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EU Parliament Adopts eCall Resolution
arisvega writes with news that the European Parliament has pass a resolution in support of eCall, an initiative to install devices in vehicles that automatically contact emergency services in the event of a crash. The resolution calls on the European Condition to make it mandatory for all new cars starting in 2015.
"The in-vehicle eCall system uses 112 emergency call technology to alert the emergency services automatically to the location of serious road accidents. This should save lives and reduce the severity of injuries by enabling qualified and equipped paramedics to get to the scene within the first “golden hour” of the accident, says the resolution. The eCall system could save up to 2,500 lives a year and reduce injury severity by 10 to 15%, it adds."
Considering all of the crazy technology we have in even the cheapest modern cars, it is amazing something like this isn't commonplace outside of high end systems like OnStar by now. Would love to see this in the US too.
Every accident that happens in the middle of the day on the freeway results in 20 emergency calls (and the response system is more than adequate to deal with this fact). Accidents that happen on a dark windy road in the dead of night? Not so much.
We could save hundreds of thousands more lives if we just banned cars.
(If you're reading this from Brussels, don't make this the next "European Policy Initiative".)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
They can silently listen in on you. Court filings have shown that this is in fact being done. Merely having the hardware provides this ability; you need not be a subscriber. (thus I refuse to buy a vehicle with OnStar)
You are advocating luddism as a solution to a social problem. The social problem being that "they" think they have a right to track other people. Until you address that, you're just playing whack-a-mole, and with every smack of the hammer denying society access to the technology that's being used against it.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Try to remember this post when you're upside-down in a ditch with two broken arms at 3 AM on a country road.
Me? I'll gladly pay $500 extra dollars per car even if only one in a hundred people ever go through that experience. I know a hundred people, and I don't think any of them should spend a minute more in that ditch than they have to.
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"The in-vehicle eCall system uses 911 emergency call technology to alert the police automatically to the location of the smell of marijuana. This should aid in the war on drugs and reduce terrorism by enabling qualified and equipped homeland security agents to get to the scene within the "golden hour" of the first toke, says the resolution. The eCall system could save up to 2,500 politicians jobs a year and reduce corruption inquiries by 10 to 15%, it adds."
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Fine, pay for your own service.
The same argument could be made for seat belts. In both cases it ignores the fact that an accident affects not only the people inside the vehicle but also everyone who who wants to use the road and the public services aren't free either. So it isn't difficult to make an argument that if you're going to drive a heavy box of metal at high speeds you should take a few steps to minimize damage.
And if you're worried about being tracked I hope you don't use a cellphone. Still, the thing should be required to not track anyone, or be open-source.
I guess it may help some people that crash in some remote place in the night (so basically where none would report it anyway).
Unfortunately it solves pretty much the wrong problem. The biggest issue with help is not that it is not notified in time, but that it cant arrive in time. There is not enough ambulances and they often have to travel vast distance to help. Adding new source of calls wont help.
Whats more they will now get more distracting calls from accidents that are resolved by participants or cops (no serious injuries - sensors cant tell about this) or even completely bogus from defective cars, so the ambulances will move around needlessly at some times (likely failing to help some extra people due to extra distance).
Allow me to sum up the first 5000 or so comments:
Oh yeah, it's an evil conspiracy. Sure. "They" will monitor every car in the world through this, because... uh... no idea.
Funny how geeks have become innovation-phobic. It used to be the other way around.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You know this is just an excuse to install a GPS in every car. Then once they've done that, automatic speed enforcement! Bam!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you bore the entire costs of your stupidity i wouldn't care if you lived or died dude.
But when shaving an hour off the medical response time to reach you could reduce the severity of your spinal injury, and save the public millions in slashing your long term care costs - it does become a public problem. 1. You don't cost anyone money when you are healthy. 2. You are only free to be stupid only when we - your fellow humans on earth - aren't on the hook to pay the price for your actions.
Otherwise chill and be cool: Wear your seat belt. Don't murder people. Don't steal things. Get insurance. Don't become a paraplegic. These things all mitigate the possible harm you can cause ME. Your freedom must not come at the expense of mine, and it does damage my freedoms when I must pay higher insurance rates and taxes to pay for your sorry ass.
That was my first thought too, but in a lot of cases (in Australia at least) reception on those back roads is pretty ordinary at best, and would likely drop to nothing when upside-down in a ditch, so i'm wondering about the usefulness of this idea... it would certainly have it's uses but if the primary use-case is the "upside down in a ditch on a back road" then i'm not so sure.
One problem is: How will it tell apart a serious accident in which people were hurt, and one in which the car was damaged but the people inside were unscathed. Once it gets installed in all cars, this could result in emergency services rushing to places where they are not needed, wasting time.
Your argument seems to be based around the idea that it's impossible for you to ever be aided by this service. Instead of castigating you for your unrecognized selfishness, I'll try to appeal to it. First though, we need to at least attempt to break through your self-deception, because a rational conversation isn't possible with it. If I fail, well, at least I tried.
Have you ever encountered black ice? If you haven't, talk to someone who has, whose opinion you trust. If such a person exists, you'll find out that sometimes, it hits, and there is absolutely no way you could have avoided it short of never driving, ever. If it forms just right, you can't see it, period, not with three extra eyes and binoculars. If it forms on a turn, and you hit it, your car will slide, and there is no amount of driving skill that will prevent it, not even if you were the best driver that ever lived. Physics and all that jazz.
And there's all those other idiots on the road, too. What if that hot shit drops his joint in his lap and jerks the wheel just as you're passing, running his car into your lane at the last possible instant causing a head-on collision and knocking you both out? I know you're a magnificent driver, but daddy's money bought little Mr. Hot-Shit a car that turns faster than yours, and the random jerking of the wheel happened to replicate a perfect turn that pushed that car to the limit of its lateral grip, so no matter how astounding your reflexes and command of the machine you pilot, the immutable laws of the universe are dictating a crash. Even though you're perfect, you can't react to something before it happens, provided you're a believer in free will.
So now that we've established that even though you're perfect (and you are), it could still happen to you, what's the price you're willing to pay to drastically reduce the chance that you die, or perhaps just lose a leg? I know you've got a price, since you've made that your argument. I guess $500 isn't worth it to you. I'm curious. What is?
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There have been tests with automatic speed enforcement, and the subjects said it was very relaxing to not be able to go faster than the speed limit.
-- Cheers!
Modern wiring harnesses are designed to be (a) fast to assemble and disassemble) (b) reliable (c) as foolproof as possible, hence the different connectors. Those of us with long memories can recall when cars had hardly any wiring at all, yet it was always going wrong (cables frayed, bullet connectors pulled, contacts corroded, mechanics connected the wrong wire during a service and nobody noticed till the brakes started the indicators flashing).
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Although you are being ridiculed, I think you are right. It is damn near impossible to have an accident and not having ten or more witnesses. The cost is prohibitive and the privacy impact possibilities are scary. I for one will be happy to give the GPS antenna required for this system a tin foil hat.
The claims of 'up to' 2500 lives means that in reality it will be half of that at best. The EU has 500.000.000 inhabitants. "Possibly" saving 1000 is 0.00002% change in mortality rate. That means the money would be a lot better spent on fighting cancer, obesity or other life-threatening diseases.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
If it were the US government I'd be very sceptic indeed; the EU parliament is a lot better when it comes to privacy. I'm sure it's not that hard to design these things in a way that does not allow them to be used for surveillance or tracking.
For reference, here is the specification I have used for the work:
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/126200_126299/126267/10.00.00_60/ts_126267v100000p.pdf
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/126200_126299/126268/10.00.00_60/ts_126268v100000p.pdf
http://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_ts/126200_126299/126268/10.00.00_60/ts_126268v100000p0.zip
The Qualcomm copyright information have been removed from the earlier revision. This do not grant that the algorithm is not protected by a patent.
While searching on the Internet, there is information that the new system is based on NG112 (VoIP based as I understand) or E100 (what that ?).
I hate it when devices are made mandatory.
Because you have no clue how procedures liek this work?
They always end up being piss-poor quality,
Can you point out one example?
designed by bureaucrat committees. No, they are designed by the inventors who first invented them.
If private companies can offer these things instead, Private companies are the ones who are offering this. Or do you think Mercedes Benz and Porsche a socialist owned companies?
with no "must" behind it, they will come up with something cheap that folks will buy on their own. Look at car GPS navigation systems, and think about what they might have looked like, if a government decided how they were to be built. Hurl.
If there was no must behind it your car had no safty belts.
I think the EU Parliament must be located in some sleazy Amsterdam space cake bar. Strong shit you get there . . .
Well, to give you an idea how the thought process here in europe is: if a car company is upgrading their cars with a system that increases safty, then sooner or later a few car companies offer this feature in their high end products or even build it as standard in all of their products.
Now after five to then years having such systems on the road there will still be lots of models or companies that don't offer this system.
Now, after ten years such a system is considered to be state of the art. So obviously we have trash cars on the roads, even new build trash cars that are _not state of the art_
As soon as common sense and proven usefullness realizes that we have such a new system a law gets introduced to make this system mandatory.
Happend with safty belts, air bags, ABS, ESP, crush zones, pedestrian safty systems etc.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, this system is designed to the resolve "single vehicle incidents", where typically a single male (irresponsible) driver at night loses control of the vehicle at excessive speed and gets knocked unconscious in the accident after hitting a tree.
While it is true that a fast response can save a lot of lives in these situations, I am not sure why I should have to pay for these idiots on the road. Even worse, risk compensation could mean that they drive even more aggressively, thus increasing the risk to sensible drivers on the road. It is certainly a double edged sword.
I am assuming that by 'risk compensation' you are referring to that phenomenon where as cars become safer and safer people become more reckless drivers. Well I don't think that'll apply in the case of this eCall thing, since it doesn't actually make you safer in the event of a crash. It just makes it so the emergency services know about it earlier.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
1 in 100 seems an improbably high number of beneficiaries. Consider that this technology would only benefit victims of the subset of accidents more severe than those in which the individual remains capable himself of contacting emergency services, but less severe than those in which the individual is beyond help even of services immediately dispatched. One must also remove from this subset all accidents in which other people are available to call for immediate help. In densely populated areas, this number might be vanishingly small. On the other hand, $500 seems rather high as a per-vehicle cost estimate.
Ultimately, appeals to emotion, such as "what if it were one of your friends?" aren't helpful, because at some point additional protection becomes cost prohibitive, regardless of who is being protected. Further, It is quite possible that the same amount of money used to fund this service could save more lives were it used instead to redesign the top X most dangerous intersections in Europe.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?