Why Do BMWs Have Orange Dashboard Lights?

There's a proverbial rainbow of colors emanating from the various gauges and instruments on your car's dashboard. Even before the advent of small, digital screens, you could see gauges illuminated in colors like white, blue, and yellow. Those screens have given drivers a greater degree of customizability and control over what they see when they're driving. More automotive brands have been opting for these screens as time passes, though one brand in particular may have already had it right earlier.

Most models of BMW vehicles, particularly those made during the mid-2010s, utilize a soft orange color for their dashboard instruments. Unlike some brands, which use a mix and match of a few different colors, BMW's lights are almost always solid orange. It'd be pretty easy to write this off as a simple stylistic preference, but in actuality, there's a scientific basis for using this particular shade of orange, all with the intent of preserving a driver's clarity of vision while traveling at night. It's a similar technique used by other kinds of vehicles like submarines.

The concept of visible color is a result of our eyes taking in different wavelengths of light. You see the color blue, for example, because a certain amount of light is hitting your eyes in a very particular way. This is also why high exposure to blue light is bad for your eyes, because blue light has a short, powerful wavelength. In other words, you're getting more light in your eyes at once, which tires them out. Naturally, this is a bad idea for lighting up instruments on a car dashboard at night, because it'll tire the driver's eyes and make it harder for them to see.

This brings us to orange light; according to BMW Designworks President Oliver Heilmer, who spoke briefly with AutoBlog on the subject in 2017, BMW vehicles use orange light on their dashboards because orange light has a longer, softer wavelength. It's bright and distinct enough for a driver to see the instrument panel, but because it's softer, the driver's eyes can still adjust quickly to the surrounding darkness.

While Heilmer didn't expressly say as such in this statement, it's speculated that BMW cribbed this design choice from the instrument panels used in fighter jets, which are also illuminated in orange for the same reason. In fact, orange and red light is used in all kinds of low-light situations to maintain an individual's night vision. Light of a similar wavelength and color is used to illuminate the interiors of police cars operating in dark conditions, and astronomers use red flashlights so they don't force their eyes to readjust while gazing at the stars.