Automakers will soon be required to equip new motor vehicles with black boxes

Automakers will soon be required to equip new motor vehicles with black boxes.

Automotive “black box”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is planning to make it mandatory for automakers to equip new motor vehicles with black boxes.

The idea behind the “black box” is to gather data that can help investigators determine the cause of collisions and increase vehicle safety. But privacy advocates claim that government regulators and automakers are spreading an intrusive technology without first implementing policies which would prevent misuse of the collected information.

Consumer and privacy advocates do not disagree there are many potential benefits from the devices, but insist that proper safeguards be put in place to prevent your car from turning into a spy of sorts for insurance companies that may want to raise your rates.

“There are important safety concerns here and they shouldn’t be ignored, but there are also pressing privacy concerns,” said Chris Calabrese of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Chiefly, who’s going to access this information and how long is it going to be collected? I’d make sure that the owner of the vehicle controls the data.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to propose long-delayed regulations which require auto manufacturers to include event data recorders – also known as “black boxes” – in all new cars and light trucks. Automakers have been quietly equipping the devices, which automatically record the actions of drivers and the responses of their vehicles in a continuous information loop, into most new vehicles for years.

Some vehicle models have had “black boxes” since the early 1990s, but a federal requirement that automakers disclose their existence in the owner’s manual didn’t go into effect until a few months ago. Automakers who voluntarily equip recorders in vehicles are also now required to gather a minimum of 15 types of data.

When a motor vehicle is involved in a collision or when its airbags are deployed, inputs from the vehicle’s sensors during the 5 to 10 seconds prior to impact are automatically recorded. That’s typically enough time to record events like how fast the vehicle was traveling and whether the driver applied the brakes, was steering erratically or was wearing their seat belt.

Data collected by the recorders is already being used in lawsuits, criminal cases and high-profile accidents. Lt. Gov. Timothy Murray of Massachusetts found out the hard way last year. After he crashed a government-owned vehicle, he told police that he was wearing a seatbelt and was not speeding at the time of the collision. However, the black box installed in his car revealed he was actually speeding at 75 miles per hour in a 65 mile per hour zone, before accelerating to more than 100 miles per hour and he was not wearing his seat belt. The lieutenant governor was not issued a citation at the time of the collision; however, after police examined the vehicle’s black box they issued Murray a $555 ticket for speeding in excess of 100 miles per hour.

Despite privacy complaints, the NHTSA so far hasn’t put any restrictions on how the data can be used. The NHTSA is also considering expanding the data requirement to include as many as 30 additional types of data to include: whether the vehicle’s electronic stability control was engaged, the driver’s seat position or whether the front-seat passenger was belted in.

“Right now we’re in an environment where there are no rules, there are no limits, there are no consequences and there is no transparency,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy group. “Most people who are operating a motor vehicle have no idea this technology is integrated into their vehicle.”

Part of the concern is that the increasing computerization of cars and the growing transmission of data to and from vehicles could lead to unintended uses of recorded data.

Safety advocates, however, say requiring data recorders in all cars is the best way to gather a large enough body of reliable information to enable vehicle designers to make safer automobiles.

“Basically your car is a computer now, so it can record all kinds of information,” said Gloria Bergquist, vice president of the Alliance of Automotive Manufacturers. “It’s a lot of the same issues you have about your computer or your smartphone and whether Google or someone else has access to the data.”

Data recorders “help our engineers understand how cars perform in the real world, and we already have put them on over 90 percent of (new) vehicles without any mandate being necessary,” Bergquist said.

“The barn door is already open. It’s a question of whether we use the information that’s already out there,” said Henry Jasny, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Automotive Safety.

The National Transportation Safety Board has been pushing for recorders in all passenger vehicles since the board’s investigation of a 2003 accident in which an elderly driver plowed through an open-air market in Santa Monica, Calif. Ten people were killed and 63 were injured. The driver refused to be interviewed and his 1992 Buick LeSabre didn’t have a recorder. After ruling out other possibilities, investigators ultimately guessed that he had either mistakenly stepped on the gas pedal or had stepped on the gas and the brake pedals at the same time.

When reports of sudden acceleration problems in Toyota vehicles cascaded in 2009 and 2010, recorder data from some of the vehicles contributed to the traffic safety administration’s conclusion that the problem was probably sticky gas pedals and floor mats that could jam them, not defects in electronic throttle control systems.

The NHTSA believes the data the electronic data recorders could collect will save lives in the future by providing a broader picture of why and how crashes occur.

“A broader EDR requirement would ensure the agency has the safety-related information it needs to determine what factors may contribute to crashes across all vehicle manufacturers,” NHTSA Administrator David Strickland said.