Posted on 12/16/2012 1:37:45 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Bypassing Congress, the Obama administration has issued a proposed administrative rule, which if adopted, would mandate the installation of "black boxes" in all automobiles and light trucks beginning in 2014.
The U.S. Department of Transportations National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed the regulation on Dec. 7, which it said would capture valuable safety-related data in the seconds before and during a motor vehicle crash.
The proposed standard would require automakers to install event data recorders (EDRs) so-called black box devices -- to collect specific safety related data in all light passenger vehicles beginning Sept. 1, 2014.
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said approximately 96 percent of model year 2013 passenger cars and light-duty vehicles are already equipped with black-box capability...
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
Like Obama phones, tax payers won’t have to pay any more!(/S)
Well, it looks like I’ve bought my last new car.......
.ACLU..
I see a new market for “Black Box Cleanser’s”.
On another note, how long will it be before the police institute road-blocks to examine the contents of the black boxes and issue retroactive tickets for all infractions? (assuming that GPS data is also stored in the B/B.
Why can’t Congress act? Are our Reps so lazy they can’t even write a bill prohibiting enactment of obozo’s various edicts? Or has Boehner lost his will to oppose the kenyan?
Oh, joy! Will it also record teenagers making out in the back seat, and counterrevolutionary talk?
First step towards eventual periodic transmission of data from auto’s to the gov for taxation and other purposes.
Um... if its my car, its my data.
Yup, they need that data for the carbon tax.
Beyond all that, only kings and tyrants rule by edict.
There is only one branch of government now.
If you have a vehicle that is OBD-II compliant (1996 or so onward), it already has data archiving capability. I have a ‘97 Ford that mentions this in the operator’s manual, even stating that the data *may* be available to law enforcement agencies and insurers.
What makes you think you don’t have one already?
It’s starting to look like every sci-fi totalitarian movie I have ever seen and books I’ve read. They were supposed to be warnings not how to manuals.
In 1990 I bought a brand new F-150 for $10k or so. Now $10k will get you a pretty good USED vehicle.... Gee, I wonder why the prices have gone up so much.... And I wonder why the auto makers are struggling....
Maybe it’s all the mandates? Nah, couldn’t be....
Oh, and isn’t it all in the name of safety? So why do people who don’t have boat loads of cash have to drive “less safe” beaters? Don’t these mandates make things less safe for the poor?
Heck my first new Chevy was $2300 and McDonalds burgers were 15 cents, LOL.
Racist!
There are the airbag sensors, of course, but the crash has already started at that point. So let's look at how aircraft recorders work. The digital flight records store parameters for the entire flight, so that not only can it be used to assist crash investigators, but it can also used by maintenance depots to detect faults before, during, and after a flight so that a failure cascade can't progress to the point where the aircraft falls out of the sky.
The cockpit voice recorders also record constantly; the fact is the system saves only the last 30 minutes or so of audio, erasing the tape or memory as it records over the older material. They record multiple audio channels in parallel, too.
So for a "consumer-grade" road "flight recorder", I see the main car computer recording everything all the time, but reusing memory space so that only the last "n" minutes of data is retained. This precludes using flash memory, because flash has a limited number of write cycles it can do before the storage cells fail. So that means another form of NVRAM needs to be used, or working RAM has to be dumped at the end of a crash event to flash. The engineering is not that difficult, particularly if the amount of data is held to a minimum.
The engineers might then say "why limit the memory? If we use 4 or 16 GB flash, we can record information directly in real time, and not wear out the flash memory for a considerably longer time." Not exactly cheap, but an easier design, because you don't have to worry about "staying alive" long enough to dump temporary memory. I can see it now: "at 30,000 miles, change the compact flash card." It becomes just another maintenance item.
And a long-term window into your driving habits.
I don’t know what the hell we are paying Congress for.
Obama makes all the laws.
Waiting for the Executive Order outlawing guns.
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