The technology existing in newer motor vehicles is quickly becoming more complex while causing questions to be asked about ethics and vehicle owner rights. Data from Event Data Recorders (“Black Boxes”) have been available to download from vehicles as early as 1999 (GM products). As technology has evolved so have the complications of what kind of data is captured, who can retrieve it and how this affects the rights of vehicle owners involved in collisions who should be able to use that data in their defense.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration set out rules to be followed by vehicle manufacturers as to what kind of data those manufacturers were required to capture and how that data was to be made available to vehicle owners. That law was to become effective with 2013 model vehicles. The success of that rule was marginal. Although most manufacturers complied with that ruling in terms of capturing the required parameters, the availability of that data has fallen short. Many manufacturers have allowed their vehicles to be compatible with crash data retrieval hardware which has been purchased by almost all police forces, insurers and research institutes, However a number of manufacturers have opted out and created their own hardware. All this hardware is expensive and requires trained personnel to conduct a download which adds more cost to the activity. The bottom line is that the average owner/consumer is in no position to obtain the data from their own vehicle. Yet police can access the data for criminal matters and insurers can access it by requiring the owner to surrender their rights of defense to the insurer. And large research institutions can assess it for “benign” purposes.
In recent years matters have become even more complicated. Vehicles no longer have a single EDR module, but the complete vehicle electronics system is a complex of integrated modules that store a variety of data in a variety of locations. Now vehicle infotainment systems can be interrogated by specialized software (Berla) and many vehicles are now equipped with multiple cameras whose views can also be downloaded by specialized equipment.
As an example, Nissan is offering owners the option to purchase an app which will allow them to download camera data on select 2024 and 2025 vehicles. Some details of the plan are discussed on the Nissan website but the cost is not revealed.
It remains questionable how these complications will apply in court proceedings where a vehicle owner ought to have the right to examine evidence in their own defense. If hardware, software and technician costs are too high does that take away the owner’s right to the evidence? What happens if police do not download all the available data in a criminal case because there could be significant costs associated with that? Will this be a matter of “evidence spoilation” that have been a point of argument in historic criminal cases?
Unfortunately the laws are slow to react to quickly developing technologies and vehicle owners may suffer these consequences for many years before the “wild west” is brought to order. Or it may never be brought to order.
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