Independent and unbiased monitoring or road safety, like in any other field, is essential to a proper-functioning society. But as our world becomes more technologically complex, such monitoring becomes much more difficult.
Publicly funded road safety organizations such as the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) or Transport Canada’s Road Safety Branch were created in the late 1960’s and have provided meaningful evaluations along with safety standards that have protected road users throughout these decades. However recent advances in the sensing, monitoring and storing of vehicle performance on public roadways has increasingly become a proprietary matter only available to the manufacturers and their partners. The rulemaking in 2006 that required manufacturers to provide basic “event data” that they store on their various modules has become challenged as the functioning of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) is not made public.
Other manufacturers such as General Motors have recently (early September, 2026) announced that they will be expanding their use of in-vehicle cameras to improve vehicle security as well as to monitor in-vehicle passengers. A spokesperson for GM commented “We wanted to add flexibility to monitor the back seat without turning away from the road, which is dangerous”.
The operators of many commercial fleets in North America have also begun to enter into relationships with firms providing technologic that monitors driver actions and artificial intelligence (AI) to capture instances where driver behavior is wanting. Such systems store data about those instances that this can be used to coach drivers to improve their driving. Obviously there are privacy issues that accompany these developments.
And various other advancements have taken hold. Closed-circuit cameras (CCTV) and automated license plate recognition (ALPR) systems have become popular such that surveillance of the public’s behavior has increased. This concern has caused some jurisdictions, such as the State of Florida, to revoke licenses for these devices , commencing in early September , 2026, and require that the cameras be removed in 30 days. Various camera installations continue to exist in southern Ontario and, in fact, their installations are being expanded in locations such as the Waterloo region. Private firms such as Flock, Mio-vision and others have established relationships with many public jurisdictions.
For the purposes of collision reconstruction all these rapid developments have made the landscape far more complex. While data becomes increasingly stored in various ways, accessing that data is becoming more complex. Despite the claimed good efforts of NHTSA and Transport Canada, manufacturers have developed their own proprietary hardware to access data such that even very large entities such as police and government agencies must pay substantial money to keep up with purchases of the hardware. It can be said that the average vehicle owner has a “snowball’s chance in hell” of ever being able to independently retrieve the data existing on their own vehicle. Individual rights are good on paper, but they are fast becomes less useful than the paper they are written on.
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