The boxes, which are in about 30 million vehicles, also record information such as whether the driver was wearing a seat belt, if the air bag deployed and the force of the collision.
They were initially intended to determine what caused a vehicle's air bag to deploy, but are appearing in civil court cases and to prosecute drivers in motor vehicle accidents.
Is this a good thing? I'm seeing it as a bad thing. A tool that will be primarily used by Insurance companies to screw you, and occasionally by the government to prosecute you. If they were only limited to be used for safety study I would be ok with it, but I know that they will be used against their mostly unknowing owners.
The box will become a witness against you that may be wrong reporting false information (in error) such as wither or not you had your seat belt on, did you brake and when speed and driving habits. Refuting the information will then become your burden to disprove.
Not a big brother alarmist but this worries me as far as I know there is no federal guideline for these boxes and while they apparently only record on average 20 seconds of information how long before they record more (some models record weeks) How long before they start reporting more than info in relation to an accident such as driving habits speeding habits LOCATIONS etc?
"Don't want to sound like a fanboy, but I am with you. I'll buy it for sure, it's just a matter of for how long I will be playing it..."
- Silvast, Battle.net forums
Don't do stupid shit on the road, and it won't be a problem.
So I don't think that there's really any issue with it. If you get into a really bad accident and kill someone, and it was obviouly your fault, they can already prove it. If they have a black box it just saves them some time and money. If the black box was wrong, just get your own expert witness to go over the scene and prove that it was.
They are not infallible but the tendency will be when used against you they will be expert witnesses and when you use it to defend yourself it will be considered junk.
1. In areas where everyone speeds (as in the police give tickets to cars going 5mph over the limit because they're moving slower than traffic), black box data may be used by insurance companies to blame not-at-fault drivers for accidents (i.e. "The other driver was speeding, so we're not paying even though our driver was driving on the wrong side of the road," etc.). I would be worried about them using black boxes for speeding tickets, but they can do the same job with sensor-triggered cameras on the roads.
2. Black box recorders would sense when passengers aren't wearing their seat belts. However, they would also sense when cargo isn't wearing a seat belt. Nothing distinguishes what's actually in the seat. In these cases, the black box's readings could lead to fabricated passengers in court cases.
If enough people avoid them, manufacturers will stop putting them into their cars.
Hooray for capitalism.
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Maradon! had this to say about Jimmy Carter:
If you don't like it, don't buy a car with one in it.If enough people avoid them, manufacturers will stop putting them into their cars.
Hooray for capitalism.
Poeple have to actually know their car has it in order to avoid/seek it out, and I realy doubt the majority of owners know its installed
"I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-- George Herbert Walker Bush
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Peanut butter ass Shaq Leftover Mog booooze lime pole over bench lick:
Poeple have to actually know their car has it in order to avoid/seek it out, and I realy doubt the majority of owners know its installed
Then they must not care very much.
quote:
Maradon! had this to say about the Spice Girls:
If you don't like it, don't buy a car with one in it.If enough people avoid them, manufacturers will stop putting them into their cars.
Hooray for capitalism.
It's been requested that all new cars sold in the US by 2008 have this installed. Most new cars already have it.
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Peanut butter ass Shaq Almond booooze lime pole over bench lick:
It's been requested
By who?
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Maradon! had this to say about Jimmy Carter:
Then they must not care very much.
In most states, car manufacturers don't have to let consumers know if a car has a "black box" and won't have to do so until before releasing model 2011 cars. No mention it needs to be made in the manual or by the dealer. It doesn't excuse doing extra homework on a particular model before purchase, but I very much doubt most consumers do that much homework or expect a black box in their car.
At this time, the NHTSA isn't really pushing for EDR to be installed in all cars, but they wouldn't fight it either. They're more worried about improving the technology right now. There's upsides and downsides to the boxes, but it's likely that boxes will be installed in all US cars at some point so people will have to get used to them.
There's lots of changes coming. All 2007 models sold in the US have to have a tire pressure monitoring system of some sort. Some vehicles figure out a low tire by way the ABS speed sensors on each wheel. If one sensor is at vastly different speed of the others it sets a check tire pressure light. Most newer vehicles have sensors connected to the wheels (inside the tires) and sense the pressure that way and send a small radio signal to the computer. I was fixing a 2006 Chev Monte Carlo today and while test driving it, noticed that the dash info center had actual pressures for front and rear tires while scrolling thru. Kaglaaz How'ler fucked around with this message on 08-23-2006 at 05:47 PM.
The one thing that scared me about the car... The gas pedal doesn't have a throttle cable connected to it. It's a "Fly by Wire" type (the steering is still conventional) which controls an electric servo which opens and closes the throttle plate on the intake. 
Start putting black boxes in to monitor seat belt use, and these (Or similar) will become common-use items.
And if it tracks the winding/unwinding of seat belts, they'd have to guarantee it doesn't get stuck in the out position. The one in Lyinar's car gets the seat belt folded and jams regularly, whether or not you actually wear it.
Likewise...What if something happens to the black box? At any given time, how much "random" or "sundry" damage to your car occurs. In other words, prove that me disabling the black box via corrosion or whatever didn't occur naturally.
Law abiding citizens, or citizens who follow most of the laws in spirit if not letter will end up screwed, and anyone who resents it with half a brain will figure it out and gyp the system in about twenty minutes. Hell ANY ONE OF YOU can go to AutoZone or Advanced or wherever and buy a book telling you how to do anything you want to your car. They cost about 25 bucks a pop. Mechanics and so forth keep them around. Especially home mechanics. You think someone won't notice the "don't tamper with this" item? And then tamper with it?
And it's virtually impossible to enforce non-tampering.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
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Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael enlisted the help of an infinite number of monkeys to write:
Hell ANY ONE OF YOU can go to AutoZone or Advanced or wherever and buy a book telling you how to do anything you want to your car. They cost about 25 bucks a pop. Mechanics and so forth keep them around. Especially home mechanics. You think someone won't notice the "don't tamper with this" item? And then tamper with it?
Finding out how to do X to your car isn't necessarily hard or costly. The tools to do X have gotten more costly over the past few years, especially with computer systems doing more and more. To even read the black box, you'll need a special tool and software.
Tampering could be caught at an inspection, standard service, or an accident. I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies were to drop you if you tampered with the box or it was even made illegal to do so.
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Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael said this about your mom:
...
Law abiding citizens, or citizens who follow most of the laws in spirit if not letter will end up screwed, and anyone who resents it with half a brain will figure it out and gyp the system in about twenty minutes. Hell ANY ONE OF YOU can go to AutoZone or Advanced or wherever and buy a book telling you how to do anything you want to your car. They cost about 25 bucks a pop. Mechanics and so forth keep them around. Especially home mechanics. You think someone won't notice the "don't tamper with this" item? And then tamper with it?And it's virtually impossible to enforce non-tampering.
Even with a factory/dealer service manual, most will not tell you how to tamper with the electronics. At best they might tell you how to make it give up a flashout code.
Also Those $25 Chiltons of Hayes are far from a really good source of information, they are good for simple repairs and tune ups and not much else IMHO
And yeah it could be easy to tamper with it, but the powers to be can just put one hell fine/violation if you get caught with buggered device.
---Also, outside of any form of GPS tracking, I am all for this, should make for a nice drop in insurance rates.
And Kaglaaz, you think that is scary, almost all new marine systems have gone fly by wire. In fact Mercury's New Verado engines are all Buck Rogers with electronics up the wazoo and all fly by wire controls. Peter fucked around with this message on 08-23-2006 at 10:52 PM.
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Peter went off the shallow end
---Also, outside of any form of GPS tracking, I am all for this, should make for a nice drop in insurance rates.
`Doc fucked around with this message on 08-24-2006 at 09:02 AM.
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This one time, at `Doc camp:
I have to go with this response as well. Insurance companies are almost never looking for a way to charge it's customes less. That's how they make money off the ones that do get into accidents or make claims and have to give money to.
