Maintenance managers battle black boxes

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (March 8, 2000) — The spectre of public access to stored vehicle electronic data has mobilized the American trucking industry. The fear? In the event of an accident, on-board data could be used in subsequent civil suits or as evidence in cases of regulatory offence.

Amidst a controversy that’s been brewing since last fall, The Maintenance Council of the American Trucking Associations has formed a new Task Force on Vehicle Event Recording to ward off what some people think is inevitable. That follows an ATA policy statement that says it would only support the collection of such data –“reliable” data, it insists — to help prevent future accidents, and only if all vehicles, cars included, were subject to the same rule.

While there is presently no single “black box” on trucks, as there is on airplanes and trains, U.S. safety advocates have been urging that it be mandated. Among those who fear the worst is Freightliner president Jim Hebe, who said last fall that it’s a “done deal, the ball game’s over.”

The TMC Task Force, working within the Total Vehicle Electronics Study Group, is an attempt to find a compromise. Its stated aim is to create a Recommended Engineering Practice that “delineates commercial vehicle incident event data useful for post-accident analysis.” It would create “collection, storage, and retrieval stipulations to ensure comparable event data are generated by all vehicles.”

The ATA’s position is that trucks are not like planes and trains because of their sheer numbers, their diversity, and the fact that they share the road with millions of cars. It will support the creation of data standards only under certain conditions, including: if all vehicle owners and operators are properly protected against the use of electronically generated data in regulatory enforcement and civil litigation; if the data are left anonymous and used for safety research and trend analysis by a single lead agency; and if there is no burden on vehicle owners and operators for the collection and reporting of such data.

At a session on the subject during TMC’s annual meeting in Nashville this week, questions from the floor raised some interesting issues: one, compared to planes and trains, there are a great many trucks on the road and thus many crashes involving them, so who would collect and process all this data and how big a bureaucracy would it require? Two, could truck and/or sub-system suppliers be protected from civil litigation too? And three, what would constitute a reportable crash?

A committee of advisors to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has created a “top 10 needs list” of information it would like to have in order to analyze accidents. It includes the obvious things like pre-crash conditions — speed, brake applications, etc. — as well as data that might require trucks to be equipped with rollover and yaw sensors. The list is not final.

The industry already collects, or could collect, a great deal of truck-status data, says ATA engineer Larry Strawhorn. The Task Force will have to decide what’s important and what should be made readily downloadable. “I don’t know that we’ll have to add any sensors,” he says.