What Is An Event Data Recorder?
Michael Babboni
Car Accidents
People that watch the news or any dramatic film or television involving the crash of an aircraft are familiar with accident investigators at these events always being on the lookout for what is called a “black box.” In the case of an airline accident a black box is the nickname for a “hardened” piece of hardware that records all the relevant data of the operation of an aircraft, and is designed to be durable enough to survive the immense forces involved in a crash.In today’s modern automotive industry, it’s not just aircraft that benefit from this kind of advanced information collection. If you own a relatively new automobile, you yourself may already have this type of equipment on board, although it is called a crash/data event recorder.
What It Does
As the name implies, a data event recorder is designed to do just one thing, and that is gather as much mechanical information about a vehicle’s activities as possible. Depending on the design of an EDR, this data collection may be taking place constantly, or it may only begin once a car performs a sudden, detectable activity, such as a hard application of the brakes or other rapid change in speed.
EDRs collect a mountain of data, much of it invaluable in accident reconstruction, or any other investigation that is trying to get at the truth of collision, such as when you are involved in a personal injury lawsuit. Among the important pieces of data an EDR can tell investigators are speed, steering angle, whether brakes were applied or not, and whether people were wearing seatbelts.
In professional trucking for the hauling of freight, the equivalent of the EDR has been in place as a commercial requirement for quite some time, often including other data such as actual location via GPS data, to ensure that drivers are following regulations and planned routes of travel.
How You Benefit
All of this means that if you get in a car accident and suffer an injury because of the other driver, if one or both drivers are using a vehicle with an EDR installed, this makes getting to the truth of the accident is made considerably easier. Important data recorded right at the event can often mean the difference between taking guesses at what exactly happened, and catching people in a lie if they are attempting to deflect blame.
For example, someone that was being a distracted driver and not paying attention to the road rear ends the driver in front. The driver may claim that he or she tried to brake but couldn’t do it in time. EDR data from that driver’s car can easily refute this claim with hard data that shows the driver was going full speed and didn’t brake at all, thus weakening their defense considerably when it becomes known that their testimony is either misremembered, or a deliberate lie.
A good lawyer for car crash will be one of the first people on your side to tell you that if your injury is the result of someone else’s actions, technology like the EDR unit can be a quick short cut to getting to the truth that can win your personal injury case.