A black box for the road

Your car already has a black box recorder in the shape of the systems that make decisions about when to kick in the ABS or blow the airbags, information which is significant enough in an accident investigation that California is shortly to
enact legislation to define who has access to it.

There's a limit to what you can extract from such things, however, and in Japan, where the use of such information isn't common, the usual pattern in police accident reports is to find out everything possible from the scene and then apportion the blame between the parties involved in a way that's weighted toward the guy who seems more guilty, but can result in the victim paying up as well as the offender. For a taxi firm with hundreds of cars on the road, that amounts to a major business expense. One such company, Nerima Taxi, has taken the lead in jointly developing a tool that's a kind of lifeblog for the accident-prone. The Witness combines a CCD
camera, G sensor and 64MB Compact Flash card in a 15 x 5 cm package that sticks onto the windscreen behind the interior mirror. When an abnormal amount of G force acts on the car an alarm sounds, and the wide-angle camera—which is taking a JPEG image every 0.2 seconds all the time it's turned on—records the 12 seconds before the bump and the 6 seconds after to the flash memory for posterity, along with speed and other information. The aim is twofold: first, to lessen the company's liability in accidents by providing objective information about what happened, and second, to warn wayward drivers when they're pushing it too hard, and enable managers back at headquarters to go over near-accidents like a coach reviewing a bad play.

We happened to ride in a taxi that had the Witness installed today (there are now over 2000 of them on the road),
and subjectively at least it did seem like our driver was unusually careful; Japanese taxi drivers, in Tokyo at least,
are apt to drive with a heavy right foot and regard it as the other guy's duty to get out of the way, but this one was positively tiptoeing around. At Y73,000 the Witness isn't cheap, but the makers reckon that in one sample case, a taxi company saved Y238,000 per car in four months after introducing it—principally due to less accidents because the drivers knew Big Brother was watching, and lower costs incurred when they did get into a bump.