Last week’s tragic bus crash in the Sierre tunnel in Switzerland, where 28 people died, could put the idea of equipping cars with black boxes back on the table.
The bus was bringing Belgian school children home from a ski trip in the Swiss Alps. For an as-yet-undetermined reason, the bus lost control in the tunnel and hit a concrete wall, placed at a 90-degree angle from the road, at full speed.
The impact was extraordinarily violent, folding the bus in on itself and ripping out passenger seats and even the roof of the coach.
The investigation has only just begun, and no one can say what happened with any certainty yet.
So what does that have to do with racing?
The thing is, race cars in the main series, i.e. the fastest ones, are equipped with black boxes that record crashes. Located under the driver’s seat, the boxes continuously store information on the car’s vital functions on a buffer memory.
After a crash, experts and engineers can tell precisely what happened. Did the driver brake? How fast was the car going? Was the steering wheel locked? Did something break?
Commercial planes, some trains, trucks and emergency vehicles are already fitted with this type of device. The question now is, should there be a law requiring all vehicles using public roads to be equipped with black boxes?
The idea may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. If every passenger car, pickup and SUV featured some type of recorder, it would be easier to reconstitute the events that lead up to a road accident. We would know precisely what happened and would even be able to establish responsibility.
But what if we take things a little further and imagine that the content of our car’s black box could be read by police officers? That data combined with GPS tracking would allow them to easily prove a traffic violation.
Say you were caught speeding; the police could verify your actual speed by querying the black box. Same thing if you roll through a stop sign or make an illegal turn at an intersection… the famous black box could be used against you to prove beyond a doubt that you violated the Highway Safety Code.
Would you be willing to accept a black box in your own car? And what if you didn’t have a choice?
The bus was bringing Belgian school children home from a ski trip in the Swiss Alps. For an as-yet-undetermined reason, the bus lost control in the tunnel and hit a concrete wall, placed at a 90-degree angle from the road, at full speed.
The impact was extraordinarily violent, folding the bus in on itself and ripping out passenger seats and even the roof of the coach.
The investigation has only just begun, and no one can say what happened with any certainty yet.
So what does that have to do with racing?
The thing is, race cars in the main series, i.e. the fastest ones, are equipped with black boxes that record crashes. Located under the driver’s seat, the boxes continuously store information on the car’s vital functions on a buffer memory.
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| Allan McNish's destroyed Audi R18 at Le Mans last year. McNish was miraculously uninjured. (Photo: WRI2) |
After a crash, experts and engineers can tell precisely what happened. Did the driver brake? How fast was the car going? Was the steering wheel locked? Did something break?
Commercial planes, some trains, trucks and emergency vehicles are already fitted with this type of device. The question now is, should there be a law requiring all vehicles using public roads to be equipped with black boxes?
The idea may not be as ridiculous as it sounds. If every passenger car, pickup and SUV featured some type of recorder, it would be easier to reconstitute the events that lead up to a road accident. We would know precisely what happened and would even be able to establish responsibility.
But what if we take things a little further and imagine that the content of our car’s black box could be read by police officers? That data combined with GPS tracking would allow them to easily prove a traffic violation.
Say you were caught speeding; the police could verify your actual speed by querying the black box. Same thing if you roll through a stop sign or make an illegal turn at an intersection… the famous black box could be used against you to prove beyond a doubt that you violated the Highway Safety Code.
Would you be willing to accept a black box in your own car? And what if you didn’t have a choice?