Park Ridge, III, - After being stalled for months by squabbling, standards for automotive "black boxes" are moving forward again, as automakers, suppliers, crash experts and even insurance companies swing their collective weight behind two separate efforts. The IEEE plans to publish a vehicle data recorder standard by year's end, and the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) expects to release a separate recommended-practices document in the same time frame, thus providing two distinct solutions to the companies and government agencies awaiting a standard. The resulting documents, which take different approaches to defining the automotive black box, are expected to serve as a first step toward the creation of a standardized method for collecting accident data. Automakers and crash experts hope that by supplying that first step, they will pave the way for greater highway safety.
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