If you have airbags you have a data recorder in your vehicle.
Insurance companies, law enforcement and opposing counsel can use that data against you.
Automotive Black Boxes, Minus the Gray Area | Autopia | Wired.com
The Florida Supreme Court establish(ed) precedent in that state that data gleaned from event data recorders is admissible in court.

 

They will save you more than than hang you if you drive right.

 

Hopefully they will be reliable. The ones used on aircraft are pretty well defined -- who knows what they will put in your car.

But, in some ways it's better -- at least you now about it. Cops have been pulling records from things like OnStar -- without knowing how reliable the data was. I think that in some cases, the logging was just for the company's own benefit, and definitely could have bugs.

But, it gets presented as a computerized record, and they're never wrong.

hj

 

But, the black box won't be able to tell if someone crossed the solid line, drove drunk, drove the car with a failed safety inspection, etc.

So other than recording speed, direction headed and such, what good will it be?

 

I believe in the not too distant future, the car will give you a breathlizer test, the backup camera feature will evolve to a "dash cam" (like the cops have), and state inspection will require a machine to be hooked up to the obd port(here they do that for emmision testing for obdII cars/trucks).

I wouldn't be surprised if the cars would report you to the police for speeding.

 

Part of the Lexus/Toyota unintended acceleration investigation hinged on these recorders. Toyota flubbed the PR badly on that one, claiming it couldnt be read. Unlike OBDII for emissions and aircraft recorders, both of which are standardized by regulation, the automotive event recorders are still proprietary to the mfr.

One legal question is "who owns the data?". If you lease, guess what, you may not be able to have a say, like requiring a warrant before the police can download after a crash. The original intent, like with aircraft recorders, is to gather data in order to make future vehicles safer, not to pin tort or criminal liability on anyone, but that is what happens anyway. The obvious one is "was the gas or brake depressed?"

 

Make the whole vehicle out of the stuff they make aircraft flight data recorders out of...........You will survive a head on with a log truck at 90mph!

 

Speed, direction, throttle position, brake application--all will back up your story about how you tried to avoid the guy over the center line etc.

There are limits on how much data can be stored--10 seconds I think.

Too lazy to look it up right now.....

 

Nah, eventually the cars will know the speed limit and just won't allow you to go over it, or will only allow you to go over for very short periods to pass.

 

It isn't legal to go over the speed limit to pass, so I can't imagine it would be allowed.

 

This is almost like Progressive and their "Snapshot" for the OBD2 port. That also raises some concerns. Maybe I'm just paranoid. But now days, Who isn't? If I don't want someone to know where I'm at, I don't need my truck telling them. I'm almost sure the conspiracy theorists are already starting on this.

 

reminds me of the movie "the game" when you dont know whos out to get you, whos listening, whos watching...scary stuff!

i guess i'll have to start driving the '91 f-250 all the time...no black boxes there! haha.

funny thing is though, how true can this info be? at least on earlier cars/trucks. when i was hit head on in my '00 excursion at 35mph my air bags did not even go off. it did trip the fuel re-set but after resetting it i was able to drive the truck 2-3 blocks to load it on the tow truck. so would running/driving it after the impact overwrite the info? how long after a impact does it keep records...so many questions on top of the "who owns it"

the other thing is, i always have the car/truck towed to my house not a towing yard! even if its totaled. too much stuff gets stolen and gone through at the local impound/junk yards.

 

I'm assuming that the recorders are needed in the airline business as they tend to crash in over open oceans or in remote areas and the pilots are pilots are probably going to die leaving no witnesses.

I could support these devices being installed temporarily in rental / lease fleets to protect the company and then removed when the vehicle is sold at auction.

It seems that many truckers could benefit from this device.

 

Air France flight 447, an Airbus 330, is a case where the plane vanished over the middle of the Atlantic. Because it took over two years and $10M to recover the "black boxes" (which are really painted bright orange), there are those now advocating real time satellite telemetry of the data instead of a physical recorder. There was some telemetry of data to the maintenance base when things started going really bad, and that at least gave an exact time and hint at what might have failed.

The airspeed sensors appear to have iced up in a storm cloud causing the computers to get confused. At that point the pilots must take over and hand fly the airplane on just a couple of basic instruments.

 

all the more reason to buy older vehicles and they are not putting one of them in anything i'm driving unless they want too go through life with their arms broken into weird shapes and a black box up their posterior !!!!! they have their noses too far into us the citizens of this great country , in a supposed free country , too far up our backsides / into our business !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! sheez no wonder i pulled the freaking 40 lb airbags outta my bird and put the 91 non airbag steering wheel in it .......................