The Black Box In Your Car

Since it seems the Fed Gov wants all new cars to have a black box, or EDR (Event Data Recorder) by September of next year, I thought I would research what the existing ones do.  What data they record, whether they transmit, and which cars have them.

About 80% of new cars have EDR's.  General Motors and Ford implement the technology on most of their recent models, while Mercedes-Benz and Audi do not use EDRs at all. Toyota has them.  They don't transmit, unless you have Onstar.

Here is a great article written by a mechanical forensics company in New Hampshire that describes the EDR and also lists all the makers of cars and what is known about their EDR's.  They say this about the new law: "It mandates a list of things that an EDR must record if the car has an EDR which is intended to be downloaded after a crash. Think about that for a moment: if a car doesn't have an EDR intended to be downloaded after a crash, then the rule does not apply."

In other words if you have an older car you won't have to take it somewhere and get an EDR put in.

What I have gathered is that the EDR is part of your airbag system or sometimes the drive train.  It is silver in color (not black).  It is usually kept under the dash or under the drivers seat and records data on the speed, braking, seat belts, etc. of your car.  Some record continuously (but in a loop that gets overwritten periodically) and some only when your car has an accident.  The Onstar system, if you have it, will also broadcast a signal to a remote location when the airbags are deployed.

Heavy trucks' EDR's are part of their fuel injection system and record more information, such as sudden stops, low oil pressure, or coolant loss.

The EDR has come in handy in traffic court cases - it has helped determine who was at fault in an accident in a few cases.  But the EDR is not standardized and can be inaccurate also.  It's not enough information to use by itself to determine what happened in an accident. For example Toyota has said their EDR's are not good enough to reconstruct an accident.

One thing the EDR's in vehicles don't do currently is record the conversations inside the car, who is in the car, what direction it's going, etc.  The ones in airplanes do record sound in the cockpit.  (The black boxes in airplanes are also actually bright orange, not black, so they can be more easily found in a plane crash.)

Right now there is controversy being hashed out as to who owns the data in an EDR.  It will probably be determined that the owner of the car is the owner of the information, but it differs from state to state.  An article I read in Risk Management Magazine said "10 states have passed EDR legislation since 2004 and 20 more states have legislation pending."  I'm not sure when that article was written, so these numbers might be different now.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has required that all manufacturers make their EDR data publicly available. As of October 2009, only General Motors, Ford and Daimler Chrysler had released their EDR data to be publicly read.  The NHTSA are also trying to get the auto manufacturers to standardize the EDR's so they're all the same.

So, this one looks not so much like a conspiracy to spy on people, for once, but more some kind of way to save insurance companies some money, or possibly determine whether the car itself was at fault, like in those unexplained acceleration cases.  However, it bears watching, because future EDR's may do more than the current crop.  I'm sure auto manufacturers will drag their feet, because it raises the cost of building a car.