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Event Data Recorder--Friend or Foe?

H

Happy Trails II

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2021 SR DCSB Auto
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Seems all cars come with these now. It is in the SRS module of the 2021 Tacoma.
Toyota website says this: An Event Data Recorder (EDR) is an onboard device that receives information from these computers and records that information received several seconds before and/or a fraction of a second after a crash or near-crash situation. The data is intended to help understand how a vehicle's various systems functioned in a crash. The EDR is contained in the Supplemental Restraint System airbag Electronic Control Unit.

Page 9 of the manual adds this tidbit: Your vehicle may transmit the data recorded in these computers to Toyota without notification to you.
This also includes front camera video according to the manual.

OK, we live in a connected and surveilled world. No getting around it these days.

Has anyone found a operator/owner benefit of this? You might be able to defend against a false claim of liability, but can you access the info? Or only Toyota?
Has anyone encountered a failure of this feature that interfered with your vehicle operation and use?

This is the first new vehicle I purchased in 19 years. So its all kind of a bit weird to me. It's not like I'm operating a commercial airline full of paying passengers. Just a damn pickup truck.
 
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Im glad I dont have that in my 2017 :p


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I do not know what Toyota uses the data for, however in major crash reconstruction law enforcement agencies use the data to supplement TOTAL station measurements. The data recorder only captures a few moments just prior to the crash and is time sensitive. I am not aware of a manufacturer that has a longer retention time than 1 minute.

This system is also used to hail emergency services automatically if you use the Toyota services. It contains speed, gps location, airbag deployment and rollover detection to name a few.
 
I can (fairly confidently) tell you that Toyota doesn't care what you're doing and isn't ever going to pull your data. They aren't nearly as advanced of a data gathering company as Tesla or even Mercedes/BMW, these are fairly low end vehicles. Especially if the manual says they will notify you if they do pull any of this data.

I'd be willing to bet it's more of a black box component where it logs what the truck is doing and erases it constantly, holding a few hours worth of driving. They're only interested if it's some edge case incident that they would like to investigate.

And no, you'll never get a benefit of this, and I really hope that no future customer gets a benefit of it either. It would most likely mean you've been in an incident of decent proportion. Odds are they started figuring out how to do this after the whole Prius gas pedal issue, and needed a way to figure out which are people panicking and which are actual hardware issues.


EDIT: I think I overlooked HiterSixOne's comment before posting mine. He explained my "black box" part of it better than I did.
 
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