Civic Type R

Make
Honda
Segment
Hatchback

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is on a new mission to understand car crashes.

It's proposing a new set of regulations for cars equipped with Automobile Event Data Recorders, or EDRs for short. It's basically a snitch mounted somewhere in the car, and most automotive manufacturers fit one as standard. In fact, the NHTSA pulled a proposal to make it mandatory during the Trump administration because the system was being widely adopted voluntarily.

For now, the current legislation requires a car with an EDR (also known as the black box) to record five seconds of pre-crash data. Under the new regulations, an EDR will have to record 20 seconds of pre-crash data at a higher frequency rate. According to the NHTSA, this will help it better understand the actions that lead to a crash.

These new regulations are part of a law passed in 2015, and the NHTSA was given until 2020 to finalize the new ruleset. As mentioned earlier, that deadline was missed and has now been pushed back to no earlier than September 2023.

According to the NHTSA, around 99.5% of new cars have an EDR, so that's job one done. Now, all that is needed is a finetuning of the data it records before a crash. In 2006, the requirements were simple. A vehicle with an EDR was required to register vehicle speed, crash forces, and any force on the brakes. The EDR also recorded whether a seatbelt was used and if airbags were deployed.

With the recent advancement in driver assistance systems, EDRs have much more data to collect.

There's even the possibility of recording footage on vehicles equipped with front-facing cameras. Not that it's necessary, as the NHTSA can always use photographs, CCTV footage, or an actual visit to the accident scene for that part.

The critical difference is the frequency at which data is recorded. Increasing that part of the EDR recording process will give investigators a clearer picture of what happened before the accident. Upping the recording time from five to 20 seconds will do the same. The more data you have, the more information you'll have after it's processed.

The NHTSA names Honda as a perfect example of an automotive manufacturer working with it because it voluntarily collects data from advanced driving systems.

Think twice the next time you want to hoon your Civic Type R. The EDR big brother is watching.