Well... when it comes to drawing of attention and color, I'd imagine that a lot of it would depend on the colors surrounding it... in this case black... red should stick out quite a bit. Although, as physics explain, red and violet are at opposite ends of the color spectrum being the most difficult to see by the human eyes. Although you are right especially since the surrounding environment is completely black and red certainly would "draw" more attention than blue. However, for the same reason that the military uses red filters on their flashlights, red is less noticeable to the human eye for a couple of reasons: 1) Red is everywhere in nature (flowers, animals, sunsets, etc etc etc) and 2) its at the end of the color spectrum.
On the other hand, when acura tried to decide waht color to use they had to consider other things:
Driving distraction
Style
and legibility
I'd imagine that Acura opted for the first 2.
Seems like youve read a lot more about this than I have though, I'm just going on what I recall learning in my physics class way back in the day in high school.
I agree with you that red in this environment may draw the attention, but it also become more of a graphic design issue when were dealing with text. Any professional graphics designer should tell you that you should never use red text as it is very difficult to read (when small at least).
Reguardless, the red bothers ME
so I'd like to change it
looks like it will require that I change many many many bulbs inside the console making it not worth it. Perhaps I can dim the red a little. I should check the manual for that? Anyone got any other ideas?