Tesla autopilot driver 'was speeding' moments before death – prelim report The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has released its preliminary report into the Tesla crash that killed Joshua Brown, a 40-year-old Ohio man who was using the car's Autopilot function at the time of his death. Brown was driving down US Highway 27A in Florida when a truck hauling a 53-foot trailer packed with …
Unlikely, since the crash is likely to be so violent as to break the camera. Not even black boxes (and they're built to take a pounding) are immune. Plus, consider where the best place to put a camera would be (in the mirror or visor) and remember what part of the car got decapitated more than the driver.
"The crash is likely to be so violent as to break the camera"
Who cares? It won't break the memory card and that doesn't need to be where the lens is.
"Not even black boxes (and they're built to take a pounding) are immune."
What kills black boxes is immersion in salt water for weeks on end.
Cars already have black boxes. The Airbag control system constantly logs activity, snapshooting the last couple of minutes it in a near-crash or crash scenario (anywhere it moves to "arm" or "deploy" mode) and keeping the last few such events in flash.
This logging has been used by insurance companies to decline payouts when it's shown the driver was reckless (in the case I'm thinking of, the driver was shown to be exceeding 100mph in the 30 seconds before the crash and had braked hard enough that the airbag system was anticipating a crash several times in the preceeding few minutes - all in a low-speed urban area.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_data_recorder
Actually something else the EU forced on the UK. Are all these to be removed from lorries if Brexit goes ahead. So now we have laminated windscreens back to zebra zone, car headlamps back to sealed beams, all these were laws forced on the UK by the EU. However back to the guy in the car, just having the lorry with markings would have made a difference.
Either or both of those minor changes might not have just saved his life, but prevented the collision entirely.
Given our ever increasing reliance of sensors to replace or augment our own senses, surely it makes sense to be as visible as possible to those sensors.
Perhaps even go as far a putting IR strobes or some other machine visible marker on the corners (high and low) of all new vehicles. Encode some positional data and vehicle footprint into the strobing and visibility of a single lamp would be sufficient to define the entire space occupied by a vehicle. This should free up a great deal of processing power to deal with everything else.
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