more of a tuner base with Jetta's, probably because the old S40 was so boring, and the stylish and cool S60 was too expensive - a lot of people my age say "oh god, you actually want a Volvo" when I mention S40, then I show them a picture of it and they start to say "wow that car is awesome... why even look at the Jetta".

From the ads i've seen the Volvo seems to be targeted towards more sporty drivers then the new Jetta - the GLI is the sporty Jetta.

For the 10% of men who are colour-blind it is a revelation that these lights have different colours.

Color blindness normally comes in two forms: red-green (common) and blue-yellow (much less common). I knew a man who had both forms and it was obvious when his wife hadn't laid out his clothes for him!

Total color-blindness (called "maksun") is rare and debilitating, but historically was common among miners who worked all day in very dim light until the cones in their retinas atrophied. They had to wear very dark glasses in sunlight to prevent the rod receptors from saturating. (Learned that on a trip to a closed mine in BC a couple years back.)

More than you maybe wanted to know!

Mike

That's why you use red for braking. It's psychologically better (even reaction times are slightly faster for red lights) and they are more visible through fog. More importantly amber lights are all too easily confused with sodium streetlights.

This is false. Most headlighting in those days was acetylene burners which are white and would be hard to filter as a yellow. Electric lights were a dim yellow and barely classifiable as white.

The French justification for yellow headlights was related to the yellow glasses used to improve contrast in low lighting conditions. There's a small margin around dusk or in fog when they might make an improvement, but in a pitch black night you just want white ones.

Any European vehicle lighting is of course vastly superior to any American vehicle lighting. I've no idea why, but US cars still use lighting techniques we used in the '60s.

Red also doesn't diminish in intensity with distance as much as other colors. One reason US police cars now have both blue and red flashing lights is that blue provides distance information and the red gives the warning. Evidently there were a lot of instances where drivers would plow into stopped police cars because it was difficult to judge how far away they were, especially at night. To be pedantic about it, it's a psychophysiological phenomonon.

I was thinking about Michael's comment about yellow being a stronger indicator. I was looking at lights while I was driving and found that yellow is almost as strong as white. However, it is as almost as unnoticeable as white also. It is a very common color. Hence, the "weak" color of red is much more noticeable. Michael's use of strong means that the yellow filter doesn't filter out as many lumens as a red filter. However, the "weak" red light is much more noticeable. In practice, the red brake lights have a higher wattage lamp, so that the filter factor is compensated for. So I would say that the countries and companies that adopted red as a signal for important things like stopping and emergency vehicles made a good choice.

It really comes down to bureaucratic red tape and other BS though it's not nearly so true anymore as it used to be. Quite a lot of newer cars have headlights that meet both DOT and ECE regulations with a beam pattern very close to the old style E-code lamps.