In-car 'black box' technology known as Electronic Control Units already exist in many cars and could, in theory, be used as evidence in court cases writes Patrick Logue. But are we willing to accept such close monitoring of our driving?
It's a fact of life these days that information on many of our everyday activities is recorded, monitored and stored. You can be sure that every time you walk outside the door the chances of a CCTV camera pointing at you are quite high, calls to most companies are "recorded for training purposes" and we will soon see a radical jump in the number of cameras monitoring our speed on the roads.
When five people were tragically killed by a Dublin bus on Wellington Quay three years ago, it was little surprise that investigators were able to tell exactly how the bus behaved before, during and after the incident by accessing information stored on the Volvo bus's on-board computer.
It is not new technology. For many decades passenger airplanes have carried black boxes and in the event of major incident these have been recovered and data downloaded to tell investigators on the ground what was the most likely cause of the crash. So if buses and aircraft use this type of technology to ascertain the cause of crashes, why not cars, responsible for the deaths of more than 300 people annually?
It is a question that most stakeholders in the transport and road safety sector are publicly reluctant to call for. The issue of data retention in any form is deeply unpopular and therefore a political hot potato.
Brian Farrell of the Road Safety Authority believes it is "up to the manufacturers to start offering this and you will probably eventually see this included in cars".
He believes any extra data from crashes can help in prevention strategies. "The better the data we get, the better our interventions can be. We would have more specific information on crashes," he adds.
Cars already retain a certain amount of data on their on-board computers, known as Electronic Control Units (ECUs), which are becoming increasingly sophisticated. ECUs control the car's safety systems, such as ABS and traction control. If the car goes out of control, the ECUs will apply more brake pressure or activate the traction and vehicle stability controls, and, in the event of an impact, will deploy the airbags.
David Baddeley, managing director of Volvo Car Ireland, a separate company to the bus company, says: "Only one piece of information is retained in the car on the Safety Restraint Systems and that is the forces suffered by the car." He adds that Volvo themselves don't use information from ECUs when analysing crash data.
He believes the idea of manufacturers fitting cars with "black boxes" would be technically possible but it would be a "significant civil liberties issue, which is not to say it is not the right thing to do".
Others, however, contend that ECUs contain more data that would be useful in finding out the cause of crashes. These units may contain information on the speed the car was travelling, if it braked or not, or whether the occupants were wearing seatbelts.
There is evidence from abroad to back up this theory. The New South Wales supreme court in Australia, last year, ruled that police could download information from a Peugeot car's ECU in the hope of revealing how the motorist was driving.
Peugeot told The Irish Times at the time that it was not easy to get at the information stored in the ECU. "An ordinary dealer or distributor cannot access information of this nature or depth on a passenger car," a spokesman said. "However, Peugeot confirms that information of this nature, ie speed, gears and impact, may possibly be accessed by manufacturers of airbags. But I need to stress - may."
According to the Canadian Safety Council (CSC), several manufacturers use event data recording technology in their models - General Motors have done so since 1999 and Ford since 2000.
The CSC website quotes an incident in 2001, when a speeding Montreal driver smashed into another car, killing a man.
Data taken from the car showed it was travelling at 157 km/h, that four seconds before impact the driver floored the accelerator pedal, and that just before impact he took his foot off the accelerator but did not brake. The CSC says, however, the information used by police can only be accessed with the permission of the car's owner, a point backed up by Cyril McHugh of the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI).
"Once a company sells a car it becomes the property of the owner," says McHugh.
"There is an ethical consideration in monitoring a particular person's driving, if it wasn't done by the State I don't think a company could do it," he adds.
"It is getting very much like Big Brother. You can see how a company can do it with a fleet, but it becomes a bit more intrusive when you go broader than that.
"There is no doubt that there is increasing information being held on cars and the technology is there, but the ethical considerations of a car company monitoring the usage of a product that is sold - I think that is something that would need a lot of consideration before anyone would dare implement it.
"It is something that will probably be driven by the EU at some stage."
Indeed, signs of just such a scenario are beginning to show at European level and the issue has been discussed for a number of years.
The Aider project, which started in September 2001, was led by Fiat in Italy, and included a further nine partners in Israel, Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain. The project envisaged a "black box" which would continually monitor a car's environment, including speed, terrain and many other factors.
The box would perform a quick calculation, comparing the state of the vehicle before and after any impact. The box would allow a crash reconstruction to be made and would also establish an automatic link to emergency services.
It was this element the European Commission is now concentrating on and has set September 2009 as a target for the introduction of its initiative called eCall. By that date all new cars made in the EU should have a pan-European in-vehicle emergency call system, designed to save 2,500 lives on roads across the EU every year.
The technology is triggered in a crash and automatically calls emergency services and reports the exact location. eCall may be triggered automatically, or manually by a "panic button". The accurate location information will drastically cut emergency response time. The Commission says studies indicate response times will be reduced by 50 per cent in rural areas and 40 per cent in urban environments.
Location information obtained via a GPS satellite tracking system will allow call centre operators to pinpoint the exact location of the vehicle, while biomedical data, such as heart and respiration rates, allows them to determine the severity of occupants' injuries, helping them decide whether to send a helicopter or an ambulance, and what equipment might be needed. Information about the number of occupants and video footage of their locations inside or outside the vehicle will assist paramedics in locating patients who need priority attention.
But the technology may have other uses. Silvia Zangherati of the FIAT Research Centre (CRF), who was the Aider project co-ordinator, says the system would have the ability to be used by police forces to reconstruct crashes, helping the police determine who or what was to blame and assist in future prevention.
She said data such as speed and braking actions would be "available, if required, but not to everybody, only the carmaker".
For the moment, however, the Aider project is by-and-large only a concept. Perhaps in the future this technology may help make inroads into the 1.3 million crashes which cause 1.7 million injuries and 40,000 deaths in western Europe each year.