Quibble over black-box standards delays safety strides

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This article was published 03/01/2003 (8397 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON — Highway safety could be vastly improved if black boxes that record information about car crashes were standard, experts said, but they said objections from the automobile industry were thwarting that effort.

About 25 million late-model cars and trucks, most built by the General Motors Corp. and the Ford Motor Co., carry the boxes, which record crash information including how fast a vehicle was moving, whether the seat belts were buckled and how big a jolt the occupants suffered at impact.

Other manufacturers said they would install the boxes, small, inexpensive recording devices connected to the system that deploys the air bags. The companies use the data to determine how well the car safety systems work.

But safety and medical experts said benefits would be broader if the data were easier to collect. An immediate benefit, they said, would be fewer deaths.

Accessible data would enable ambulance crews to determine quickly whether a crash was likely to have caused serious internal injuries and help paramedics make more accurate lifesaving decisions, like whether to call for a helicopter ambulance.

First, though, the industry needs a data standard, so ambulance crews will not have to carry a different cable and computer to connect to the different recorders for each make of car. Without a standard, some data might be indecipherable except by the manufacturer.

Advocates of the standard said automakers are dragging their feet. The companies said they are defending the privacy of drivers.

“The privacy issues will have to be addressed,” said Vann H. Wilber, director for safety and harmonization of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group. “That’s something we think needs to be debated and resolved.”

Legal experts said that many of the privacy issues have been settled and that courts have concluded that data recorded in a crash are subject to the rules governing other evidence.

Pre-trial discovery

In a lawsuit, for example, the data are subject to pretrial discovery just as other physical evidence. If the car is totaled, ownership of the data goes with the wrecked car, to the insurance company.

Concerns about the unauthorized use of the data can be met, safety experts said, and some have suggested that automobile industry executives are hiding their distaste for regulating a standard behind a feigned concern for drivers’ privacy.

Beyond helping paramedics make better decisions, the safety researchers said, information from scores of data recorders could reveal design flaws and strengths.

Jeffrey W. Runge, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called the prospect of having such precise information on big crashes “very tantalizing.”

A committee, representing the automakers and others has been meeting for more than a year, under the auspices of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a global association that offers help in setting standards for electronic devices, but progress toward standardizing the automobile data recorders has been slow. In its ninth meeting this year, on Dec. 3-4, the companies would not allow the committee’s co-chairmen to submit a progress report to the Department of Transportation, which is considering whether to impose a standard. It has requested public comment of the issue. Even if the agency were to decide to impose a standard, drafting and adopting it would take months.

The report incorporated an April 13 news release that said the standard would “define what data should be captured, including date, time, location, velocity, heading, number of occupants and seat belt usage.”

The news release added, “It will also define how that information should be obtained, recorded and transmitted.”

The DaimlerChrysler Corp. representative on the committee, Barbara E. Wendling, said, “That’s really outrageous.”

Wendling is also the chairwoman of an industry committee on crash data recorders. Of the progress report, she said, “It completely misrepresents what’s going on in this committee.”

A Toyota representative also objected.

The automakers had already made sure that the committee would not specify a “minimum data set.” That means none of that data have to be preserved and available for downloading.

The progress report had already been signed by the committee co-chairmen, James E. Hall, a transportation lawyer and former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, and Thomas M. Kowalick, a professor of history at Sandhills Community College in North Carolina.

A cover letter to the Transportation Department described the report as their opinion. But facing opposition from the automakers, Kowalick promised that the report would not be sent.

Wendling also found fault with a presentation from a trauma medicine researcher, Elizabeth Garthe, who said that ambulance crews often underestimated the extent of internal injuries in car crashes and that a quick way to retrieve data about crash severity would save lives. The boxes, Garthe said, were “inexpensive and reliable.”

But Wendling countered: “That’s a value judgment. It’s not been established that it’s inexpensive and reliable.”

The costs will depend on the box’s capabilities and whether it has to be protected against fire. Research shows that more than 90 percent of existing boxes survive wrecks, and proponents said that may be enough to show patterns that will help safety studies.

Component suppliers, who are also represented on the committee, suggest that the cost would be a few dollars per car, although the automakers said they are not certain.

Joan Claybrook, of Public Citizen, a consumer group, said the automakers had also opposed vehicle identification numbers. Claybrook issued the rule requiring standardization of those numbers 20 years ago, when she was the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

She said the agency must “come to some conclusion,” because without a regulation, nothing ensured that the essential elements of the data would be available.

But John Hinch, a safety specialist with the agency who has attended most of the meetings, said: “The agency is a long way away from doing anything. We’re just trying to figure out what the government role is.”

The technical questions are complex. For example, should the box record data for only collisions that trigger air bags or for multiple collisions, which are common in serious crashes? GM’s box records two collisions; Ford’s one. How many seconds of data should be preserved on, for example, use of brakes and turn signals, steering wheel position, throttle position and skid? How many times each second should each be monitored? Should the system have independent power in case the first collision knocks out the car’s electricity? Should the system permit wireless retrieval of data, so ambulance crews would not have to pry open a door or the hood to look for a data jack? Would that make the data vulnerable to interception by outsiders?

The committee is to continue working for another year, but there is no assurance that it will develop a standard that will lead to widespread use of crash boxes to record useful data.

Meanwhile, advocates of standardized boxes said, millions of new vehicles will be built without them. If a standard existed, vehicles could be equipped with uniform devices and greatly enhance highway safety, they said.

Garthe said a study she helped conduct recently in Massachusetts found that 15 percent of the people seriously injured in wrecks were transported to hospitals by helicopter while perhaps four times as many should have been and would have had greater chances of survival with faster trips. With information from crash boxes available promptly to paramedics, she said, “lives can be saved.”

–New York Times News Service