HI all, Here’s an interesting one: my truck recently got rear-ended by a lady driving a 2008 car that apparently contains an Event Data Recorder — an EDR, aka “black box” that is supposed to detect collisions and record pertinent information, such as the speed the driver was traveling when the collision happened.
That would be a really interesting piece of information to know, because apparently the lady who rear-ended my truck told her insurance company that my truck front-ended her, somehow. (A bald-faced lie.) And her insurance company says it’s her word against mine, so they’re refusing to pay for damages! I’m working on the legal front, but the lack of witnesses was making it an iffy case … until I realized that her car probably recorded her velocity at the time of the crash, which would provide the evidence I need to win in a court case. Seeing as my truck is probably not worth $10,000, I may not be able to get a lawyer interested in this case, in which case I may go to small claims court, in which case I may actually subpoena the data in her car’s EDR as evidence. However, I’m really not sure who extracts that data, or how it’s done. I’m sure that as a plaintiff in a case I can’t read it myself; there’s got to be some credible third-party who reads these things. What’s funny is, I read online about how this data is “very complicated to interpret” and “requires specialized equipment costing $10,000 - $20,000”, but I also read about how the fifteen data points it stores are standardized values and is readable through your car’s data port. Which of those things is true, I wonder? Anybody had any experience reading a car’s EDR, or know anyone who has? -m- _______________________________________________ dorkbotpdx-blabber mailing list [email protected] http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/dorkbotpdx-blabber
