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Red, amber, green — the part of a dashboard that generalises across every car.
Also known as: Warning light colours, What the colour of a dashboard light means, Red light on my dashboard
The colour carries more information than the pictogram. Red means stop as soon as it is safe, amber means something needs attention but not immediately, and green or blue means a system is simply switched on. A driver who learns nothing else can still act correctly on an unfamiliar symbol.
A standardised colour convention for tell-tales: red for a fault or condition requiring the vehicle to be stopped, amber or yellow for a condition requiring attention, and green or blue for a system that is active and working normally.
Contexts: Vehicle dashboard
Far more reliably honoured than the pictograms themselves. Manufacturers add and vary symbols freely, but a red lamp means red on essentially every vehicle sold, which makes the colour the safest thing to read first.
Blue is reserved for main beam and is the only colour that means one specific thing rather than a class of thing, which is why a blue lamp on a dashboard is almost always the headlights.
A lamp that comes on briefly at ignition and goes out is running its self-test. One that never comes on is as much of a fault as one that stays on, and the MOT test treats several of them as failures for exactly that reason.
A bulb removed or a lamp taped over is a test failure in Great Britain, not a fix.
Small illuminated pictograms behind the steering wheel, lit in red, amber, green or blue.
The glow plug lamp follows the same colour convention.