July 30, 2002

A Black Box for Your Car

Continued from page 1

By Howard Baldwin

To that end, Martinez, an emergency room physician who served as head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is also working with IBM and the Insurance Services Office of Jersey City, NJ, an aggregator of statistical and actuarial data for the insurance industry. The group is creating a database of accident records to be used collectively by car manufacturers, law enforcement agencies, and insurance companies.

Crash investigators or auto body shops could offload the contents of the flash memory into this database, dubbed the Global Data Safety Vault. Originally scheduled to launch in mid-2002, the database won't begin to be populated until at least the beginning of 2003. Though the car manufacturers have already agreed on a standard plug for downloading recorder data, agreement on standard data formats has proved harder to reach.

For instance, of the hundreds of onboard diagnostics codes that the Environmental Protection Agency has mandated for emissions testing, few if any are consistent among the Big Three. The Global Safety Vault initiative faces a similar normalization challenge, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a leading standards body, has joined the effort to get input on what data should be captured for its P1616 standard.

There's also the question of where to place the recorder in a vehicle. Martinez suggests putting it near the airbag module, which is close to the crush zone of the passenger compartment, since both have to not only withstand a collision but keep working afterwards (the same sensors that trigger the airbags also trigger distress calls from certain telematics systems). In the test, Ford centered its recorder behind the dashboard and under the radio.

Even with these unanswered questions, Martinez believes that event data recorders will first appear in the 2007 model year, the earliest year in which they could be added. He estimates the cost at only around $5. The benefits to recorders and the planned Global Data Safety Vault are compelling: police could investigate accidents quickly and accurately; manufacturers could identify potential recall problems more quickly; and insurance companies could more easily identify fraudulent accident claims (currently about 20 percent of all claims filed). "These are the dark ages of crash data," insists Martinez, "and we're trying to replace bad information with good information."