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IEEE Building Automotive Black-Box Standard

Posted by michael on from the bent-out-of-shape dept.

An anonymous submitter writes: "According to EE Times, the IEEE is working to develop an automotive black-box standard similar to what airplanes have. Forget Acme Rent-A-Car in Connecticut - get ready to have your insurance company jack your rates for going over 65mph."

6 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rampant Paranoia by u01000101 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    To hell with the positive benefits of making cars safer in the long run...

    I bet the black box won't help a bit to recover stolen cars... no sir, that's another department. It will surely monitor your driving habits and give the insurance companies more reasons to refuse to pay. It'll allow cops to trace you but won't help in pinpointing your position if you have an accident.

    It's not that I don't have my tinfoil hat, it something called *REALITY*. Try it some time - it'll change the way you see the world.

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  2. Wrong Impression! by lkaos · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I heard about this about 6 months ago being experimented with in Europe. It's a wonderful idea, especially in New Jersey which has the highest car insurance rate of probably anywhere.

    The way it worked in this test program was a small monitor would gauge your speed (now that I think about it, another monitor guaging breaking habits could also be useful) such that if you were obeying the speed limits, you would get a discount on your insurance.

    Insurance companies want to base rates on potential of accidents, and therefore, currently use statistics to determine rates. This means that I have an extrordinarily high insurance rate even though I'm a good driver simply because of my age and gender.

    The idea isn't to fine people automatically (like in Demolition Man) but to reward people for good driving habits. The real piece of technology that needed improvement was GPS -> speed limit mapping, once that is perfected, I personally can't wait to sign up for this type of program.

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  3. Black Box? by snarkh · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Investigators in protective gear pick through a pile of smoking, twisted metal for clues to the crash. One reaches down, pries back some steel and pulls the black box from the wreckage.

    These boxes are in fact orange!

  4. Re:speed monitoring by Sircus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You *can* drive safely at 90. Try visiting Germany (I'm English, but I live in Germany) for a fine practical demonstration. Most of the Autobahnen have no speed limit. I regularly drive 100-110mph and I'm regularly overtaken (by people with better cars). The annual likelihood of an American driver being involved in a fatal accident are 1 in 4,503. For a German driver, they're 1 in 6,676.

    People are that much more alert about changing lane, staying in the correct lane, etc., when there's a possibility there's a Mercedes in the lane they're changing to, travelling 50mph faster than they are.

    Most road traffic accidents (and an even higher proportion of fatal accidents) don't occur on motorways. In the normal case, you have a crash on a motorway, there's going to be a 10 or 20mph (or in Germany, say, 50mph) speed difference between the two cars. Have a head-on crash on a road with a 30mph speed limit, you've got a 60mph speed difference. It's the small local roads that need the attention, not the motorways/highways/turnpikes/autobahnen/pick-your- word.

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  5. A nice idea but... by mrBoB · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I'm always paranoid about collection devices that have the ability to beam data back to a central repository. I'm concerned with the abuse of such systems. Instead (in addition, who knows) of raising your rates, insurance companies would have data available to them that would allow them to completely drop policies, or give them impetus to call you, suggesting you "raise your premium or coverages" due to your driving habits! On the other hand, if this device has the ability to beam back driving data, what keeps it from beaming back position information? Law enforcement/ insurance might ask to have such functionality available to them to make it "easier to recover stolen vehicles" or to "keep track of 'rehabilitated' cons."

    Personally, I would be more in favor of a standardized system that would allow Police to pull data off a wrecked car to find out more about the crash. Since, as other people have mentioned, it would be hard put to use such a device to determine LIABILITY, Police (and Insurance) will still need to be satisfied with witness testimony. Being required to actively "pull" data from such a system, the potential for abuse will be greatly diminished.

    -Bob

  6. Re:paranoia by gilroy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Blockquoth the poster:

    Anyhow, if insurance rates do go up for speeders, they should correspondingly go down for those who abide the speed limit.

    They should. That doesn't mean they will... auto insurance, being a state-mandated service, is not exactly the model of capitalism one would hope.
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