www.airbagcrash.com
From USAToday article:
USAToday - GM installs 'black boxes' in cars
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/t...8.htm11/23/99- Updated 02:20 PM ET WASHINGTON - (AP) General Motors Corp. has installed devices in hundreds of thousands of its cars that collect data when a car crashes much like a black box on an airplane. Doctors, engineers and government officials say the information can help them better understand how the human body tolerates car crashes. They plan to apply that knowledge to construct safer cars, improve the treatment of crash victims and write government auto safety standards that would better protect passengers in auto accidents. The existence of the so-called auto black box system also is raising sensitive privacy questions about whether such information can be used in litigation. The most sophisticated version of GM's device, known formally as a sensing and diagnostic module, is in hundreds of thousands of GM cars from the 1999 model year: the Buick Century, Park Avenue and Regal; the Cadillac Eldorado, DeVille and SeVille; the Chevrolet Camaro and Corvette and the Pontiac Firebird. The module will be in almost all GM vehicles in a few years, the company says. The module, part of the air bag sensing system, stores information in the few seconds before a car sensor identifies a crash and fires the air bags. The data includes the speed of the car, whether the driver was wearing a seat belt, when an air bag deployed and whether the driver used the brakes. GM has quietly installed different versions of the sensing system on some cars throughout the 1990s, but the modules have become more sophisticated over time. Their existence became public in a paper written by GM and government engineers and presented at a conference last month. Up until now, government crash investigators could only take an educated guess at the speed of a car involved in an accident based on evidence at the crash scene. GM is currently the only automaker that makes such data and a tool to
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recover it available to researchers, the paper said. GM hopes to have laptops available so government crash investigators can download data independently of the company by the end of the year. Bob Lange, director of engineering safety for GM, said he wanted to use the device to collect crash injury information from all age groups so that autos could be designed to further ''reduce the likelihood of injuries.'' The module helped GM figure out last year why some air bags were deploying inadvertently, leading to a recall of more than 850,000 Cavaliers and Sunfires to change a computer software program. ''There's an incredible opportunity to improve safety,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Augenstein of the Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network. Augenstein said if doctors know more about crashes, they can target their treatment of patients, in some cases including checks for serious injuries they might have missed. John Hinch, a research engineer at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and one of the authors of the paper, said he saw ''lots of potential'' for the module's data. ''If we can understand crashes better, we can have better sensors (in automobiles), better air bags,'' Hinch said. ''NHTSA can build better (safety) rules and have better information for consumers.'' Insurers also seem to favor so-called black boxes for cars, in part because it would help them determine who is at fault in accidents. But they say state courts will first have to sort through how such devices could be used in litigation and whether they are reliable. Norman Jolly, an attorney who has litigated auto cases, said he has already seen auto companies try to use air bag deployment information stored on a car computer chip as a defense in lawsuits. Jolly and Richard Schiffrin, another lawyer involved in auto lawsuits, believe companies will not be able to keep such information private. ''It's inevitable that information from a technology such as this would find its way into the public domain -- either through litigation arising out of an automobile accident or an investigation,'' Schiffrin said. Ford Motor Co. said a more limited version of the module was on all its 1999 vehicles, but the company is unable to retrieve the data for customers.
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DaimlerChrysler AG also has a limited version that can detect whether an air bag deploys but a spokesman said the company was still considering other applications of the technology. Copyright 1999 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Ok...thats great. The problem is this technology is NOT typically available to the general public. Only law enforcement has access to the required Vetronix CDR equipment to access this valuable data.
www.airbagcrash.com makes this data available to you. More...
How the CDR system works
For many years, airplane crash investigators have had the benefit of retrieving data from the flight-data recorder. This information has proven invaluable for helping to determine what happened in the critical time before a crash. In 1997, the National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) made the recommendation that vehicle manufacturers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration work together to gather information on vehicle crashes using onboard collision sensing and recording devices. As a result, General Motors expanded the data downloaded to permanent memory in the air bag sensing and diagnostic module at deployment or in a near deployment collision. Since 1973, when GM first introduced air bag-equipped cars, some crash data has been recorded. As explained in the owner's manuals of GM vehicles, the amount of recorded data has expanded with time and technology. The capability to record pre-crash data was included with some 1999 GM vehicles following the NTSB's recommendation. The Vetronix CDR System helps further the NTSB's recommendation by creating a product that downloads the data stored in recordable airbag modules.
General Motors has authorized Vetronix Corporation of Santa Barbara, California, to develop software, hardware and interface cables to allow the recorded data to be downloaded to commonly used computers. Data useful to researchers and investigators, such as delta-V, driver seat belt usage, and pre-impact data is stored and displayed in an easy-to-read format. This new tool also allows the investigator to input other pertinent information, such as weather conditions, and export the data to a remote database. Interface cables that connect directly to the airbag module are available for vehicles that cannot be powered up after a crash.
Any questions or comments are more then welome on this link. We will try to provide any technical information that is requested.
Logan
www.airbagcrash.com www.logandiagnostic.com 
Re: The GM black box 
