Red turn signals
I was driving around town yesterday when I got stuck behind an elderly woman driving 20mph in a 40mph zone on a single lane road. While waiting to pass her, I noticed that the rear turn signal light on her minivan was red. Now, the standard for most cars is to have three different sets of lights on the back of the car with their respective colors. One for the brakes, which is usually red. The turn lights, which is usually orange (and sometimes red) and of course the reverse lights, which is white in color.
But why do car manufacturers think that using the color red for the brake lights and the turn signals is a good idea? I know that its easy to figure out that the blinking light probably means that the car is about to turn left or right, but doesn’t it just make sense to use the standard color that people usually associate turn signals with?
It’s these small design-standards that make tiny differences. When its raining cats and dogs and you can barely see the car in front of you, it just might make a difference to know if the car in front of you is slowing down or making a turn into your lane.
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27 July 2008
Can’t do that in Europe, turning signals have to be yellow. That’s how I usually spot the cars that don’t get exported to Europe: they have red turning signals. And more often than not, they’re driven by bad drivers…
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