Honda Black Box Will Put Scummy Insurance Scammers on Notice

Honda's Drive Recorder is the solution to he-said/she-said arguments involving car crashes. The Drive Recorder is essentially a souped-up black box. It includes a camera that records video and audio for 12 seconds prior to a crash and eight seconds after. Also included is a box that records other important data and statistics, such as speed and deceleration rates. More »

Kubica's 75Gs, and We Don't Mean Money

Photo: AFP/ Getty Images More »

Black Box Bogey: NHTSA Says Carmakers Must Tell Buyers They're Being Watched

The Feds have spoken: No exposure without disclosure. This week, the NHTSA gave automakers a green light to put black-box data recorders aboard new vehicles, but from 2011 onward they must inform car buyers if a model carries such a box. (Currently, 60% of new cars have them.) That'll give regulators and manufacturers plenty of time to work up a standard-triplicate disclosure document (yours is the pink copy) buyers will likely sign and date at purchase time. The agency will also set a baseline requirement for the amount of data the boxes collect during a crash at 15 pieces, including speed, seat belt use (binary), and which pedal a driver hit beforehand. That last one would indemnify carmakers in cases of accidental acceleration. Thanks, Big Bro. Er, sort of. More »

More on Progressive's Elective "Black Boxes" for Usage-Based Insurance

As we once reported, Progressive is paying some of its policyholders to be the Guinea pigs in a research study into usage-based insurance. Blogger mnot now points us to details of Progressive's TripSense data recorder — a dongle connected to a car's data port that collects information on driving habits. According to Progressive's terms and conditions, the device will record information on "each individual trip you take in your vehicle" including "trip start time, duration, and speed" "trip distances, estimated annual mileage, weekly trips, time spent in different speed bands, and daily travel," and must be in use 95% of the time. It's all in the name of collecting vehicle usage data to "perform additional research and analysis" on a possible plan to adjust rates based on actual driving data. Personally, we're more comfortable paying higher rates than having a gang of suits second-guess our driving skills. That's what wives/girlfriends/mothers-in-law are for. Dongle this, Prog-rock. More »

When Big Brother Is in the Mirror: Car Chip E/X

On his Cool Tools blog, Kevin Kelly profiles the Car Chip E/X, a nifty device that allows drivers to download precious info from a car's electronic pancreas brain. The chip plugs into a car's interior OBDII interface and can record up to 300 hours of driving data, making it a kind of e-spy you can use to rat on yourself and your car. In an accident, the chip will log the last 20 seconds, making it the insurance investigator's best friend. Better treat it nicely. More »

In America, Car Watches You: Lexus and MCI Team up to Monitor Drivers

Toyota announced it was including two driver-monitoring technologies, developed with telecom giant MCI, in its 2007 Lexus GS 450h sedan. As Edmunds Inside Line reports, one is like a digital mother-in-law that calculates the possibility of a collision and sends an alert if a driver isn't facing forward; the other uses GPS to track teen drivers' behavior, alerting parents when the young ward speeds, travels to an area that's designated off-limits or loses her virginity behind the 7/11 (that's Circle K to you Westerners). The system will cost $300 to purchase the hardware, plus a yearly subscription fee of $60 for the wireless service. No word on a plug-in application that has "the talk" with kids. More »