Planes have them. Trains have them. Some trucks do, too. And you may be driving around with one somewhere in your car and not know it.
A rule the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed last month would blow the cover on “black boxes” in cars, standardizing by 2008 the kinds of information they collect and requiring the data be disclosed to those who own or lease the vehicles.
Also known by the auto industry and regulators as “event data recorders,” the devices are connected to a vehicle’s air-bag system and can detect such things as the vehicle’s speed, whether the driver was wearing a seat belt at the time of a crash, and how the brakes were applied.
Though some insurers, consumer groups, medical professionals and the National Transportation Safety Board have been pushing to make the boxes mandatory, the NHTSA proposal is limited to requiring automakers who install the devices to collect the same data in the same format – 18 pieces of information in all.
The NHTSA says there are 30 million of the devices on the road and that up to 90 percent of new models have the recorders.
Under the proposal, carmakers would have to disclose in owners’ manuals that the recorders have been installed and that they will record what happens in the seconds before and during a crash. They also would have to make it easier for researchers and crash investigators to access the recorded data, which can be difficult to mine.
John Hinch, a NHTSA safety engineer, said the agency isn’t interested in the information to determine who might be at fault in a crash – as insurers or family lawyers might be – but in the vehicle’s speed and what happened in the split seconds before the crash.
“We will have a better understanding of cause and effect, and better rules in the future. (Black boxes) will allow us to build safer cars,” Hinch said.
Insurers, consumer groups and manufacturers have a variety of opinions about the usefulness of the data and how it should be used. Supporters say that safety research, car design and accident investigations would be enhanced by standardized information that one day could be centrally collected and analyzed.
Law enforcement officials regard it like DNA or a video camera in a bank, as valuable evidence. “They are increasingly being used in litigation. It can be a key piece of evidence. This would revolutionize third-party claim settlements,” said David Snyder, vice president of the American Insurance Association, which represents 400 auto insurance companies. “But their greatest value is in safety research.”
Some carmakers are dubious about the rulemaking proposal. They predict it will discourage the expanded use of black boxes simply because of questions about who owns the data, the security of the information and how consumers will feel about its collection.
The problem issues are privacy and disclosure.
“If vehicle owners are not made aware of these systems, then potentially we have problems. By and large, the public is unaware they are in their vehicles,” said Philip Haseltine, president of the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety, a group funded by the automakers. Consumers Union told the agency that it is concerned that insurers will require the use of black box information as a condition of coverage in the future.
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