Cair Foundation

Investigators in protective gear pick through a pile of smoking, twisted metal for clues to the crash. One reaches down, pries back some steel and pulls the black box from the wreckage.

Another plane down? No. This time, it’s a multicar pileup on the interstate.

It’s a postcrash scenario that auto makers, insurance companies and authorities hope will emerge from a groundswell movement to put “black boxes” into automobiles. The effort gained momentum this past week, as standards work shifted into high gear and three companies accelerated their alliance to deliver crash information electronically to a managed database.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers said it has begun work on a universal standard for vehicle-based data recorders that would capture crash information for analysis. The IEEE standard, due out in 2003, is expected to help manufacturers develop such devices for autos, trucks, buses, ambulances, fire trucks and other vehicles.

At the same time, a three-company alliance that includes IBM Corp. announced the formation of an entity, Global Safety Data LLC, that will manage a global database of crash information. The partners — IBM, Insurance Services Office Inc. (Jersey City, N.J.) and Safety Intelligence Systems Corp. (Lindenhurst, N.Y.) will pursue a system for electronically collecting, transmitting and depositing crash information over the Internet to a database known as the Global Safety Data Vault. The hope is that, by enabling vehicles to transmit crash data instantly and by creating a central repository for the collection of that data, the system can improve experts’ understanding of auto crashes and reduce accident-related fatalities.

“We’re trying to build an end-to-end network to capture crash information and create knowledge with it,” said Dr. Ricardo Martinez, president and chief executive officer of Safety Intelligence Systems, who is also an emergency room physician and a former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). “We see a tremendous number of unresolved crash issues that could be resolved by getting better information.”

Proponents of the black-box concept believe the standards effort and the new alliance are a necessary means of dealing with the enormous public-health problem posed by automobile accidents. According to National Safety Council statistics, a death is caused by a motor vehicle accident every 12 minutes; a disabling injury occurs every 14 seconds. There are already more than 6,000 crashes per day in the United States, the statistics say, and the number of registered vehicles in this country is expected to double over the next 20 years from today’s 217 million.

Proponents of the black-box technology want to change the way accident data is collected. Today’s methods, they say, are primitive and typically rely on hand measurements of skid marks and crumple zones. “Most of the crash data today is essentially junk,” Martinez said. “And it’s what we use to form our policies and vehicle designs.”

Martinez has petitioned NHTSA to mandate the inclusion of a black box, or at least a dedicated data chip, on every vehicle sold in the United States. That way, he said, the information gleaned by wheel speed sensors, airbag sensors, crankshaft sensors, yaw sensors and seat belt sensors could be collected and stored on board vehicles. It could then be analyzed by experts to determine a vehicle’s “delta V,” or change in velocity, in the moments before impact. And it could tell researchers whether airbags fired properly, whether seat belts were buckled and whether brakes failed.

Flintstones to Jetsons

“As an emergency room physician, it’s hard for me to understand how we can put all this electronic technology into the car, but when the crash is over, we go back to this primitive method of investigation,” Martinez said. “Now that we have the ability to capture a lot of knowledge, we should move ourselves from the Flintstonian era to the Jetsonian era.”

Eleven of the 45 companies that build passenger cars worldwide already use some kind of black-box technology, according to representatives of the IEEE. The best-known of those is General Motors Corp., which said three years ago that it includes the device, known as a sensing and diagnostics module, as part of its airbag sensing systems on most GM vehicles. The module can store such information as engine speed, vehicle speed, airbag deployment, seat belt deployment and the state of the brakes before and during an accident.

Similarly, Delphi Corp. (formerly Delphi Automotive Systems; Troy, Mich.) has been providing black boxes for racing applications for about six years. The boxes, which measure about 4 x 4 x 2 inches, use a special “crash-hardened” design to enable them to survive accidents. The box incorporates 2 Mbytes of logging RAM to store data that is written 1,000 times per second. It is bolted beneath the dashboard in racing vehicles.

This year, Delphi has also announced that it will place accelerometers (force sensors) in the ears of three Indy-circuit race drivers. The sensors will be wired directly to the black boxes, which will collect data on forces applied to drivers’ heads.

But there is still no standard way to collect automotive black-box data. Neither is there a single repository to store it.

NHTSA’s Fatal Analysis Record System is currently said to be the world’s best collection, but it holds data from only about 50,000 accidents of the roughly 6 million that occur in the United States every year, experts say.

Input requested

That’s why backers of the technology want to see the application of standards, such as the IEEE’s nascent “Motor Vehicle Event Data Recorders” (IEEE P1616). IEEE said it has been working on the standard since November and has already been in touch with 104 automotive companies and vendors for input. The standard will define what should be captured, including such data as the date, time, location, velocity, heading, number of occupants and seat belt usage. IEEE is encouraging engineers with expertise in automotive electronics, embedded systems, telematics, GPS, solid-state recorders and automotive software to help with the standard

“The IEEE effort falls right in line with the idea of getting better, more accurate data, more quickly,” said Jim Ruthven, program director of IBM Automotive Solutions (Southfield, Mich.).

IBM and its allies, meanwhile, want to take the concept a step further. The computing giant is working to provide the software architecture to enable black boxes to gather crash data and electronically transfer it to a computing infrastructure for analysis.

Automated data collection

IBM engineers say the data from a black box could be collected in one of two ways. The first would be via data extraction technologies — from companies like Vetronix Corp. (Santa Barbara, Calif.) — that let users draw the data off black-box recorders and transfer it elsewhere for further study.

In the long run, however, they hope to use automated techniques to transmit data from the black boxes to the Internet via an automotive telematics system. “The real power of this plan will emerge when you’re able to combine it with telematics,” Ruthven said. “Nothing is so compelling as the ability to pull the crash data off and upload it to a remote system.”

IBM also hopes the alliance will tap its Intelligent Data Miner software tool suite for analyzing the crash data in the Global Safety Data Vault. IBM has demonstrated the technology on a Chrysler Concorde concept vehicle equipped with a black box and the software architecture. Such efforts show that the technology is easily within engineers’ grasp, but it must clear the inevitable social hurdles. Several consumer groups have expressed qualms about potential privacy violations, particularly if the technology is associated with global positioning systems that could track a driver’s whereabouts.

But the alliance says the system would contain only vehicle information. “Police reports have a lot more personal information in them,” said Martinez.

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We know you CAIR!

See ya soon!We know you CAIR!