The Reminger Report: Emerging Technologies

Regulations & Recommendations on Autonomous Vehicle Data

July 22, 2021 Reminger Co., LPA Season 1 Episode 14
The Reminger Report: Emerging Technologies
Regulations & Recommendations on Autonomous Vehicle Data
Show Notes Transcript

Today,  Zachary is once again joined by Stuart Sherry, an electrical engineer and senior staff consultant with Engineering Systems, Inc.

Zach and Stuart discuss crash investigations on autonomous vehicles as well as the growing need for regulations and recommendations regarding autonomous vehicle data.

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ZBP

            That’s interesting.  Now one of the things that you do as part of your job is, correct me if I’m wrong, but at least as I understand it, is you investigate accidents after the fact as it relates to these technologies to determine what role they may have played or just what happened in the crash in general.  I know just from my experience that in the last 10-plus years, a lot of vehicles now contain what we call or what’s commonly referred to as the “black box,” the ECM module, and I’ve had a couple of cases that I’ve handled where they’ve pulled those ECM modules, they’ve pulled the black boxes and they’ve downloaded some data and they’ve given it to me, and it shows some stuff - the speed of the vehicle, the time of the impact, whether or not the brake was applied, the last time the gas pedal was pushed, but there’s not a lot of other data at least in some of the vehicles outside of those basic parameters.  As you investigate these motor vehicle accidents that involve some of these more advanced technologies, tell me, what are you looking for?  What can you see and what does the investigation look like now?

 

SS

            I think that is going to be the very interesting part of the future of autonomous driving.  Today, as you mentioned, we have the Part 563 of the Codified Federal Regulations that basically establishes if your car has, as you mentioned, ECM or an event data recorder it’s often called, here’s the things it has to record:  as you said, maybe brake applied, gas pedal position, velocity, it has to record X number of seconds before an accident, and that’s defined and that’s great, but there’s not a lot of information available about or defined as to what’s needed for a car that has an autonomous driving capability.  For example, I did a case study on a Tesla that did a crash or had an accident while it was on autopilot, and the EDR data contained nothing that was relevant for the crash.  What had to happen in that case is, you have to work with the manufacturer, so in this case, Tesla, and gain access to some of their proprietary information.  That’s where I see the future going, that either we’re going to end up with more regulations or we’re going to have some issues with manufacturers or suppliers because there’s a lot of information that’s stored that may give clear information or clear answers to what happened during an accident.  For example, maybe a radar system that will tell you it had a conflict with the LiDAR system saying, hey I saw an obstacle, and the LiDAR system said I didn’t.  That’s not defined to be recorded in an event data recorder, and so an OEM, original equipment manufacturer, or a supplier may or may not decide to store that in some other module, so if you go to a crash investigation, maybe there’s a sensor fusion ECU now.  It’s not an event data recorder, it’s not an ECM, it’s not an airbag control module, that’s not defined by any federal regulations what to record, so we would be having to work with the manufacturer of those devices to gain access to the proprietary software, their code, which I think becomes a difficult process.  You may or may not have cooperation from that party depending what side they’re on in the litigation, and that’s really where a lot of the answers are going to lie in the future.  I look at black box data from aircrafts that’s been around forever - well-defined, been in the industry for generations.  It’s still new in the auto industry, and it’s not adapting, I believe, fast enough to support crash investigation for autonomous-type features.

 

ZBP

            A couple things I’d like to unpack from what you just said, the first of which is that as it relates to the event data recorder or as I refer to it as the ECMs, is that these black box, the data is currently covered by, you indicated, a federal regulation, is that correct?

 

SS

            Yes, that is correct.

 

ZBP

            Do you see or do you have any sort of predictions?  Do you anticipate that we’ll see federal regulations that also govern the data that surrounds the autonomous features?

 

SS

            I do think we will because you look at NHTSA for example, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and they’re very active in this space.  They’ve started their, I believe, called “AV,” Autonomous Vehicle, Start Program where they’re getting input from manufacturers, from suppliers, to try and really understand what do they really need to do.  So I think we will see something in the future.  It’ll just really be a question of what it will be and if it will be consistent across manufacturers, if it’ll be a recommendation like we see with the current one that it doesn’t mandate you have a data recorder but says if you do, here’s what you must do.  So will we see something like that, if you have autopilot or kind of like super-cruise or something where you can have hands off the wheel, here’s the things you must record.  But I definitely think we will see it because as I said NHTSA is involved in discussion on these topics.

 

ZBP

            One of the things that I know that I’ve discussed, and this is an ongoing topic, not just in autonomous vehicles, but just in a lot of the emerging technology space, is the fact that these companies generate, not just these companies but these technologies generate a lot of data, and it seems like it’s an exponential growth of data that is recorded and then used and analyzed to assist the product in becoming better, and so it occurs to me that if there is this large amount of data that’s being collected for the vehicle to make these decisions, it’s got to be stored somewhere, and as you indicated, in the case of the Tesla, you just needed the proprietary access to gain it, but what occurred to me that eventually, NHTSA, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or some other regulatory body would step in and regulate that data.

 

SS

            Yeah, I get the same feeling.  Like you said, there’s so much data collected today.  Some of it stays on the car, so if we have a car in an accident, we can go to it and somehow access it immediately, but a lot of it, a majority of it, is stored somewhere else off-site, like you said, on servers that are used to improve their learning algorithms, so that data may be accessible elsewhere after a crash for years or who knows how long, and like you said, the issue really can be interesting.  Do we start to get some standards and regulations saying, this is the kind of things you must record if you have these features?  Now I could see on the OEM or manufacturers’ side, them arguing against the regulations saying it’s an undue burden on us to make us record this data, and that’s where I think maybe you start to see recommendations where NHTSA says or we get a regulation that says, if you do this, here’s how you should do it, so that may relieve some of that burden, but every OEM, I think, also does do it differently.  Most cars today do have some sort of cellular capability where they are transmitting data to their Ford server or GM server or something somewhere, so you’re going to see more and more of that become accessible probably through these kind of proceedings.

 

ZBP

            It’s interesting because we’ve had this discussion with some other guests about the question always goes back to who owns the data, and as you’re talking about, and I’m not picking out any specific company, but the vehicles transmitting the data back to the manufacturers to be stored on the manufacturers’ servers or in their cloud platforms to essentially help them develop better algorithms and better decision-making processes, and the question gets asked at least, who owns that date?  If I’m the driver driving a car and I’m the one that essentially is helping to create that data, do I have some ownership interest?  So it is interesting, this topic comes up in a lot of spaces and so it seems like it’s going to be probably prevalent in this space, too.

 

SS

            Yeah, I would agree.  I mean, as it is today, if we have to access an event data recorder for a case we’re investigating, we are supposed to get permission from the owner of that vehicle.  There can be exceptions made if it’s a criminal investigation or things of that nature, but at least today, it seems that the default is the owner of the vehicle owns the event data recorder data, but to your point, we all have cell phones and we just thumb through the terms of service and click “Okay.”  We don’t ever, I mean most of us don’t ever read who owns that data.  We all know it’s probably not us, and I can for sure see our cars in the future, the first time you start it up, a screen comes up.  Read through 10 pages, Accept, yep, sounds good.  I want my car to work great, so I Accept, and later you find out you’ve sold all your data to them and you have no ownership.  That’s most likely the way things will go from a corporation’s standpoint.

 

ZBP

            This is another topic that I’ve heard come up, and I don’t know if you have any thoughts on it, but one of the things that I’ve hears from a business model from some of these vehicle manufacturers is that they’re going to start offering some of these technologies in a subscription-based model that can be turned on and off.  So you might download a Level 2-plus autonomous vehicle feature.  You drive it in July and August.   You pay some dollar amount per month.  September rolls around and you say, I don’t use it that much.  I’ve got no long trips planned or I’m just driving the car around.  I turned it off.  And I wonder if that subscription service is utilized or that model is utilized, if we’re going to see some of the data ownership issues that you just described become more prevalent.

 

SS

            I would say yes.  I can tell you in my previous life when I was doing development of these kinds of issues, we were developing a product that was more of what I call a comfort feature for autonomous vehicles, so if you own an autonomous vehicle, you’d want to probably have a nice comfortable seat to sit in, and we were developing technologies to add vibration, lumbar massage, those really nice comfort features, and the idea was to sell that as a subscription, so the seat would already have all of the hardware and software included, and you decided, like you said, I’m going to take the long trip, I want to have my vibration massage for this long trip, and you would pay X number of dollars to have it on that trip.  So that’s already out there and in discussion.

 

ZBP

            That’s interesting.  Well, Stuart, that’s all that we have for today.  I just wanted to thank you again for taking the time to come and talk with us.  Your expertise in this area obviously is very beneficial both to myself but I know to our listeners as you explain this technology, especially from an engineering perspective, it really kind of helps us to understand how it plays a role in the cars we’re driving now and probably will be driving in the next five to ten years.

 

SS

            Thanks a lot, Zach.  I appreciate it as well.

 

ZBP

            Thank you.