The Effects of Collision-Related Power Loss on Toyota Safety Sense 3.0 Event Data

Toyota vehicles equipped with Toyota Safety Sense (TSS) can record detailed information surrounding various driving events. Often, this data is employed in accident reconstruction to better understand the dynamics of a collision. TSS data is comprised of three main categories: Vehicle Control History (VCH), Freeze Frame Data (FFD), and image records. During an event, it is possible that a vehicle undergoes a catastrophic power loss from the damages sustained during the event. In this paper, the effects of a sudden power loss on the VCH, FFD, and images are studied. Events are triggered on a TSS 3.0 equipped vehicle by driving toward a stationary target. After system activation, a total power loss is induced, triggered on the instrument cluster “BRAKE” alert message, at various delays after activation. This testing studies various signals recorded across VCH, FFD and image data including vehicle speed, measured accelerations and time and date. This testing also compares the acceleration values between the VCH, VBox 3i and third party sources. Results show that there is a minimum time to record after system activation to record any related data. Power losses which occur before this minimum time record no data and losses after the minimum time record incomplete data sets. Studied vehicle signals were all in general agreement with measured values from measurement equipment.