Cars In The Future : Event Data Recorders
Return to Cars In The FutureEvent Data Recorders (EDR) is the description given to any device that records vehicle and occupant details over a period of time. In a road safety context, they have potential to increase the knowledge and understanding about the period of events leading up to, and during a crash.
This gives great potential to gather consistent and accurate data for analysis in many areas of road and vehicle safety.
- Factors that contributed and caused an accident can be studied in order to help prioritise education, training, and publicity focus.
- Data about the vehicle dynamics can help manufacturers identify situations in which vehicles are not performing as well as expected or where a minor improvement in, say stability or braking, might bring a large accident reduction.
- The data may also help road engineers determine what environmental circumstances contributed to the accident.
- Provide data in situations where there has not been a collision, but where the circumstances could have caused one. This will aid the study of future active safety systems.
- The data could also be used to bring improvements in occupant protection systems, and give greater understanding of injury mechanisms and tolerances in order to develop injury criterion further.
- Validate the effectiveness of crash test programs, and help to influence their future direction based on the nature and severity of commonplace real world crashes.
- Post accident the data can be used to help emergency services understand the nature of the crash and therefore help them plan before they arrive on the scene, and the data will also be able to feed into accident reconstruction.
Clearly every discipline within road safety will benefit from a more accurate and comprehensive dataset, however, there are some issues that will have to be resolved before data is put to wider use – for example with privacy and ownership of the data.
In order for the data to be useful and improve analysis, there will need to be a consensus achieved over the variables that are collected, and the frequency at which they are recorded.
There is potential for EDR to be used to collect information on the frequency of near misses; these are an important indicator of a driver’s risk of being involved in an actual collision. Health and safety has used reporting of near misses in order to demonstrate potential hazards in absence of injury accidents over the last few decades, and the analysis technique developed is known as Heinrich’s triangle.
There may be ways in which employers, for example, would be able to assess the risks to their drivers by monitoring near misses, and help the employers reduce that risk by providing suitable training.
If parameters could be defined for near misses so that their frequency can be recorded on an EDR, then this may give a good tool for identifying high-risk drivers.
As well as recording driver’s behaviours and making this information available for analysis post crash, EDR may have an influence on reducing the number of accidents that occur in the first instance. Drivers who are aware that they are observed may want to avoid the risk of negative feedback about their performance and modify their behaviour to perform safer over a short period after EDR are introduced.
Event data recorders have a good deal of potential to improve safety in the future, and it is important that legal issues of data ownership, possible ways to use the data effectively, and standards for data collected are set. The privacy of the individual also needs to be considered as part of the debate about data ownership.
Potentially, the widespread use of EDR will result in a large amount of data, which would need handling and storing.
Early consideration and debate of these issues will help the introduction of a beneficial and standardised system in the future.
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