40 million "black boxes" In cars since 2000??? Interesting Read in Playboy Advisor

[CPA]

Originally posted by: mugsywwiii You can't very easily put people's lives in jeopardy with your computer.

Bullsh!t. Maybe not in the their "well-being" sense. But you can easily jeopardize a person's identity and way of life.

 

[lRageATMl]

the ecu is what records if you have hit the rev limter, etc...i'm not sure if this is the same thing as the black box that many of you are talking about.

I know for my car I have 2 ecu's (bought an extra one for 200 bucks)...one that I normally use, and the other one is the one that I stick in when I take my car in for warranty work.

My point...there are already ways around it...not to mention that the car is basically one big computer run machine...it's only a matter of time before someone can "hack" into it...how do you think people tune cars?

 

[Graphicd00d]

Originally posted by: Carbo

Idiots like you will never figure just WHY we have the constitutional protections in this country that we do, so why don't you just jump off the Fremont bridge?

Hiding behind the Constitution is always the first choice of those hiding guilt. Put down the booze and the bong, drive responsibly, and you'll have no need for concern about that black box.

Move to China! Sounds like you will fit nicely there.

 

[Xtremist]

Originally posted by: polaris2k3

I think I'm pro-black box in my car. I wont have a problem with it cause maybe, just maybe, it will make some of the morons out there drive safer, instead of running lights and stop signs, endanger not just themselves, but everyone else.

So would lengthening the amount of time a yellow light is displayed. Unfortunately, the traffic cams make too much by using shorter yellow's. Seems like that might be a better, less intrusive step to take before black boxes? Besides, how would recording speed/braking help prevent running red lights [edit]or[/edit] stop signs? It would only be helpful if it caused a collision, in which case it would only really help with a stop sign since you'd know the person obviously didn't speed up to 30 MPH 2 seconds prior to impact 15 feet away. A red light issue doesn't fly though because the telemetry data can't be correlated to whether or not the light was red. If you are able to use a camera that's already in place to do this, then why do you need to know how fast they were going? It's obviously they're fault anyway.

In either case, we already are able to determine this information regardless if a box is installed. If we know one guy was going 30 in a 4-way stop intersection and gets in an accident with a guy going 10... Wonder who ran the stop sign

Imagine this: A guy that was just working OT, eager to get home to his wife and kids. Sees a red light and thinks its a small suburban intersection, no one ever comes here anyway. So he runs the light, then a split second pass the intersection smokes a kid that was going home alone from soccer pratice. He claims he has hit a stray dog and claims his insurance for damages to his car. Then a month later, maybe 2, it turns out that a senior citizen with bad eyes saw his car hit the kid. The guys lawyer managed to convince the jury that the old man thats nearly blind cant be taken seriously. So he gets away with manslaughter.

Terrible, terrible terrible. Seriously. But again, this really has no basis in reality:

[*]These devices only record for a 2-3 second period prior to an accident, at which time they stop functioning (I believe this is how/why they're tied to the airbag system).
[*]If this guy did get away with it and had his vehicle repaired (assuming the airbag's deployed, which they may not have), they're going to reset the device and that last shred of evidence is going to go away with it.
[*]Okay, how in the world is a guy with bad eyesight going to be able to see this guys car and see his license plate number? I mean, how is this guy getting caught at ALL let alone getting away with it once he's approached with an eye-witness account?

The only way this could even be remotely possible is using an example from a previous post I made where you actually have these things recording GPS data and sending it to a central location, goverment operated. Why? Because you've got no one to identify the exact vehicle so you can't go to it and retrieve its' data later. You need it as it happens. You need to know WHICH car was at this place at a specific time, not if THIS car was at a specific place at a specific time. Your search is working in reverse here. You've taken a huge leap from recording 2-3 seconds of telemetry data prior to an accident and changed it into recording terabytes of data (speed, location, etc...) on millions of vehicles every day around the US. In the hit-and-run example, who knows how long you'd need to archive that for too. A few days? Maybe a week? But it'd sure be nice to know what car dumped someone's body the police just discovered, who died 3 years ago. Not to mention if you only had an approximation of when something occured, you'd have a list of maybe 100 suspects, potential killers. Of course 99 of them would be innocent, and you never know, maybe even that last one was too. Those 99 are probably going to be pissed being treated with suspicious officers and doubting everything they say.

Finally, what if it wasn't the owner driving the car? Whoa, who would've thought. Of course months later, how is he going to remember, "Oh yeah, I loaned the car to my buddy for a few hours." He's not. And he's going to get screwed hard for it. Especially when he goes to prison for something we honestly don't know he did. We might know his car did it, but him? Naw... Again, this is all assuming we've enacted a nation-wide GPS tracking terabytes added daily database of car operation data. I thought I was a little off the wall Seriously though, I understand your point, it just isn't valid in this instance. It's terrible to think about and to know it could happen, but it's just not a good example for this at all.

Now that story might be lacking in detail (and proper grammer/spelling), but you see my point. If they used the infomation from the black box, then the guy would have had a lot higher chance to be proven guilty and gotten what he deserved, even if it was only an accident.

Detail along with a swift, good reality check. But I do see your point, and it's a valid one. Unfortunately, you're talking about a black box that doesn't exist. The black boxes that we're discussing wouldn't help in your example one bit, not one. So you really have to ask, if they're really only useful in instances where the vehicle is most likely disabled in an accident, doesn't our well-proven and tried scientific analysis of skid-marks, friction ratios (sounds scientific to me!), etc... do a good enough job? Why is it that we must rely on what a piece of technology tells us when we come up with the same conclusions on our own? Just seems a bit excessive to me and a case where the good doesn't outweigh our right to privacy, unless of course we have no expectation of privacy in our cars

If you REALLY want to know, all this Constitution BS, is well, BS if you ask me. That thing was drafted hundreds of years ago by a bunch of dead white guys, dont you think it kinda needs a little revision by now? Haha, The Constitution 2.0 anyone? People as a whole has change, and our needs has changed.

This is one of the more comical things I've heard someone say. With things like the DMCA, and PATRIOT Act (again, not to be associated with that actual word) I think we're on Constitution 3.7 or something. Well, not Constitution 3.7, but America 3.7. And it's a scary thing to a lot of people, actual patriot's, and rightfully so. More than anything else, the Constitution is a set of ideals, a core set of beliefs and practices our Country is founded on. We create, change, and revoke laws all the time in an effort to accomodate new social issues. However, requiring them to be "Constitutional" is simply requiring them to meet our Country's core set of beliefs. And if you feel adversely towards those core beliefs or those who feel a desire to defend those values, you really need to take a look at yourself and ask if you're living in the right place. That's not to say the US is perfect, it isn't by leaps and bounds. However the idea is one of the only things that helps keep us from becoming the very thing we originally set out to detach ourselves from. If this concept is foreign to you, or you are simply unable to see how this is important, or should be important, well, that you just really need to sit down and think about what you're really saying.

Yes, 1984 is pretty much a reality. WWI, WWII, the whole cold war era with korea, vietnam and cuba, not to mention the whole thing with latin america, AND the whole middle east thing, AND the beloved patriot/India thing, AND lets move more to the east with the China/Taiwan thing, and now theres the terrorists we have to deal with too. We are always in a constant state of war, or the constant blink of utter freaking destruction, thats just how we are. The public is aways held in check by fear, but who cares, its good for the economy anyway. Ever really heard the US presidents radio address? Sounds pretty damn close to 1984 proganda to me, just instead of telling us chocolate production is up by 500tons, Bush tells us employment is up by 20,000 jobs or the economy is improving, etc. Man, I can go on forever, but I'm not going to cause half of you have already shifted that 8minute attention span of yours to the porn thats being downloaded over your Kazaa; as I am about to do right now.

I agree about the fear thing, it's extremely true... and unfortunate. In fact, that is something I wish would change. And we've all seen how well a constant state of fear is to our economy... umm sure. I don't even need facts to refute that. Tell me... Is the first thing you do when you hear about something extremely unsettling to go and buy a new Benz? I hope not. I'd be stashing that stuff away, not buying new toys. Maybe the survival industry gets off on massive fear attacks, but I can't imagine most other industries do. When I can buy my home at 6.18% and refinance 2 years later at 4.75%... I'm sorry, but that's no sign of a booming, vibrant economy. Honestly I can't complain too much since it saves me a great deal of money, but it's not the tell-tale sign you refer to.

 

[rh71]

I wouldn't mind it one bit...

Do the crime, do the time, right ? What do I have to hide ? I speed like everyone else... just lucky to have done it safely. If I cause an accident as a result of my own negligence, I have no one to blame but myself.

 

[mugs]

Originally posted by: CPA

Originally posted by: mugsywwiii You can't very easily put people's lives in jeopardy with your computer.

Bullsh!t. Maybe not in the their "well-being" sense. But you can easily jeopardize a person's identity and way of life.

I agree with your disagreement with something I did not say. I think it's appropriate to take stronger measures to protect a person's life than their way of life. That's not to say that I would be accepting of the downward spiral scenarios some people bring up, just that the way things are now doesn't bother me. I chose my wording carefully, because I figured someone would say you could hack into a missile silo and launch missiles at people or something like that.

Originally posted by: Xtremist
So would lengthening the amount of time a yellow light is displayed. Unfortunately, the traffic cams make too much by using shorter yellow's.

Yellow means stop if you can... if you lengthened yellow lights, people would still run them just as much, because people don't make an effort to stop when it's yellow. Around here people don't stop until at least 2 or 3 cars have gone through the red light. And if they're turning on a left arrow, forget about it - they won't stop until someone wedges their car past them.

 

[Pliablemoose]

Since I've been involved in multiple auto accidents, and the other auto has been @ fault each time, I like the black boxes. Seems I don't have much choice in my 03" Ford anyway...

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: FFMCobalt
Well, if you're not driving like a dumbfvck, what do you have to worry about? Drive responsibly and this little black box will be on YOUR side, not theirs.

I think most would agree that driving at or below the speed limit generally implies driving like a dumbfvck. But whose side would the box be on there?

I'm willing to bet if they used the boxes to correlate accident rate with speed there would be a negative correlation.

 

[Xtremist]

Originally posted by: mugsywwiii

Originally posted by: Xtremist
So would lengthening the amount of time a yellow light is displayed. Unfortunately, the traffic cams make too much by using shorter yellow's.

Yellow means stop if you can... if you lengthened yellow lights, people would still run them just as much, because people don't make an effort to stop when it's yellow. Around here people don't stop until at least 2 or 3 cars have gone through the red light. And if they're turning on a left arrow, forget about it - they won't stop until someone wedges their car past them.

You're making unfounded assumptions here. Maybe we could try it first? Oh wait, some places already have. Various places have found that red-light running has dropped to almost nothing at intersections that have lengthened the yellow light time by as little as 0.5 seconds. I'm not saying you're wrong in the long-run, our society has a tendancy to be rather disappointing, however it seems to me that continuing to do something that is already working that doesn't have any privacy implications could be an alternative until it stops working? I've also heard an "all red" period of a few seconds. Imagine how much fun that would be for traffic cams. You have the people that are just stopping, and the people that know they're going to go next. That might not work very well

Regardless, you seemed to have forgotten the actual issue as presented by the rest of my post about your comment. These black boxes don't affect catching people for running red lights so the example of their usefullness in doing so is invalid. It doesn't matter if lengthening yellow's would help or not. Regardless, these devices certainly wouldn't. The only reasoning that they would is if an accident is caused by this. However, again, I'd like to see some kind of research that says we're having a hard time telling who was running the red currently before using these as a "safety" device. If it's obvious who the offender is in red light running accidents, what's the benefit?

 

[Vic]

Originally posted by: epicstruggle

Originally posted by: thomsbrain
you may have read 1984 but you obviously didn't understand it.

Yeah, thats a good way of showing me a point. Anyways, do what you want. Sooner or later all cars will have this, and all the better.

You have no concept of 1984 or what it is trying to tell you. But if you think you know more than me, and that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, then go ahead.

I look forward to driving on the road knowing that at some point cars will have this in them. At some point id like to see a lower cap as to how fast a car can go. Also a way for the police to stop a car with a remote system would just be nice for me.

later,
epic

Good post from the Why-We-Should-Close-the-Borders Poster Child.

Please go back to whatever totalitarian country you came from, you're not welcome here in America, kthxbye

 

[Xtremist]

Originally posted by: glugglug
I think most would agree that driving at or below the speed limit generally implies driving like a dumbfvck. But whose side would the box be on there?

I'm willing to bet if they used the boxes to correlate accident rate with speed there would be a negative correlation.

Shhh... Now you've done it. Whether intentional or not, you've criticized our President. Watch out! Of course, criticized his lie, but regardless..

 

[OutHouse]

Last bump for the day crew.

 

[Brutuskend]

My VW doesn't have one.

Another reason I love OLD cars.

 

[compslckr]

we have a 2003 ford expedition, and i didnt know that it had this "feature" before the 03 expedition we had a 2001 expedition which was totaled, and i never heard anything about a black box reading in the accident report or anything about it after the accident