Recently, the Senate has passed Senate Bill 1813 called "Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act". While the House hasn't yet approved this bill, a portion of the bill is already causing great interest to everyone. It requires that "Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall revise part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, to require, beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder that meets the requirements [in this act]." (pg 1068). This will require "black boxes" like the ones used in airplanes to record crash data in all new cars starting in about three years. These Black Boxes are shielded, tamper-proof devices which are designed so that even in the worse crashes, the black boxes will survive and allow the crashes to be reverse engineered.
Of course, this raises a big question about privacy because these boxes can be seen as a step towards a big brother type government. Because the sensor records data such as location and speed, people fear that eventually such data could be used to track people or enforce speed limit laws. The Senate, however, also added several clauses in the law to address theses objections. They stimulated in the law that the data on the devices can only be retrieved by the car owner or the lessee (or by a court order).
However, the inclusion of "Black Boxes", or Event Data Recorders (EDRs) in cars is not an entirely new development with this law. Many commercial automobiles makers have already begun to voluntarily started to include these devices in cars. One report by the National High Traffic Safety Administration showed that about 64% of cars in 2005 had EDRs installed. General Motors, Ford, Isuzu, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru, and Suzuki have all started including the device in all new cars they build.
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