Black box: Secret witness to crashesBy Sam Wood and Troy Graham
Inquirer Staff Writers


Most people don't know it, but there's a good chance your vehicle has the kind of "black box" that busted Gov. Corzine's state police driver for doing 91 m.p.h. moments before crashing last week on the Garden State Parkway.
Known officially as "event data recorders," the black boxes were designed to assist the deployment of air bags. They've been installed in 40 million cars, most of them domestic models, and European manufacturers are debating whether to add them to their vehicles as well.

The black boxes record speed, acceleration, deceleration and other data, and they've become a tool for law enforcement in crashes like Corzine's - though the legalities of using the information are still being sorted out across the country.

The New Jersey State Police have the capability to analyze the boxes, but the data gleaned are not admissible in court and no tickets have ever been issued based on information taken from the recorders.

"This is technology that speaks for the victim, a victim who is often dead," said Thomas Kowalick, the nation's top researcher on the devices. He is chairman of the global technology group that sets standards for the black boxes.

"It is scientifically objective data, and it normally tells the truth," he said. "It's been used to incriminate people in criminal cases and it's been used to find people innocent."

The black box in Corzine's 2005 Chevy Suburban recorded data every five seconds, state police said, registering the vehicle's speed at 91 m.p.h. moments before the April 12 accident, and then 30 m.p.h. as Trooper Robert Rasinski, the driver, tried to slow before crashing into a guardrail.

The governor, who was not wearing his seat belt, remains hospitalized at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, though his doctors yesterday took him off the ventilator that had been helping him breathe for the last week, Corzine's spokesman said.

The governor suffered 10 broken ribs, fractured his collarbone and breastbone and broke his left leg.

Alan Adler, a General Motors spokesman, said the company has been using black boxes on some vehicles since the late 1970s, and virtually every GM vehicle has included one since the 1990s.

"We get a lot of calls asking us, 'Is this a Big Brother thing?' " he said. "It really isn't. EDR's have been an enhancement to safety."

He said manufacturers use data from the boxes to improve the performance of air bags and discover other problems. Once, GM issued a recall based on information from a black box, he said.

But, Adler stressed, the recorders don't work in the same way as airplane black boxes, which record everything that happens in the cockpit.

Kowalick said there have been questions about the accuracy of the information.

In a Florida case, a man was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a crash in which the box said he was traveling 114 m.p.h. through a residential area. Two 16-year-old girls were killed.

A defense expert said the man was traveling 57 m.p.h., and state experts, using traditional accident reconstruction techniques, set his minimum speed between 80 and 98 m.p.h.

Kowalick said icy conditions could sometimes fool the devices. But, he said he trusted the reading of Corzine's SUV.

"The state troopers would have to not trust themselves if they were the ones who interpreted the data," he said.

Mark Rasch, the managing director for technology at FTI Consulting, a firm that provides forensic and litigation services, said modern vehicles are full of sensors that collect data, and there could be data that confirm what the black box says.

He said the on-board computer in Corzine's Suburban could have recorded his speed, and a global positioning system also could determine the speed, if the vehicle was equipped with one.

"Most GPS don't just record where you are now, it records where you were a second ago," Rasch said. "By comparing the two, you can find the speed."

He, too, said the black boxes are "as reliable as the sensors you're measuring."

"How reliable is your speedometer?" he asked. "Absent some kind of tampering, these things tend to be pretty reliable."

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