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01/08/2011
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"There will be 5.5 million car crashes this year and every one of them will be different," says Kowalick. "The only time you get two crashes the same is in a crash lab; and that's not real-world data.
Ryan Borroff investigates the controversial issue
of installing event data recorders in vehicles
Despite advances in automotive safety systems, motoring remains a dangerous activity. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), somebody dies in a motor vehicle crash every minute.
Setting aside the human cost of such tragedy, at least 90% of these accidents are caused by human, rather than mechanical, error. As we've seen with the Toyota recalls of 2009 and 2010 – which were alleged to be caused by unintended vehicle acceleration, but which USA's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) later found were most often caused by human error – so-called 'black box' event data recorders (EDRs) look set to play an increasingly important role in establishing the causes (and culpability) of crash events.
In the US, OEMs – including Ford and GM – began installing EDRs in motor vehicles in 1996. Yet other manufacturers, including Audi and Mercedes-Benz, still don't install them at all. And while the installation of such technology is not yet mandatory, the consensus is that it will become so and that Europe will follow suit. In July, the European Commission set out plans to reduce road fatalities by half by 2020 in its European Safety Policy Orientation 2011-2020 proposal, by clearly stating its commitment to look at the "value of developing and installing event data recorders ('black boxes')...to improve technical investigations and analysis of accidents".
"The US Government worked out how valuable this technology was after the Toyota recall situation," explains Thomas M. Kowalick, chair of the EDR global standards committee at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). "There is a tremendous movement here and federal legislation to mandate EDR on all vehicles is pending." And what a can of worms it is.
The harvesting of such information offers a number of benefits to an OEM. An EDR records information that can help determine what a vehicle was doing during a time period just before a crash, to a time period just after a crash, for later collection and analysis. An EDR can record data, embracing pre-crash vehicle dynamics and system status, including vehicle speed at time of impact, steering angle, brake application (or non-application) and seatbelt usage, plus post-crash data.
"The very earliest EDRs just obtained information about the crash pulse itself," explains Prof Pete Thomas, Professor of Road and Vehicle Safety, The Transport Safety Research Centre (TSRC), Loughborough Design School, Loughborough University. "...in other words, the 100 milliseconds of the actual crash itself when the vehicles are actually in contact and when injuries are being sustained.
"This information is very valuable to engineers who are designing car structures and also car restraint systems to help them make sure that the systems they are developing are going to give maximum benefit in real-world crashes."
Such data represents a veritable goldmine of information for automotive engineers as to how a vehicle's components and systems behave in a real-world crash event. Imagine the amount of research data that could be garnered from just one year of crash events and what such data could contribute to the science of motor vehicle safety.
"There will be 5.5 million car crashes this year and every one of them will be different," says Kowalick. "The only time you get two crashes the same is in a crash lab; and that's not real-world data. If you could take just one day's worth of crashes in America – which is 20,000 tow-aways – that would be more data than you collect in one year in a crash lab."
Such information could also help detect vehicle defects, and contribute directly to future vehicle design and development, in terms of vehicle shape and system performance. As Thomas explains: "What we've found was, where we were able to make comparisons, real-world crashes are sometimes quite different from the laboratory or legislation. The crash pulses can be different and therefore the injury risks can be different. At the end of the day, engineers want to design systems that provide the best safety in real-world conditions."
If only it were that simple. The issue of who 'owns' the data and who can access it is proving controversial. Kowalick is striving to ensure that the end user's interests are represented. Specifically, he is campaigning to ensure that vehicle owners are made 'aware' of an EDR's existence in their vehicle and is pushing for legislation that ensures vehicle owners get to 'own' their EDR data. "When a vehicle crashes, we want to make sure that the first person who gets access to the data is the owner," says Kowalick.
And privacy is not just the concern of groups like the IEEE. According to Thomas, manufacturers are rightly concerned about driver privacy as well. "They are very reluctant to install a system by themselves that could mean car owners may choose to buy a different car. We need to find a way through that, too."
At the moment, there are few vehicles on the road with the capability to store such information and no systems on the car that routinely look at crash pulse information or at stored data. Thomas would like to see cross-industry action and action at EC level "to encourage all car manufacturers to start fitting EDR systems at the same time.
"With new active safety systems – such as stability control, lane keeping and automatic braking systems – there is no instrumentation on the car that can retain such pre-crash information to help engineers acquire real-world data. Ultimately, we are looking for a lot more information about normal driving behaviour and the events leading up to a crash."
One thing is for sure: if (or when) EDRs make it into all new cars, it will be by design – not by accident.
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Author
Ryan Borroff
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