Pretty soon...

http://www.merl.com/projects/eyewitness/

"The Personal EyeWitness Vehicle Accident Video Recorder provides a robust and tamper-resistant recording of vehicle accidents. The PEW continuously records video into semi-conductor memory, overwriting old video every thirty seconds, and stopping only after an accident triggers the vehicle crash sensor."

 

Hmmmm...

Just think about this for a second....

Toyota is seriously protecting the knowledge of how to get the 6.1 NAV system into Override mode right?

Do you suppose that when the system is in Override Mode that the EDR is either disabled or there are other cryptic-key-presses that allow the dumping or alteration of the EDR and it's data?

Certainly I believe that even cars without NAV have the EDR but the potential of an interlink between the two is not beyond the realm of possibility..

 

So if these shops ground out the pin that tell the nav you are moving to keep the disable features alive, they might also disable the recorders?

 

One thing concerns me. The data that is recorded is what the TCH perceives the circumstances to be based upon sensor readings. The car is almost all drive by wire; when you press the accelerator you're not moving a cable attached to the throttle, you're sending a signal to a computer that says you want more power delivered to the wheels.

Might you wind up in a situation where the manufacturer, or police, or insurance company says that you were doing something bonehead, like accelerating through a red light or residential neighborhood, when in fact it was a faulty sensor giving that reading?

(Just because I'm paranoid, it doesn't mean people are not after me. )

 

You would be given the chance to demonstrate that the sensor was faulty in a court of law.

 

That's a feel nice quote. You're in an accident. Next thing you know you're being sued because the black box has said you were doing something naughty. Now I'll have to go out and hire someone to diagnose all the failure modes and find a bad part among the rubble to prove that the sudden acceleration, or whatever problem occurred, was mechanical and not user error. So now the burden of proof falls on my shoulders? It may be a non-issue because maybe the black-box will also show that while accelerating the brakes were being stomped on. Just makes me a little nervous when computer data can be considered more reliable in making determinations of the cause of an accident than eye-witness accounts and driver inputs.

I've already had a couple of little gremlins occur intermittantly. Luckily they were for dash displays and climate control. I also read a post earlier today from someone that was stuck in traffic on an incline and had to floor it to get the car to move. Sometime ask me about the French Arianne rocket that had to self-destruct because the designers hadn't increased the size of data location holding the acceleration value.

 

That's the beauty of it, there are other sensors that can confirm or contradict each scenario and you got to be kidding about eywitness accounts, that's proven many times over the most unreliable proof there is. And if I had to decide who is more reliable computer or a driver, I can bet anything people are less reliable. The only problem with computers is that they're build and designed by, yes you guessed it, people who are prone to make mistakes. In your particular case, if the sensor was showing accelerator being pushed, another sensor would show breaks being applied as well, besides broken sensor will stay broken and can be verified as such. Finally you forget the most important factor, in case there is design fault, reading and analyzing sensors will point it out and nobody can blame the driver, so instead of having 200 similar accidents before anybody start suspecting faulty design, it can be discovered much quicker by analyzing data. Either way you look at it the benfits far outweight any possible shortcomings. If you don't believe me look at the airline industry, black boxes helped explain most if not all of the major accidents, forcing new safety rules and improving safety for all passangers. If there is an airliner accident, the first question investigators ask is: where is the black box and can we read the data so we don't have to guess and know the facts. It's good we will have similar capability with cars.

 

Not true, there is a such thing as an intermitently bad sensor.

It might only fail if the temp is below a certain point or above a certain point, but if it is in a certain range it might be fine. There are other factors that could cause intermitent failures (humidity, vibration, pressure just to name a few).

 

I saw these on the news a short time ago.. interesting articles regarding teh EDR:

http://cbs4boston.com/seenon/local_story_296220911.html

"In the Zimmerman case, the EDR data indicated her wheels were spinning at 58 miles per hour, not 40. Her lawyer says that’s because she was skidding on ice, not because she was speeding. But with her own vehicle used as evidence against her, Zimmerman was tried, convicted and spent 100 days in jail."

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I watched the following below on TV. The TV covered a lot more information regarding the speed the was going vs. the speed reported by the EDR than what the article talks about.

http://www.wthr.com/Global/story.asp?S=4104695
" It became an independent witness to what Mr. Matos' car was doing five seconds before the crash. Matos claimed he was driving 60 miles an hour, but the electronic device told jurors he was going 114 mph down a neighborhood street."

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I guess in terms of speed, the EDR can only record how fast the tires are spinning and not the actual forward speed of the vehicle. I imagine in the first article, the EDR should have showed a speed of 40mph and then quickly go up to 58mph when the lady hit ice, but if it only recorded a certain timeframe, it may not have recorded back far enough to show it.

As for the 2nd article, going 60 vs 114mph is night and day, and I tend to believe the EDR at this point.