Our own Minister of Transport has likened South Africa’s roads to utter ‘lawlessness’. If you had a fender-bender, however, like an air crash investigation, what if we could refer back to the little ‘black box’ in your car? What if you could investigate only the facts and figures of what happened in a collision?
The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US, has enforced new rules governing black boxes in cars that will go into effect on September 1st. Black boxes, otherwise known as Event Data Recorders or EDRs, collect data from the moments leading up to a crash and can help investigators better determine the circumstances of the crash. EDRs don’t have as much information as an airplane’s black box, but the data is still important and helpful to investigators. The ruling by the NHTSA doesn’t require that all cars have EDRs, but that they standardise the information the EDRs collect and make retrieving the data easier. Devices must now record at least 15 data elements.
Congress in the US this year considered a provision that would require black boxes to be in all new cars sold, but it was defeated in the House by conservative Republicans who saw it as an intrusion on privacy. Vehicle telematics or tracking devices like you get in South Africa from DigiCore or Ctrack Fleet Management Solutions, or via insurance products such ‘Safe Driver’ by Outsurance and ‘Vitality Drive’ by Discovery Insure, can also provide similar sorts of answers. With increasing uptake in private over fleet vehicles and trucks, these latest devices are less about theft and hijacking recovery and all about driver behaviour measurement.
The Discovery Insure system installed by Ctrack, for example, is a ‘DQ-track system’. It measures date, time, location, speed and odometer readings. In addition, through a series of algorithms, it can help interpret G-forces in cornering, braking and acceleration. The benefit of this is blindingly obvious for the insurance companies calculating their premiums and assigning liability, but the knock on effect for road safety in South Africa could also be immense.
While driver measurement and behaviour monitoring systems are still in their infancy in South Africa, there is absolutely no reason why, according to existing findings elsewhere in the world, they can’t help dramatically reduce the ‘lawlessness’ on our roads and, by extension, the road death and collision rates. We hope a similar ruling to that of the NHTSA isn’t far off for South Africa.
