The following is a rewrite of a report I generated in 2016 while working for corporate Kawasaki as a trainer and training designer. It is of course now somewhat dated. I was tasked by Kawasaki with informing dealers of the fact that Kawasaki had begun including event data recording (EDR) programming in its streetbike ECUs, as told us by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, the manufacturer in Japan. The EX300—the baby Ninja—was the first Kawasaki roadbike with EDR. There was a law requiring vehicle manufacturers to alert buyers to the EDR's presence, and this was being complied with in owner's manuals and by the dealer training I was developing. Industry media also began reporting on the emergence of EDR at this same time. All motorcycle manufacturers are using EDR today. It is actually mandatory. This technology is the functional equivalent of commercial airplane “black boxes”.

Event data recording probably began with aircraft flight data recorders. However, a joint General Motors and NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, an arm of the Dept. of Transportation) experimental project saw EDR used for the first time in a limited number of cars as early as 1974. These EDR enabled GM to study collision data, especially concerning injury and wrongful death claims involving first-generation airbags. You know, the ones that killed old ladies and children and the reports about which scared the piss out of a lot of us and which resulted in later vehicles having added to them an "off" switch on the passenger side. Not long after, fleet managers relied on EDR-like systems to tell them at what speeds their vehicles were being driven, and eventually insurance and law enforcement investigators began accessing vehicle EDR data in accident reconstruction. Interestingly, almost all EDR-bolstered court cases result in plea agreements, which illustrates the dread with which the accused regard them. Very powerful.

By 2004, 70 percent of cars had EDR (at that time still voluntarily) installed on the assembly line by their manufacturers. Ten years later, in 2014, just before EDR became mandatory, almost 100 percent of car manufacturers were installing it, at a reported additional cost of less than 50 cents per vehicle. Bombardier, maker of the best-selling personal watercraft (PWC), the Sea-Doo, may have been first in the powersports industry to include EDR, and the Kawasaki Jet-Ski personal watercraft had vehicle usage data downloading capability soon after. You may not know that PWC are hugely over-represented in personal injury claims among powersports manufacturers, making vehicle use monitoring the most urgent in this product category.

Despite increasing use in legal contests, when I originally compiled this information, the courts had not yet viewed EDR data as infallible though they were allowing law enforcement very wide lattitude due to historic legal decisions regarding motor vehicle searches. It appeared that the "diminished expectation of privacy" doctrine that allows searching a car for virtually any reason was subsequently applied to a vehicle’s EDR data. As with most motor vehicle borne informational technologies, laws standardizing EDR function and data retrieval eventually emerged, in 2012, making them all work the same. Two years later, a consortium including the NHTSA and insurance and doctor groups succeeded in making EDR mandatory on all vehicles for the 2015 model year (US Senate bill 1831, section 31406). The NHTSA mandated that EDR collect from 15 inputs minimum, including throttle opening, engine rpm, wheel speed, vehicle speed, braking force, chassis attitude, etc. Many EDR systems can receive data from as many as 45 sources, including such unexpected input as vehicle seat occupancy and cabin noise level. EDR is fairly passive most of the time and simply passes through data, until, similar to an airbag deploy, they are triggered by an event, at which time they preserve a 5 to 30 second long data stream (depending on vehicle, model, and input types). Motorcycle application is currently somewhat more limited as motorcycles move in more planes (axes) than do cars, although the emerging use of electronic gyros (omni-directional inertia sensors) in many bikes today, as they have been in cars for decades, is closing that gap.

EDR data is of course encrypted, making unauthorized viewing and tampering difficult. However, several companies make readers available, which law enforcement has and uses in accident investigation. First responders such as EMTs are also said to use EDR data to help determine the best immediate treatment of vehicular accident victims. Powersports dealers (and even distributors) are not expected by their OEMs to have retrieval tools, and at the time of my original report, none did.

Many consumer privacy groups fear EDR "mission creep", i.e. a widening of the scope of EDR data use and availability until it amounts to constant monitoring of people, especially since the obvious future enhancement will be to add GPS to EDR, resulting in the equivalent of electronic surveillance. [Edit: Of course with today’s mobile device based monitoring and the ability of law enforcement to shut down your engine from a distance, at this late a date this concern may now be moot.] At the date of this writing, a third of US states were considering laws controlling EDR for privacy reasons, making the vehicle owner the owner of the data. But the precedent has already been established and most states allow law enforcement override of EDR privacy protection, while some insurance companies do end-runs around the Constitution when they buy the damaged vehicle, along with its EDR. Privacy is in fact the biggest concern at present, and at least three electronics companies have responded by offering devices which claim to turn your vehicle's EDR off. Let’s hear it for American ingenuity! Not to mention freedom! Yeah!

Not only do our sensor-laden, camera and computer equipped cars brake and accelerate on their own, and if some folks have their way, soon without even a driver, but they and our bikes also are able to "rat" on us now, if you will, and more to the point, have become yet one more way in which personal freedom is eroding at an alarming rate. Even the most ardent supporter of EDR regards it as a two-edged sword, giving while at the same time taking. The promise of safer motoring at the cost of steadily vaporizing individual autonomy continues to divide earnest and sincere people, much as was the case with ABS (antilock braking systems) in previous decades and even quartz headlights and safety helmets long before that. Perhaps as in those examples we'll one day look back with incredulity that we ever doubted the benefit to society of EDR. But I'm not so sure.

Part 3