Car Geek: Congress to mandate automotive Event Data Recorders?
According to Edmunds.com's Straightline Blog, the US Senate has passed a bill that, if similar language is passed by the House, would require all automobiles sold in the US starting in 2015 to be equipped with automotive Event Data Recorders that would record information in the event of a crash. According to Straightline:
As it stands now -- and this may be changed when the bill gets to the House -- the owner or lessee of the vehicle owns all of the data collected by the black box and said information can only be retrieved by the owner unless there is a court order or the information is "pursuant to an investigation or inspection authorized under section 1131(a) or 30166 of title 49, United States Code, and the personally identifiable information of the owner, lessee, or driver of the vehicle and the vehicle identification number is not disclosed in connection with the retrieved information."
Finally, the information can be accessed "for the purpose of determining the need for, or facilitating, emergency medical response in response to a motor vehicle crash." This, of course, would mean your black box is connected to the grid wirelessly and a physical connection isn't necessary.
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, there is still too much needless loss of life on US roads every year, and the data geek in me wants to believe that gathering more data about the events immediately surrounding an accident might be helpful in designing safety systems that would help prevent future accidents.
On the other hand, this adds some cost to the price of each vehicle (probably several hundred dollars today, though that cost probably drops significantly once these EDRs are built in large quantities), gives "big brother" yet another look over your shoulder, and -- given that to enable the emergency response feature the vehicle has to have a wireless connection, which means its location can be tracked at all times -- means that every vehicle can be tracked and located at any time, not just by the government, but also potentially by criminals, advertisers, or anyone else you'd want to avoid.
Given how very few vehicles relative to the millions sold each year will be in accidents from which useful EDR data might be recovered, I'm not sure the mandate and investment is worth it.
I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the best investment in increased road safety would be increased training and licensing standards for drivers. If we were to raise the bar similar to European driving standards, we might achieve the same intent at much lower cost.
As with military hardware, an investment in training is almost always cheaper, faster, and more effective than a technology solution.
