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The “black boxes” collect vehicle information during the seconds before and following an accident.
Perhaps you have never noticed, but that device that your car probably has installed under the driver’s seat is a “black box” that, like those in airplanes, records all the significant data that can be used in the event of an accident.
About 99.5% of new vehicles in the United States already circulate with one of these boxes, officially called “incident data loggers”.
The European Union has made them mandatory as of this July for all new cars.
The recorder or “black box” collects certain data during the seconds before an accident, as well as in the moments following it occurs.
Factors like speedif the driver applied the brake, if there was a technical failure or the operation of safety systems such as seat belts or airbags are recorded on the device.
You can also record the weather conditions at the time of impact, or the force of the impact.
The “black box” is screwed to the chassis under the driver’s seat and is connected to the car’s control unit.
Its data can be obtained through the OBD (On Board Diagnostics) port, the diagnostic system installed in most vehicles, or through a port on the device itself.
In the event of an accident, this data can be interpreted to try find out the causes of an accident. In the European Union, the data will not be accessible to anyone, only to the competent authorities.
Standard
In the United States, except for very old vehicles, almost all cars carry it. In fact, there is no federal law that requires it -as Brussels has now done for new cars in Europe-, but it is a standard feature in most models from manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota, Honda, Chrysler, Honda or GM.
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Vehicle “black boxes” are used to analyze road safety.
The information that can be obtained from these “black boxes” is very valuable in the event of an accident, and is already frequently used in auto accident lawsuits in the united states to determine responsibility for the accident. The device can determine if the driver was driving recklessly at the time of the accident or if, on the contrary, the vehicle registered a technical failure.
In the European Union, where the measure has taken longer to adapt due to the doubts it generated regarding data protection, the regulation requires that the information in these “black boxes” be anonymous and that it is only used by the Member States to carry out road safety analysis and assess the effectiveness of specific measures that have been taken, without the possibility of identifying the driver.
Brussels wants to reduce the number of road deaths by 25,000 and the number of serious injuries by 140,000 by 2038.
In addition to the “black boxes”, the new vehicles must also incorporate a “speed limiter”, which will warn the driver when he exceeds the permitted limit and make it more difficult to press the accelerator, although it will not block it.
image source, Getty Images
The “black box” can detect whether the vehicle’s safety systems such as seat belts or airbags have worked.
¿what time interval is recorded in the “black box”?
The device is constantly recording and deleting information, although it does not record video and, unlike airplanes, neither does it record audio.
In the event of an accident, the time that is recorded before and following the accident depends on the legislation of each country.
In the United States, for example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires 5 seconds of information before the accident, although it wants to extend it to 20 seconds.
The European Union requires the 30 seconds before the accident and the 5 following.
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