British Expatriate Network

Below, highlights from an item I picked up on an ABA email which i though might interest - although I suspect it isn't news to some.

Many, if not all, new cars now have on board computer systems that monitor the engine, brakes etc. In some vehicles this inforamtion can be retrieved after the event - the event generally being an accident. In particular they record the speed of a vehicle at the time the airbags deploy.

In the case below, this evidence has been admitted in a criminal trial. Thing is that people may not know that there car is recording their driving...


CAR’S ‘BLACK BOX’ EVIDENCE ADMITTED

Interviewed at a hospital after a three-car collision that left two people dead, Blake Slade, who was driving one of the vehicles, told a detective he had been going about 50 or 55 mph at the time of the accident.

The detective expressed disbelief, according to court records, because he had already heard from several eyewitnesses that 19-year-old Slade and a friend driving another car were speeding side-by-side down a two-lane highway at approximately 100 mph before the collision in June 2002. But Slade told the detective, "There were no cops there to judge my speed."

True enough, but for Slade and his friend, Kyle Soukup, then 17, there was another disputing "witness." Soukup’s 2002 Chevrolet Corvette was equipped with a "black box," a computer module that, among other things, records a vehicle’s speed in the last five seconds before its airbags deploy in a collision.

Earlier this month, Judge Alan Honorof of New York’s trial-level Supreme Court in Nassau County on Long Island, ruled that evidence gleaned from the Corvette’s black box, which recorded the vehicle’s speed at 139 mph four seconds before the fatal accident, can be used in the upcoming second-degree murder trial of the two men.


Because the technology is still relatively new, experts say, data from a car’s black box (known formally as an event data recorder) has been used as evidence in only a handful of court cases around the country. But in the not-too-distant future, they predict, it will become as commonplace in courtrooms as tire-mark and vehicle-crush-damage evidence.

Slade and Soukup are each charged with two counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of a Long Island couple, Sophia Bretous, 23, and her 31-year-old fiancé, Jean Desir. Police say they were killed when Desir, the driver, tried to turn left in front of the two oncoming cars. Their 1993 Jeep Cherokee was first broadsided by the Corvette, which tore the vehicle in half. A split second later, Slade, driving a 2002 Mercedes-Benz, rammed into the front half of the Jeep, knocking it 300 yards up the road.

In a Jan. 6 ruling, based largely on [an expert's] testimony, Judge Honorof found the black-box evidence to be "generally accepted as reliable in the scientific community," and therefore admissible.

Honorof noted that courts in at least five states, including Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and New York, have allowed black-box evidence to be used at trial.

Nassau County Assistant District Attorney Michael Walsh, the lead prosecutor in the case, says the black-box data will be used to corroborate the testimony of eyewitnesses and accident reconstruction experts.

Barbara Bernstein, executive director of the Nassau County chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, says she has no problem with the use of black-box technology as long as the owners of vehicles equipped with the devices are made aware of their installation.

"It’s like having a police officer sitting in the backseat of your car," she says.

A California law that took effect in 2004 requires manufacturers of vehicles equipped with black-box technology to disclose that fact in the owner’s manual. And Haight and Bohan say most, if not all, manufacturers of cars equipped with black boxes already volunteer that information.



©2005 ABA Journal

Sounds fair enough to me. Goes along with the adage that driving is a privelige and not a right.

I could be wrong of course but if a 19 year old and a 17 year old are driving new Corvettes and Mercs paid for by Mom and Dad, then Mom and Dad should be in the dock with them too.

I think that might remind a few parents that their kid may look good and project the family image in a souped-up car but first, they need to learn the basics and these are crap cars for learning in. Clearly good for killing other people with though.

I should have said, I don't have any great problem with this myself. My only caveat is that the cars should come with a warning sticker to advise that there is such a device installed. This is less of a civil rights issue than a belief that a warning that prevents and accident is better than evidence to help prosecute someone after the event.

Pilgrim - I agree with your comments about the parents too.

I assume mine has a black box in it. I'll look and find out.

Yep - certainly does.

You can check the list here:

http://www.harristechnical.com/downloads/cdrlist.pdf

Mines not on that list (see old post re American cars). However I would be surprised if it didn't - given that any service starts with a lap top computer connected to the USB port under the dash.

I think it's a pretty good idea too. Although, yes, they ought to tell you it's in there. What I think would be more usefull would be to prevent people from driving too fast in the first place. Maybe all new cars should have limiters to restrict the speed to the speed limit depending on the type of road. Of course that'll never happen because that makes us less free and if you propsed such a law, you'd be accused of hating America and her freedoms.

I can imagine a whole host of technological and practical problems as well.
You'd have to devise something that recognized the speed limits as they vary and adapt to the weather and driving conditions - also it wouldn't work on older cars without the technology and woulf probably involve setting something up on the roads (sensors or something) - which sounds prohibitively expensive.

But in principle I don't have a problem - as Pilgrim said - its a privlidge not a right .

Mines not on the list, too old. Never heard of this before.

'twould be dangerous. think about it...... all the old cars on the road doing 80 and a few brand new ones stuck at 55....... :o

...and sometimes (IMO) you need to break the speed limit briefly to be safe -picture yourself in the ouside lane of the freeway doing the speed limit, having pulled out to let a car enter from the ramp. The the twit from the ramp draws parallel to you and sets cruise control for the same speed as you, meanwhile a gorilla driving a pick-up behind you, stuffing his face with a burger while opening a can of pop, has decided six inches is a safe space between you and him -do you really want to brake right at that moment? Or stay in that set up forever?

Wouldn't mind it in residential and school zones, though.

As for the black box, I don't think people necessarily have a right to know it's there -although I think that being told is a good thing as a deterrent. Why should evidence of your crime be inadmissable just because you didn't know evidence could be collected that way? If they found a way to "reconstruct" fingerprints from the marks made by gloves on surfaces, would burglars who didn't know this get off on the grounds they didn't have a fair chance to disguise their crime?

My concern regarding freedoms etc would kick in when private cars had black boxes that recorded everything -visions of the police checking it out when they stop you for a defective taillight and ticketing you for every instance over 75mph they find in the past history of the car..... :o :lol:

Actually, it is possible to rocover fingerprints from the inside of some gloves - specifically thouse with a smooth inner surface. In england a few years back a guy was convicted of burglary after he left the gloves he wore (to prevent leaving prints at the scene)...at the scene. Under English law his failure to provide a reasonable explanation for thir presence at the scene of the crime allowed the court to draw an inference.

The issue with black boxes is a little different. I think that, with some special exceptions, you have a right to know you are being watched. Also I think that the system needs regulating (and in the USA it is) - the police would need 'probable cause' and a warrant to go downloading the data. In England it is not so clear.

I wonder...

Can this blackbox be disconnected, wires cut from it?
Would doing that interfere with the car running right?
If you do this is it legal as you own it and presumeably the data on it?

I don't know the full answer - I suspect that it is connected to the engine management system, so disconecting it might cause the car to not run at all. Alternatively, if it is connected to the airbags (as the story implies) they might fail. You'd thwart the cops but be dead or maimed in the process.

As to the rest, I'd imagine the owner owns the information so could presumably disconnect it (above permitting) without fear of anything more serious than invalidating the warranty. This is why the police need a warrant to recover the information in the first place. However I could imagine that changing in the future in the same way as you can't interfere with the odometer.

Wendy raises a good point and I agree with Rob's take on it.

People already disconnect their DRL's (day-time running lights) as they are supposedly "not cool" and also reprogram the management chips (looked into this myself) so it is not a huge stretch to imagine them rummaging through the dashboard, looking to disconnect the black box.

some 4000km of the autobahn still does not have speed limits and cars regularly travel in excess of 100 mph, yet they still have far fewer accidents and fatalities per mile of motorway than they do in the states. Speed is not the issue, it is the quality of the roads and the drivers.