Monitoring Your Driving

By Author: Norris Rios
Total Articles: 572
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We're all used to the idea of black boxes from the airplane industry. If there's a crash, investigators are quickly on the scene to recover the boxes. They give the first insights into the cause of the crash and, hopefully, when the investigation is complete, safety can be improved. Everyone wants planes to be as safe as possible. Well, the same is true of auto design. Thanks to big government, working through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), every new vehicle is leaving the assembly line with an event data recorder (EDR) inside (for those who like details, it's usually under the driver's seat). An EDR is designed to work in exactly the same was as an airplane black box except it doesn't record the conversations inside the vehicle. It's wired into all the major onboard systems and continuously records everything happening in the vehicle while it's in motion. If there's a crash, it holds the last minute of activity in a permanent recording.

At present, each manufacturer is allowed to produce their own design of recorder although the nature of the information to be collected is standardized. As ...
... from 2013, all the manufacturers must use the design produced by the NHTSA to collect a very wide range of data including all the changes in speed immediately before the crash, whether the driver was braking, and so on. The declared intention in collecting all this information is to allow the NHTSA to collect standardized data from all crash incidents. Should patterns emerge, it will be easier to identify design and manufacturing problems and, after consultation with the manufacturers, to modify the designs to produce safer vehicles. In this, the initial intention is to treat the information as mere statistical data, i.e. not identify the source vehicles or drivers.

But this is not the intention of the other interested parties. Although the NHTSA guidelines transfer ownership of the data to the owner of the vehicle, the majority of insurers have written a clause into their policies giving the owner's consent to accessing the EDR data following an accident. So, if your explanation of the accident given in the claim does not match the recording, this can trigger either a refusal of the claim or, in the more obvious cases of fraud, a police investigation. For example, if people were to claim their cars keep accelerating and will not slow down, the EDR will supply clear evidence of whether the brakes were actually applied. This has nothing to do with the computer systems that collect data for the pay-as-you-drive policies. But both systems could save you money in the medium- to long-term.

When you get your next auto insurance quotes, check whether there are pay-as-you-drive options. If so, there are good discounts if you are a low-mileage driver. More generally, the information from the EDRs offers insurers the chance to reduce the amount of fraud. At present, this is costing the insurance industry billions of dollars a year. If we encourage the insurers to check every large claim against the information from the EDR, this could end up saving us dollars when the next round of auto insurance quotes comes in assuming, of course, the insurers pass on their savings by reducing the premium rates.