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Reckless driving could be curbed if cars were fitted with a recorder
being developed as part of the European Community’s Drive programme. Called
Draco – short for driving accident coordinating observer – the device would
work like an aircraft’s black box, automatically registering a car’s speed,
acceleration, whether the brakes were applied and whether the lights were
on at the time of a crash. The recorders would give more information about
a crash than investigators can gather from looking at the shattered vehicles
they find on the scene.

Speaking at a conference on automotive electronics in London last week,
Bill Fincham of Queen Mary and Westfield College in London, who is working
on the project, said that the devices would pay for themselves within a
year. Each recorder costs £100, so fitting one to each of Britain’s
21 million cars would cost more than £2 billion. The Association
of British Insurers says its members pay out more than £4 billion
for crash damage every year, including damage suffered by the country’s
2.7 million commercial vehicles.

Fitting the device would definitely change driver behaviour, says Fincham.
‘The human-factors people tell us that drivers worry about being found out.’
He says that some lorry drivers have been found at the scene of accidents
trying to eat the recording tape from their tachographs.

The Automobile Association, however, says it is ‘totally opposed’ to
these boxes. ‘Who will benefit?’ said an AA representative. ‘Not the motorist!
It will be the insurance companies, so they should pay for the devices.’
He said the AA was more interested in preventing accidents.

But an ABI representative said that for insurance companies to pay would
be ‘out of the question’. He said insurers do not have the funds available,
and the cost would probably pass to motorists as increased premiums. ‘They
may be useful in the odd serious claim, but there are thousands of shunts
every day,’ he said, where the situation was not complex enough for extra
information to be needed. ‘But if it reduced accidents, which I doubt, there
would be a benefit.’

The Department of Transport says that there are no plans to make drive
recorders compulsory, but it is watching developments with interest.

Draco, which is being developed by eight companies, research organisations
and universities, has three accelerometers and a yaw rate sensor which detects
turning. By combining the data from the four sensors, investigators can
find out whether the car was speeding up or slowing down, how fast it was
moving and where it was around the time of the accident. The time of impact
is also recorded.

During normal driving, the recorder stores 113 seconds’ worth of data,
one second at a time, in an electronic memory. As it records each block
of data it erases the oldest block. If there is a collision – which it detects
by looking for particular patterns in the data – it moves the data into
another memory which can store them for up to four weeks. This memory keeps
the 100 seconds immediately before the accident, 3 seconds during the crash
in more detail, and 10 seconds after.