Yep, the bloke just looked like a lying a-hole when the data came out. Typical coward's response to deny all blame, and glad the result was made public, if only to expose his appalling driving 'skills'.

Wish we could retrofit such devices to all the shabby boy-ricer types who like to practice their 'drifting' in suburban areas. May see less parents claiming their little darlings are sensible and safe drivers if such data was analysed.

Now to combine the black box technology with the new IBM patent application where they can turn your car engine on and off at traffice lights (red turns your engine off, green turns it on again) apply that when someone exceeds safe speeds or when approaching turns - the car automatically slows down to a safe speed.

That's about all I would expect from an HSV driver, who would ever buy such a car other than a man with a very tiny pecker.

Bob

There needs to be the usual evidential safeguards including that the same access to the data is provided for the defence as the prosecution. It's not obvious how this would be done given that the police removed the unit and sent it to their own analyst.

If the result had supported the driver, would it have been made available to the defence? Have there been any cases already where this happened? How accurate, comprehensive and reliable is the technology under various conditions? There's a fair bit of water to go under this bridge yet.

I would support 'black boxes' in cars but I think this is something different. What was used was the few seconds of data retained by the airbag activation system. Early airbags exploded following a substantial impact. Modern ones have sensors that detect speed, deaccelleration and other factors to determine when to activate. They record limited useful data and will only ever be part of the picture of what happened in an 'accident'.

I'd like to know just how sophisticated the datalogging capabilities of these units are. It's all very well to point to a certain speed as a factor in an accident. But do these units log lateral acceleration, steering position, yaw angles, suspension deflection, to give just 4 factors? Without that information you cannot conclusively point to speed as being the cause. In this case it's a safe bet, but we're talking about a precedent being used in future. Let's not forget that our Serious Crash Units that investigate these accidents are the same people who blamed a fatal motorcycle crash on drink/driving while completely missing a previously broken engine mount that has been shown to cause instability in that make of bike. I wouldn't trust these clowns as far as I could throw them.

I agree, Dave.

It would be sure to make people think twice before acting like idiots on the road if they knew they were accountable.

It's such a shame that people who buy nice cars like Holdens (aka Pontiacs) and then drive around acting like idiots, endangering everyone.

How much intelligence does it take to hold the accelerator down to 150km/h? What are they proving? Isn't the power of a car shown by how fast it gets up to the speed limit? What's the point of risking lives?

LA

Wow! I'm always amazed when people are so keen to give up their civil liberties. This is a very Big Brother move and should be opposed on that basis.

All it will lead to is a black market for people that can hack the black boxes. So those that want to break the law will continue to do so, and the rest of us will end up having our GPS/black box data analysed every time we need a WOF. If we have been found to have exceeded the speed limit at any time since the last WOF, then we will be fined accordingly.

In this topic I agree largely with the points raised by Alan. Fairness, equity and accuracy are important safeguards to preserve in our judicial system.

A deceleration from 150 km/h to 98 km/h in exactly 2 seconds is an average rate over those two seconds of 7.2 m/s/s or 0.74 G. Not as good as could be expected from an HSV under ideal conditions, but entirely consistent with maximum braking using ABS while in a corner.

If the same rate of deceleration were maintained (and that is likely but by no means certain) for exactly half a second longer, the speed at impact is calculated as 85 km/h.

And had there been no collision, only another 3.27 seconds after that, the car would have come to a complete halt. (Which of course is pure supposition, but it illustrates the time scale involved.)

That is if the numbers are precisely accurate. The accuracy of the answer is very sensitive to small changes in the data, especially the time. Introducing only very small differences, I calculate a possible range of the speed at impact from 92 all the way down to 73 km/h. You would want to know quite a lot about the accuracy of the system before accepting it as proven fact.

And you would like to be certain that the “crash investigators” who came up with “the maximum safe speed” for the corner had no connection with whoever is responsible for pulling the numbers out of a hat for the speed advisory signs on our highways. There are many corners where a car with the capabilities of an HSV can easily and safely double the “recommended” speed.

There are of course a few other signs that are equally wrong in the opposite direction, where the “recommended” speed is too high for most normal vehicles. Drivers have learned they can’t rely on these signs, and funnily enough, by and large they completely ignore them.

The distance from 150 km/h to impact can also be calculated, and curiously it seems not too sensitive to small errors: 110 to 114 metres. And there is no doubt that doing anywhere near 150 km/h only 110 metres before a corner is not clever. That sort of speed on a public road can never be justified.