I have been making a few posts lately trying to let people know how important the PCM has become in the automotive industry. Some of it's early history and where they can and may go with it.
Each generation has become smarter and more intricately involved in the running of our cars and trucks. The 6.0 has become literally dependant on the PCM. Almost every electrical circuit is either directly or indirectly controlled by the PCM, what it doesn't control it reads.
My my what the future will bring.
So you might ask to what end? What may it mean to me and my truck.?
In the near future your car/truck will be fully automated. You will be able to walk out to your vehicle start it, open the doors adjust the climate controls the seats. All before you open the door. You will be able to talk to your car tell it where you want to go and it will take you there.
Shades of George Jetson you say not in my lifetime. Well think again look around you a lot of that technology already exists and is use today. The Hyaundai that parks itself. The Mercadies and Volvo collosion avoidance systems, the stereo systems and gps systems you can talk to. I even saw a commercial where you could talk to the climate control.
Now you marry all of those systems together and your on your way to a car that can drive itself.
Not so much science fiction anymore is it. Shure there is a lot left to be done but not insurmountable.
To follow will be an article on what your PCM knows about you and what it can tell.
I posted this in several forums I go to. FTE members seemed interested in learning a ltlle more than just why my truck won't start. They were quick to comment and express their concerns about potential issues.
This is a copy and paste of a members concern.
I am not really ready yet to post what I want to post. I signed a non disclosure agreement and while I think it is expired I need to find the document to make shure.
I can however talk about Yahiko's concern. Your PCM can tattle on you a lot more than you think and has been able to for 10 years or more.
When your crash sensor goes off it not only sets off the air bag it creates a snap shot of relevant sensors. The Police and the insurance adjuster have a scan tool of their own, not to do diagnostics but programmed to retrieve that data snap shot.
They can tell how fast you were going, if your lights were on, did you hit the brakes when and how hard and for how long they were applied.
Basically did you try to avoid the accident or were you the cause.
Does your verbal statement jive with the cars statement.
Now I know this for a fact. One of my friends of many years is an accident investigator for the DOT [department of transportation]. He has demonstrated what his scanner can learn/tell.
One of my neighbors is an accident adjuster for a large insurance company.
She has a similar scanner with the same capabilities.
So when FLO from progressive ins ask to install that snap shot tool they advertise it may collect more than you know.
This is a great post, Danny! People should be more concerned than they are and mostly it's because they don't know. Thanks for helping us to realize this!
Might be going out on a limb here but... there are probably zero of us that own a 6.0 diesel truck that have one of those tattle tales plugged in, at least on a full time basis!
Thank you Evil Eye I was begining to despair no one here would ever read the post.
I did not post to create an alarmist attitude but simply to inform. I tried to present the facts without interjecting my own feelings or possible concerns.
Kelly the fact that you do not have a device plugged in all the time means nothing the ability is still there and if you have lone star, lojack or built in GPS the capability is all ready installed.
But, for 1, I am not afraid of a zombie or robot apocalypses where these things come to life.
Nor am I concerned that I cannot hide the fact that my lights were not on from the insurance company.
And as for the "man" keeping tabs on me, I have no problem with it and I hope that the laws will continue to evolve to protect privacy as they have to protect the data in our cell phones but I also hope that the a-hole who drives 24hrs with out a break and runs into a limo hurting people is put behind bars same for the teenager who kills a family is held accountable for that text message they were sending while driving.
The fact that this is old news to you and me is irrelevant, it doesn't change the fact that the information can and is collected and can be accessed by anyone with the proper equipment.
I state my self that much had long been in use. But this post really was not meant for professionals but for the general public/membership.
I tried to present the information as information without clouding it with my own personal opinions or reservations. Any automated process has the potential for abuse or uses that it was never intended for.
I found my non-disclosure agreement. As I thought it expired almost a year ago so I can talk about it a little.
Now the big secret was not the technology nor what it was used for but the fact that I had to install it on some of our trucks without letting the employees know about it.
I actually had to hide the equipment so it couldn't easily be found. Not a big deal really except for that antenna LOL
I tried to tell that to the people but they wouldn't listen. Even the dimmest light bulb in the pack will notice the sudden appearance of a black plastic oblong device affixed to the windshield with a wire disappearing under the dash. And they are gonna look to see why.
The hardware was 3 devices and the wireing. The data logger, a combination GPS and cell phone modem and the antenna. All plug and play. Simple installation really no configureation needed.
The company that developed this was a statistcal anayless company. They gathered huge amounts of data and established trends, patterns to devise ways to increase production reduce costs etc. Primarily for manufactureing but later moved into other markets.
The cross country trucking industry became one of those markets.
The biggest draw back to those services they were very expensive, only the biggest companies could afford it. To increase market share they subdived their services into smaller packages.
You could pick what you wanted to monitor. The less you watched the cheaper it was.
Look I am going to stop and post this part. My health has not been good and I may have to back into the hospital this evening. Hopefully I will be able to return and complete this post.
A lot of back ground but necessary I think.
Now the trucking industry used it to watch performance, fuel usage and determining which were the best routes to use. They could watch this in real time because the devices would call home periodicaly and update the info. A by product of this was live surveilance capability.
Yes Virginia big brother really is watching. Now you may say well I don't have any of that junk on my truck.
I thought that too until a member in another forum mentioned a article he recently read in Road & Track magazine about another article about the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year.
He mentions a statement by a high ranking FORD official that Ford always new where we were and what we were doing with our trucks but they would never sell this info to anyone.
I took that to mean the PCM could call home to mamma. I may be wrong tho it may just mean that any time they plugged into the PCM they could tell what we had been doing.
I tried to find the article but I guess we have to buy the april edition somewhere. One other thing he mentioned was the amount of data collected was scary.
Now I dunno about scary but it is a lot of information gathered. Most of it I see no need for but maybe someone took the long view and decided since we can collect it we might as well, someday someone
may want to buy it.
The average diagnostic scanner only sees about 3000 values [pids] Their data logger nearly 5000 and that was over 7 years ago, imagine what it can do now. As I mentioned survelance is a byproduct of all this. I think that was what my employer was more interested in. We had no over the road type trucks frankly most of our trucks seldom move at all they run all day but seldom move very often or very far.
Agnik itself only analized the data another company gathered it and monitored.
I had a website to go to, an account, user login, etc. From there I could watch every truck the equipment was installed on 24/7 if I wanted to. Each was labled and by right clicking on it I would get a sub window that I could tell when to the second it was last shut down when it was restarted, what idle speed and when it moved I could tell how fast it moved at what RPM, where it moved too and actually watch it move. The image was a little jerkey since signals refreshed every 4 to 5 seconds.
I am going to end this now without getting into should they or shouldn't or any of that stuff.
I will mention that it isn't always a bad thing. A good friend of mine a few years ago his life was saved by monitoring software. The load he was hauling was hijacked he was beaten and left tied up in sub zero weather.
If the guy monitoring hadn't noticed the truck was twenty miles from where it should have been and going in the wrong direction he may have froze to death before being found.
Sorry for being so late with this but just back from the hospital.
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