All new vehicles must have black box crash recorders

All new models of car, van, lorry and bus will need to feature a black box to record crash data from today [6 July 2022] in order to secure type approval in the European Union. The regulation will extend to all new vehicles registered in the EU from July 2024.

The European Commission said the Event Data Recorders (EDR) will capture crash-related information before, during and immediately after a collision.

This will include a vehicle’s speed, activation of its brakes, its position on the road, as well as the state and rate of activation of all its other safety systems. The black boxes should also record the performance of 112-based eCall systems that summon assistance to a crash, brake activation and how any active safety and accident avoidance systems have worked.

Data protection

The recorders only store data when a collision occurs, so they cannot be used to track vehicle movements. Moreover, strict data privacy rules mean that any crash data recorded by a black box can only be used by national authorities for accident analysis and research. The information captured must be anonymised so that it cannot identify either individual vehicles or their owners, and it cannot be shared with insurers.

The European Transport Safety Council said the technical standards for black boxes will render them virtually useless to researchers because the specifications prohibit the recording of time, date and location information – all of which are essential to reconstructing the facts of a collision.  Without location data, for example, researchers would not be able to determine whether a vehicle was traveling at an inappropriate speed for the road and conditions.

Frank Mütze, vehicle safety specialist at ETSC said: “The original purpose of requiring EDRs in new vehicles was to provide a data source to help prevent future crashes.  Ruling out the retrieval of location and time information renders the device data virtually useless to road safety researchers.  We hope that this legislation can be reviewed and updated as soon as possible.”