No offense but I am surprised you were not aware of this. As the article stated, most vehicles have had them for a long ti.e.

Remember the Toyota Unintended Acceleration issues where vehicles were screaming down the highway not being able to stop and they were on 911 screaming etc. Black box investigations were involved in those.

 

We had no idea down here just thought I'd share

 

I had no clue either.... Thanks for sharing

 

This is old news, been around for long time.

The black box info was used by CHP in the Pual Walker fatal Porsche crash to assist in determining what speed etc cause the crash in November 2013.

Also, police agencies use the black box info for their own cruisers when their involved in crashes during police pursuits or when officers negligently cause crashes.

 

it could save a lot of crash site investigation
but probably takes a search warrant to get access to if not granted by the owner

 

This is what I do for a living - Vehicular Homicide Section of my department. We use this all the time to download data from crashed cars - negligent injury/homicide cases, etc. Yes you do need a search warrant, unless the registered owner is deceased from the accident. Gives a lot of good info - speed, when brakes first applied, speed at impact, if seatbelts fastened, if airbags deployed, times down to thousandths of a second, etc.

Again, though - this process involves getting a search warrant in most cases. We can't just access anyone's info at anytime for no good reason. Absolutely nothing to worry about unless you negligently killed or seriously injured someone. In that case you deserve what you have coming.

 

So, are you "negligent" if driving 65 mph in a 55 mph zone and some clown cuts you off resulting in injury?

 

I would say in the eyes of the law...yes. If the posted limit was 55 MPH

 

Then the point is that this big brother stuff allows the law to charge you for something no cop would ever pull you over for. Result-oriented. They can pick and choose who to charge for what. Typical across our legal system these days. Sad.

 

No search warrant is needed by an insurance company. If you file a claim you are giving them access to investigate the situation. If they want to deny or need more info to peruse a claim they just get the info. Of course the situation would need to be pretty severe to warrant the insurance company to work that hard.

As far as law enforcement they have enough data thru evidence collection before they would ever need to pull data from the box. Once again someone would need to be in a pretty complex situation to get LE or insurance to pull that info.

 

Heavy - for law enforcement, which I have been for 22 years, yes you would have to be in a complex situation for us to want to download the data recorder - pretty much serious to fatal injuries with possible negligence on someone's part. I have to correct you on your other statement though - VERY frequently there is not a lot of evidence at the scene to allow accurate calculation of various factors. Believe me, not all accidents have nice visible skid marks, gouge marks, etc to base calculations on. And, quite often debris and other items that might be useful to determine AOI and other important factors get moved or otherwise destroyed by "helpful" patrol officers, onlookers, or firemen that get to the scene before we do.

Caluja - as for worrying that you will be considered negligent for going a few miles per hour over the speed limit, don't be. For felony cases, prosecutors use the standard of gross negligence - which means it's far outside the norm of what a regular person would do. You could easily be doing well over the speed limit, texting on your cell phone, then crash into someone and kill them, and it might not be considered gross negligence by the prosecutors. The jury members and prosecutors think to themselves: have I ever driven fast while texting on the phone? Could I be the one sitting in that defendant's chair right now? If so, it's quite likely you won't meet the gross negligence requirement.

An unfortunate example we had here very recently was some jerk driving 90 MPH on the freeway (55MPH speed limit) and texting on his phone drifted onto the shoulder and rear ended a police officer who had pulled off to assist a stalled motorist. The patrol car burst into flames and the officer died. Apparently this wasn't enough gross negligence to qualify as a felony, and the A**hole was merely convicted of a misdemeanor (simple negligence).