This device will be powered by electricity, will it not?
And that electricity will be supplied by a wire, and the current that passes through that wire will also pass through a fuse, right? Or has the government found a way around that little inconvenience as well?
Will non-replacement of that fuse, if it should happen to blow out, become a federal offense?
No. But the car won’t start.
How's that gonna work if the "black box" is actually integrated into the engine management computer?
Not so easy. It will have a chip, and the chip will undoubtedly feed-back to the pooter... so if the blackbox isn't running, the pooter won't let the car start...
Folks need to pick up a pre85 pickup truck and leave it in the back yard... My 78 chevy 1/2T 4x4 mostly just plows snow nowadays, but so long as I can find gas, it will run...
It's pretty simple. As with manufacturer-installed immobilizers, this part will have to be operational before the ECU will run the engine.
Flash memory is so cheap these days, they could record a second-by-second history of your driving for a while. Think, 16 GB USB flash can be found for $13 on Amazon, so probably $10 or less wholesale as a bare chip embedded component, no problem for a black box.
Let's say they want to record a whole two kilobytes of data for each second the car is on. I think location, speedometer reading, lights status, accelerator status, brake status, and dozens of other parameters could be recorded within that. That's 8 million seconds of operation, or driving your car for about two hours a day, every day, for two years. They could even have a revolving ten minute buffer of audio in the car from the hands-free unit, and of video from the soon-to-be-mandatory reverse camera.