good morning. thank you for watching fox & friends first going way back to begin your day. we hope your day is starting out great. you probably heard of black boxes on planes but did you know there might be one in your car. as doug mcelway explains it could be a good and bad thing. the automobile has been a metaphor for american independence and freedom. some fear this little device will change all of that. the national highway traffic association has issued a proposed rule all cars be equipped with a black box. 96 percent of the new cars already have them measuring inputs like speed, seat belt use wheel spin and direction. black baches from a single day will add more information than a year s worth of crash testing like this as the head of the
sit-ins to avoid bloodshed. back in this country, most everyone is familiar with the term black box. the data recorder officials try to access after a plane crashes. you may not even know it, but the newer your car is, the more likely you have one in there. doug mcelway tells us whether that s good or bad all depends on who you talk to. magnificent motors. reporter: the automobile has been a metaphor for american independence and freedom. some fear this little device will change all that. the national highway traffic safety administration issued a proposed rule all cars be equipped with a black box, a data recorder by september next year. 96% of new cars already have them, measuring speed, pedal effort, seat belt use, wheel spin, direction. black box data retrieved from u.s. car accidents in a single day would provide more information than a year s worth of crash testing like this, head of the design team that s standardizing the devices but fears they have a massive
example of the governments and companies having too much access to our private lives. doug mckelway with the news from washington. what kind of information do these black boxes retain? well, shep, the good news is they don t retain voices, the cockpit trans missions or passenger compartment transmissions or how many times you reach for your big gulp or your latte. they do retain speed information, gas and brake pedal inputs. lateral accelerations. steering turns and stuff like that. one expert says the data from one day of crashes from the united states is more than you can get from a year of crash testing. but in the wrong hands, this kinds of data can be easily manipulated. roll that odometer back to zero. they can change the vin number on the vehicle. in unscrupulous insurance adjustors or law
already. the national highway traffic safety administration issued a proposed rule they be in all cars by september of 2014, year away. they re a valuable tool. the feds can get more information from black boxes in one day of u.s. crashes than in a year of crash testing. but they have no authority over who owns that data. the data done manipulated and somebody with the right electronic tool can turn back odometer readings, change the vin number, the speed when you had an accident, on and on. if you went to the internet and look at erasing crash data or look at the number of people making tools, to do these things, you ll find hundreds of thousands of people who are already clicking on to these sites and they must be doing that for some purpose. many thought that not the digital age the day of rolling back odometers had ended.
safety of the vehicles. the automakers of the cars that performed poorly tell cnn their vehicles exceed federal requirements but some, like nissan and vw, say they will review the results of the crash testing. kate? chris? important to review the results and particularly important because this is a really fast growing market, small cars in this country, right? absolutely. they are very popular, and i asked the folks there with this highway safety group how do you decide which cars are you going to test, that you re going to test and they say we look at the cars that are selling the most so all of those cars that you saw in the piece extremely popular among on cuonsumers. thanks so much, rene. one of the reasons they re popular and one of the reasons that big cars and suvs remain popular. especially when you re putting your family in the vehicle you want to know you re going to