Black-box recorders in new cars from July 2024

[mointainwalker]

I was very surprised to read this: was it generally known and not discussed ( seems unlikely ) ? EDR =Event Data Recorder.

All new cars sold in Europe from July 2024 will have a black box

The car equivalent of an aeroplane's black box, the Event Data Recorder will be installed in all new cars and small commercial vehicles sold in the EU from July.

uk.motor1.com

"According to the documentation provided by the European Commission, an EDR records and stores the following data: speed, braking, the position and tilt of the car on the road, and how the built-in safety systems react. Additionally, an EDR analyses whether the emergency call system is triggered – the eCall became mandatory in the EU in April 2018. The EDR must store the information "with a high level of accuracy and ensured survivability of data." It also stores the info pertaining to the vehicle's make and model, as well as the equipment installed.


Typically embedded into the airbag control unit, the EDR cannot be turned off; it's automatically activated when the airbags and seatbelt tensioners are triggered. Additionally, it starts recording when the vehicle's active bonnet pops out or when there's a change in speed in the lateral or longitudinal direction of more than 8 km/h (5 mph) within 0.15 seconds."

EDIT: Found some more information that says the recording will be limited to 5 seconds before the incident , and 0.3 seconds after triggering.

 

[securespark]

Great idea.

 

[SFK]

Already being used on some cars since at least 2020 and data is kept much longer than 5sec:

Anglesey crossbow murder: How car technology helped catch a killer

Details showing a car's movements were a key factor in finding the killer of Gerald Corrigan.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[johnny2007]

I would get nicked on day one...

 

[mointainwalker]

Already being used on some cars since at least 2020 and data is kept much longer than 5sec:

Anglesey crossbow murder: How car technology helped catch a killer

Details showing a car's movements were a key factor in finding the killer of Gerald Corrigan.

www.bbc.co.uk

Have to say whenever I have read telematics, I have - for no particular reason - thought it was limited to engine data and had believed that position data needed systems that most cars wouldn't have. This is of course daft when you think of navigation systems, but I had no idea that these systems also had SIM cards. Is that in fact normal, or only where a tracker is enabled ? The article is vague on that point.

 

[Mottie]

I had something like that in a 2009 Land Rover, I remember reading about it in the owners manual.

 

[Avocet]

I was very surprised to read this: was it generally known and not discussed ( seems unlikely ) ? EDR =Event Data Recorder.

All new cars sold in Europe from July 2024 will have a black box

The car equivalent of an aeroplane's black box, the Event Data Recorder will be installed in all new cars and small commercial vehicles sold in the EU from July.

uk.motor1.com

"According to the documentation provided by the European Commission, an EDR records and stores the following data: speed, braking, the position and tilt of the car on the road, and how the built-in safety systems react. Additionally, an EDR analyses whether the emergency call system is triggered – the eCall became mandatory in the EU in April 2018. The EDR must store the information "with a high level of accuracy and ensured survivability of data." It also stores the info pertaining to the vehicle's make and model, as well as the equipment installed.


Typically embedded into the airbag control unit, the EDR cannot be turned off; it's automatically activated when the airbags and seatbelt tensioners are triggered. Additionally, it starts recording when the vehicle's active bonnet pops out or when there's a change in speed in the lateral or longitudinal direction of more than 8 km/h (5 mph) within 0.15 seconds."

EDIT: Found some more information that says the recording will be limited to 5 seconds before the incident , and 0.3 seconds after triggering.

It has been discussed endlessly for some years now, in the meetings I sit through in Brussels! Like most civilised places, the EU has a general ambition to reduce road deaths and serious injuries on its roads. Well over a decade ago, the Commission was tasked, by the EU Parliament, with identifying any promising new technologies that might be incorporated into legislation in order to try to achieve that. None other than our very own Transport Research Laboratory, here in the UK, won the contract to carry out this research. EDR was one of the ones they identified. (Of course, this was all before we left).

It has been a mandatory requirement for all new types of car that have been type approved after 7th of July 2022 (there was a lot of hysteria about it in the tabloids and on various motoring fora at the time), and it will be mandatory of all volume cars registered in the EU, (regardless of when they were type approved) from 7th of July this year. As yet, GB still hasn't decided whether or not it is going to incorporate it into our National type approval requirements. That said, even if it does decide to, it won't be for July. Of course, if the car manufacturer has type approved it for the EU, then any car that you buy in Britain, is likely to have the necessary electronic architecture anyway.

The thing is, as Mottie says, car manufacturers have been doing this for ages anyway. They haven't been doing it to "help the police with their enquiries", of course, they've been doing it for ass-covering reasons, such as when the customer says "my brakes just failed", or "it just went to full throttle and there was nothing I could do"! All this regulation did, was to formalise the data set and make it accessible to accident investigators in a standardised format. No more messing about with tape measures, looking at skid marks. It will all be there in the memory of the ECU.

If anyone's curious, the technical requirements have been adopted y the United Nations as ECE Regulation 160:

UN Regulation No. 160 - Event Data Recorder (EDR) | UNECE

unece.org

Annex 4 lists all the data that will have to be recorded.

 

[Avocet]

Have to say whenever I have read telematics, I have - for no particular reason - thought it was limited to engine data and had believed that position data needed systems that most cars wouldn't have. This is of course daft when you think of navigation systems, but I had no idea that these systems also had SIM cards. Is that in fact normal, or only where a tracker is enabled ? The article is vague on that point.

Cars with SIM cars can receive over-the-air updates and can transmit telematic data to the manufacturer. That's separate to EDR. The regulation requires the car to store the data and make it available only to security-cleared authorities in the Member State concerned. It doesn't transmit the crash data anywhere. (It might not even be able to, depending on the damage caused by the crash).

Cars type approved after 2018 (and first registered after 2020) also had to be fitted with "e-Call". That's a separate system. (And also part of the TRL research I mentioned in the previous post). It detects an airbag triggering and sends the car's GPS location automatically, to the emergency services, via a SIM card, so every vehicle with e-Call already has a GPS receiver and a SIM card. (As a separate problem, some of the earliest systems relied on the 2 and 3G mobile phone networks, so there's a problem coming as countries start to switch those off)! GB was still playing by EU rules back then, so it is part of GB legislation now.

Under the data protection legislation, you have the right to demand a copy of any data that your car sends to the manufacturer. I've done it a couple of times for mine, just out of curiosity, but much of it is coded and doesn't mean a right lot.