Mysterious Black Boxes

Alright, I did a search and I found no threads that covered this topic. The topic I want to discuss is Event Data Recorders that are installed in almost all vehicles today, if not all I really don't know. I came across this article and found it very interesting to say the least.

The answer to the cause(s) of the acceleration problems with Toyota vehicles may lie hidden in the car’s black boxes. These Event Data Recorders keep secret data on what is happening with your modern car and especially what has happened just before and after the air bags deploy in an accident. Accident investigators understandably would like to have access to this data. Insurance companies would be happy to know if there was third party liability and thus someone to blame (and sue). Government regulators, who say they want to keep our highways as safe as possible, would dearly love to get their fingers on the Toyota EDRs. You might like to know what happened to you or a loved one. The problem for everyone except Toyota is that no one can read the proprietary encrypted data. Unlike most other auto manufacturers, Toyota refuses to give the encrypted code to anyone. Toyota and a few other automobile companies make Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code look like child’s play (which it was). The obvious question arises: what are Toyota and Honda hiding? Is there some magic that makes their cars different? What electronic wizardry have they employed to turn their ho-hum cars into best-sellers?

www.baytoday.ca...

So I did a little looking into it because at this point I seriously doubted that Toyota would withhold the information that may exonerate them from the faulty gas peddles that have plagued them. Well I found out that they will not divulge what is recorded. What is even more disturbing is that vehicles with systems such as ON Star and other satellite type navigating equipment can send this information to whoever programmed them in regular intervals.

AP IMPACT: Toyota secretive on 'black box' data

SOUTHLAKE, Texas – Toyota has for years blocked access to data stored in devices similar to airline "black boxes" that could explain crashes blamed on sudden unintended acceleration, according to an Associated Press review of lawsuits nationwide and interviews with auto crash experts. The AP investigation found that Toyota has been inconsistent and sometimes even contradictory in revealing exactly what the devices record and don't record, including critical data about whether the brake or accelerator pedals were depressed at the time of a crash. By contrast, most other automakers routinely allow much more open access to information from their event data recorders, commonly known as EDRs. AP also found that Toyota: • Has frequently refused to provide key information sought by crash victims and survivors. • Uses proprietary software in its EDRs. Until this week, there was only a single laptop in the U.S. containing the software needed to read the data following a crash. • In some lawsuits, when pressed to provide recorder information Toyota either settled or provided printouts with the key columns blank. Toyota's "black box" information is emerging as a critical legal issue amid the recall of 8 million vehicles by the world's largest automaker. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said this week that 52 people have died in crashes linked to accelerator problems, triggering an avalanche of lawsuits. When Toyota was asked by the AP to explain what exactly its recorders do collect, a company statement said Thursday that the devices record data from five seconds before until two seconds after an air bag is deployed in a crash. The statement said information is captured about vehicle speed, the accelerator's angle, gear shift position, whether the seat belt was used and the angle of the driver's seat. There was no initial mention of brakes — a key point in the sudden acceleration problem. When AP went back to Toyota to ask specifically about brake information, Toyota responded that its EDRs do, in fact, record "data on the brake's position and the antilock brake system."

news.yahoo.com...

In this same article a Toyota representative told the family of a crash victim that no data is saved regarding the accelerator or gas peddle position. What in the world are they hiding and what information are they actually collecting? The only thing we know for sure is:

Toyota Won’t Divulge Black Box Technology Secrets On Recall Problems By James Fox on March 7, 2010, 8:53 am

www.americasnewsonline.com...

Many cars do have black boxes that operate in conjunction with their onboard diagnostics systems and sometimes with global positioning satellites (GPS) (GM ONSTAR) as well. These boxes record amongst other things the emissions of the vehicle and were in fact first designed to help regulate vehicle emissions to meet CAFÉ (Federal Fuel Emissions Guidelines) restrictions.

In more recent years they have taken on a broader range of diagnostic function recording the data of critical systems performance to allow mechanics to interface via computer with the car both remotely from places like ON STAR Service Centers and at the repair bays.

These boxes also double as tracking devices for lenders in the event that someone should stop making loan payments and skip with the car.

Vehicles further equipped with Global Positioning Systems can be shut down remotely, started remotely, and unlocked remotely, and disabled remotely.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


I myself see a far more sinister application my friend. If these black boxes can and do transmit, would we know? I've read articles where this is not supposed to happen, and other articles where it does happen. Check this out from 2002.

Insurer plans to record driving habits with black boxes in cars

Motorists are to have their journeys tracked on airline-style black box data recorders under plans to provide "tailor-made" insurance which reflects individual driving habits. Motorists are to have their journeys tracked on airline-style black box data recorders under plans to provide "tailor-made" insurance which reflects individual driving habits. Norwich Union yesterday announced the launch of Britain's first "pay-as-you-drive" insurance policy, which will calculate individual premiums according to how often motorists use their cars, what time of day they travel and what type of roads they drive on.

www.independent.co.uk...

And this one from 2009 right here in the States.

The California Department of Insurance (DOI) is considering regulations that would enable insurance prices to depend on the precise number of miles a car is driven in a given billing period. But in implementing these "Pay As You Drive" regulations, the DOI appears poised to empower insurance companies to require customers' cars to be outfitted with "black-box" devices that could transmit back to the insurance companies all sorts of data about car motion (acceleration, braking, and so forth) as well as driver behavior (steering and seat-belt wearing). Although DOI has retreated from its prior position that these devices should track your location – a definite improvement – it's still true that every car already has a reliable, tamper-resistant device that verifies actual mileage: an odometer. Even worse, there appear to be no restrictions on what the insurance companies would do with that data — of course, when you drive on the public street, you lose some privacy. But 10 years ago, someone interested in your whereabouts would have had to decide in advance to follow you and then physically follow you. Black boxes can collect information pervasively, silently, and cheaply for any later use by the insurance company, private parties or the government. There is real danger that this information would not only be used to ascertain the political or associational affiliations of drivers, but also to charge more if you drive and park in neighborhoods with high vehicle theft and crime rates, to impose higher premiums for people who drive at night or to link your health insurance rates with location data that reveals your lunchtime trips to McDonald's.

www.eff.org...

I don't know about you, but I see this as a little more than just some passive maintenace convenience.

Check out CNBC's take on the whole thing. We can't even drive our cars now without big brother watching. I was unaware until today that these things even existed.

Originally posted by jackflap

Check out CNBC's take on the whole thing. We can't even drive our cars now without big brother watching. I was unaware until today that these things even existed.

EDS Electronic Data System is one of the highly profitible divisions of General Motors that was detached from the corporation back in 1998.

Like many of GM's sister companies it does business across the world with a wide spectrum of applications.

The Taxpayers get to pay for the unprofitible divisions that are grouped together.

The stand alone divisions make a fortune. EDS specializes in highly sophisticated communications, computer and sattelite technology.

It was also in 1998 the the Black Boxes started appearing in the cars.

I ride a bicycle, what can I say, I am ahead of the curve on this one!

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


You are certainly ahead of the curve then Proto. I'm still trying to digest that video. This has me thinking in some pretty wild ways.

Think about the cash for clunkers thing. Didn't everyone run to get new cars that the government was handing out? What if the goal was to get as many as possible equipped with EDR.

The only problem now is Toyota vehicles cannot be read except by Toyota. Then you have the Toyota recall where Toyota will not divulge what it is that they collect on the black boxes. All the information is encrypted.

We know certain frequencies get scrambled. Like the other day when my son was using a remote control helicopter in the living room. The transmitter turned on our radio. Twice.

So what if the vehicles that are accelerating out of control are actually being remotely operated? So that they kill two birds with one stone. Force out the guy who don't play ball with others and at the same time drum up support for your Chicago auto makers as everyone disowns Toyota.





[edit on 7-3-2010 by jackflap]

reply to post by jackflap


There is no doubt in my mind that the whole thing with Toyota is a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy against Detroit for years to bust up the last of the unions. General Motors and Ford have been making superior products to Honda and Toyota for years. Now all of a sudden the U.S. Government and the Federal Reserve are in the car business and Toyota has monumental image trouble? Not buying that wasn’t a conspiracy.

We are enslaved primarily by two things JackFlap.

One is debt, the other is technology.

One causes us to perform and labor in desperate ways to maintain our credit ratings and work for a pittance and not cause waves to keep that job so we can pay the piper every month.

The other binds us to a control grid, cars, cell phones, computers, TV’s are all part of a constant monitoring as well as something we voluntarily attach ourselves too.

It would only make sense they use those things in every way they can.

I try to stay off the grid as much as I can and confuse it as much as I can. My electronic signature originates from places far and wide because of how I have my electronics spread out.

Is an electronic toll path a convenience to not wait in line or just one more way to track your movements?

Never hurts to get a few of them on your account and hand some out to friends!

Are cell phones a way for us to stay in touch or also a way to track our movements and monitor communications?

Never hurts to get a few of them on your account and spread them out far and wide.

Is he here, is he there, is he everywhere?

Of course the lovable ever so docile and submissive sheep amongst us are always going to say, well if you have nothing to hide and you are doing nothing wrong, what’s the big deal?

Note to self, never volunteer to the galactic council to rescue slave planets.

Time for a Snickers bar, I sure am not going any place for a while!

Someone is feeding someone a line here on the un-hackability of the Toyota and Honda EDR technology. In 1985 "we" (the gang of 5) took apart the TMS7500 encryption systems and the modified VideoCypher TMS7C processor, live (powered) in both cases and copied all the embedded code as well as the RSA keys (which were just the 64 bit FIPS standard with XOR barrel role mathematics). I wrote the extraction code in less than 64 bytes of RAM and built the hardware which went to SDI for failure testing after we were done with the VC. So, we have 5 guys that did this in 85, 25 years ago!

Now we have computers that are the equivalent of 1000's of 8088 based AT's and Apple 6502's. The NSA has beasts that will chew through encryption keys in a heartbeat and hundreds of people to perform reverse engineering. There are thousands of people out there not in the NSA or other government bodies known as pirates and hackers, inventive enough to reverse engineer the Toyota or Honda EDR's. They have J100 or other solvents, good microscopes and can perform die polarization macrophotography. As well they also have dentists they can go to, to x-ray IC's for internal hardware changes. There are many ways to skin a cat.

What they are saying is all hype and crap to try and prevent people from even trying. You know, when a 1000 people are saying it can't be done, there are 3 or 4 actually doing the job.

Cheers - Dave

All cars have had this technology since about 2001. A friend that works for Avis showed it to me back then. They were using it to figure out what was happening for the thirty seconds before and during a crash.

It recorded brake pedal position, gas pedal position, steering input, speed in intervals, and air bag deployment. That was nine years ago. Now I have no idea what all it records.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler

There is no doubt in my mind that the whole thing with Toyota is a conspiracy. It was a conspiracy against Detroit for years to bust up the last of the unions. General Motors and Ford have been making superior products to Honda and Toyota for years. Now all of a sudden the U.S. Government and the Federal Reserve are in the car business and Toyota has monumental image trouble? Not buying that wasn’t a conspiracy.

You may be correct my friend. I looked up Toyota conspiracy and came up with the following article.

Toyota Troubles Mount With Conspiracy Theories

Toyota’s sales in the US were down almost 16% in January compared with the same month last year. That drop is expected to be worse this month. Toyota competitors are telling customers that it is better to ride safely in their vehicles that be cremated in a Toyota. Potential new problems with brakes on Toyota’s hybrid Prius will do even more to undermine the Japanese car company’s reputation for building high-quality vehicles, a reputation that took thirty years to create. Congress and the Japanese government have said they will begin investigations into what went wrong with the cars just as Toyota is sending new gas pedals to dealers to repaid the recalled vehicles. Some analysts believe that the defect may extend to the electronic systems on the cars which would probably make complete repairs more complex and expensive. The Wall Street Journal reports that “U.S. regulators accused the company of dragging its feet on fixing defective gas pedals and threatened civil penalties and further reviews of Toyota products.” Those investigations will almost certainly cause Congress and trial lawyers to begin actions against Toyota which will involve deposing the company’s management, engineers, and dealers with the goal of discovering a “cover up.” Toyota must have known about the problems for months and must have hoped it could fix a small number of vehicles before that problem spread.

247wallst.com...

Is the government behind it all and are we in fact being spied on? From what I can gather so far, yes.

reply to post by bobs_uruncle

What they are saying is all hype and crap to try and prevent people from even trying. You know, when a 1000 people are saying it can't be done, there are 3 or 4 actually doing the job.

So if they are in fact able to decode what is recorded on the black boxes, why make it seem in the MSM that we cannot? Why would Toyota blatently say that it will not divulge what it records?

reply to post by jackflap


There are no accidents in life nor coincidences.

With the billions of dollars all these kids have on the line, they really don't make silly mistakes like this.

Setup from the word go. The thing is JackFlap no one has ever figured out why its primarily White Anglo Saxon Intelligence and perspectives that actually run the world. No matter how clever the other guy imagines them selves to be they always have that base covered.

What's happened with Toyota is absolutely not an accident.

Toyota secretive on 'black box' data Published: Monday, March 8, 2010

In the 2004 crash in Evansville, Ind., that killed 77-year-old Juanita Grossman, attorneys for her family say a Toyota technician traveled from the company's U.S. headquarters in Torrance, Calif., to examine her 2003 Camry. Before she died, the 5-foot-2, 125-pound woman told relatives she was practically standing with both feet on the brake pedal but could not stop the car from slamming into a building. Records confirm that emergency personnel found Grossman with both feet on the brake pedal. A Toyota representative told the family's attorneys there was "no sensor that would have preserved information regarding the accelerator and brake positions at the time of impact," according to a summary of the case provided by Safety Research & Strategies Inc., a Rehoboth, Mass.-based company that does vehicle safety research for attorneys, engineers, government and others. One attorney in the Texas case contends in court documents that Toyota may have deliberately stopped allowing its EDRs to collect critical information so the Japanese automaker would not be forced to reveal it in court cases.

www.pottsmerc.com...

This article is from today so I figured I would post it here. The thing that gets me is that if the black boxes can confirm or deny the accelerator problem, why hide it? Unless they are recording some other things that they don't want anyone to know.

Toyota Black Box Conspiracy? March 9, 2010

As with most modern cars, the Toyotas afflicted with the woeful gas pedal problems all have “black boxes” which record important data prior to any crash. The intention is, as with aviation black boxes, to provide investigators with further insight into a particular incident; better equipping them to address any legal or mechanical concerns a crash may bring up. However, as it turns out, Toyota has kept their black box data quite secretive. Using a Toyota-specific software system, the boxes can only be read by Toyota equipment; of which there is just one computer in the United States with the necessary software to read Toyota’s black box data. Furthermore, whenever queried for its black box data, Toyota has made a habit of deleting some of the recorded data. As yet, there has been no explanation for Toyota’s particularly secretive treatment of their black boxes, but one can expect Toyota to issue a statement sometime before the conclusion of the U.S. government’s investigation.

www.carguideweb.com...

how does it know to start recording 5 seconds befor a crash?, if it knows there will be a crash in 5 seconds time, couldnt it, you know, warn you about it maybe?
on topic, i didnt know any cars had these black boxes until i saw this thread, im glad every car i ever owned was pre 1999.

reply to post by babylonstew


The GM cars around 2001 recorded on a 30 second loop. It would rewrite the information only holding 30 seconds of information. It would stop recording when certain sensors registered information indicative of a crash.

Starting to record 5 seconds ahed of time could be triggered by information in certain sensors. Things like hard braking, extreme pitch or yaw, and loss of traction could all trigger an alert using sensors allready in most cars.

* MARCH 11, 2010 Toyota Complaints Surged After First Recall Before September's News, Reports on Acceleration Issues Had Held Steady; NHTSA Examines Prius in San Diego Incident

Last week, Toyota engineers examined four vehicles that were involved in reported incidents of sudden acceleration, Mr. Lyons said. None of those incidents resulted in accidents or injuries, he said. The inspections involve extracting data from the "black box" that vehicles have to record the condition of the engine, brakes, accelerator and other components at the time of an accident. Mr. Lyons, the Toyota spokesman, said it is unclear if the black box, known in the industry as an electronic data recorder, in Mr. Sikes's car will provide clues to what happened because the recorder is activated only when a car's air bags are deployed. He also noted that the recorder collects data that is intended to help the company improve safety systems, not to reconstruct accidents.

online.wsj.com...

This is too weird. Toyota remains secretive of what those black boxes actually record. I remember a story that someone posted about a car company sending people to the states to actually spy on American households. I am going to see if I can find that. The story obviously was before the black boxes in cars.

To give you an idea of the extent some of the automakers will go. Back in the mid 1980’s several Los Angeles couples sued Toyota Motors after they discovered that the Japanese boarders each had rented a room to in their home were actually Toyota marketing executives incognito spying on each families to discover purchasing habits and hot buttons and decision making trends regarding purchasing.

Each boarder had presented themselves as recently arrived immigrants who completed their covers by going to work every day at a collection of low paying restaurant and factory jobs, while keeping detailed notes on all the families habits at night.

One astute and inquisitive home owner rifled through the belongings of their Japanese boarder after becoming suspicious about his comings and goings and discovered the detailed notes on their family and that the boarder actually worked for Toyota and was conducting a marketing study on their family which prompted a lawsuit and the eventual discovery of a half a dozen other Toyota Advertising Executives also posing as poor recently immigrated boarders.

To give you an idea how colorful the Car Business is the Dodge Brothers were two hard drinking, hard hitting, strong armed robbers and second story burglars who first fell in love with horse racing and then horseless carriage racing as a couple of low level Detroit thugs.

They took the proceeds of a heist and opened their own garage modifying car engines for racing when another young man named Henry Ford stumbled into their shop one day and became one of their first customers.

The Dodge brothers started helping design and making engines for Ford who paid the brothers in Stock as he quickly began to grow the Ford Motor Company.

By 1914 the annual dividends on the stock the Dodge Brothers held paid well over a million dollars a year!

Ford was so upset over the arrangements that he ended up buying back every share of Ford stock held in private hands and has stayed a private company ever since.

The Dodge brother’s sold theirs back to Ford in 1916 for 14 million dollars! Not a bad take for a couple of thugs who had parlayed the proceeds of a heist into millions of dollars and their own national brand cars in less than two decades.

Let us not forget the infamous John DeLorean and his arrest at LAX with over a 100 pounds of Cocaine on him, while President of the DeLorean Motor Company of Back to the Future Fame.

Auto making and selling ranks right up there with motion picture making, politics and Wall Street when it comes to a take no prisoners bankrupt ethics approach.

One in Seven Americans is either directly or indirectly employed by the Car Business. The stakes involved are huge and so is the power.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler


That's the story I was remembering Proto, thank you. Now if they went to such extremes back than I have no doubt that those black boxes are more than likely recording everything and anything that they can and sending it back to the programmers.

Think of the GPS coordinates for their favorite restaurants with time and date stamps and frequency. Or any location that is frequented.

Conversations and numbers of who they call and what they speak about.

I'm telling you the possibilities are endless and I'll bet that is why Toyota is so secretive about what is on those black boxes.