My wife was fine, but her 2005 Honda Pilot was totaled. On Interstate 95 between New Haven and Boston, the SUV had been picked up by the wind from a passing 18-wheeler and hurled against the median strip. My wife told me she wasn't speeding, but I didn't really believe her. So I bought a CarChip and (with her permission) installed it in our family's other SUV, a 1996 Jeep Cherokee. Now I know if she's been speeding or not--and a whole lot more.

The CarChip is a 35-by-48-by-25-millimeter data recorder that plugs into a connector found under the dashboard of most cars and light trucks sold in the United States and Canada since 1996. The connector lets the CarChip continuously record data, such as speed and acceleration, fed to it by the car's onboard diagnostics system. To get the data out of the chip, you just unplug it, attach it to a Windows-based computer, and run a downloader program.