A Compendium of Passenger Vehicle Event Data Recorder Literature and Analysis of Validation Studies

This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of original equipment event data recorders (EDR) installed in passenger vehicles, as well as a summary of results from the instrumented validation studies. The authors compiled 187 peer-reviewed studies, textbooks, legal opinions, governmental rulemaking policies, industry publications and presentations pertaining to event data recorders. Of the 187 total references, there were 64 that contained testing data. The authors conducted a validation analysis using data from 27 papers that presented both the EDR and corresponding independent instrumentation values for:

• Vehicle velocity change (ΔV)
• Pre-Crash vehicle speed

The combined results from these studies highlight unique observations of EDR system testing and demonstrate the observed performance of original equipment event data recorders in passenger vehicles.

Review and analysis of the current body of work indicates that original equipment event data recorders accurately measure and record the vehicle wheel (or transmission output) speed and integrated accelerations of the module. Reported values of vehicle velocity change (ΔV) and Pre-Crash vehicle speed tend to be less than the actual values. Numerous factors may contribute to the underreporting of this data. For Pre-Crash vehicle speed, the predominant factors include longitudinal wheel slip and sideslip. For ΔV, factors include off-axis accelerations and hardware or recording limitations. Analysts should consider event recorder data within the context of an accident reconstruction and account for factors that cause discrepancies between the reported and actual values.