By Andrew Liszewski
The RoadBox was recently unveiled at the KES 2006 electronics show in Korea and it’s kind of left me scratching my head. Basically the VGA quality camera is mounted near your rear view mirror and sees everything going on in front of your vehicle. Built-in acceleration and speed monitors are able to determine when an ‘accident’ has occurred which then causes the camera to save the video from 14 seconds before and 6 seconds after the incident. In addition the the speed and acceleration data is also documented in the event it’s needed later on.
I think the idea of being able to record the events leading up to and following a crash is great, but I question how effective this particular device can be. For one it can really only see out the front of your vehicle so unless you want to mount a RoadBox camera in every other window in your car you could easily miss capturing the crash if another vehicle hits you from the back or side. And as I see it the biggest advantage of recording a crash in the first place is to provide rock-solid proof in the event of an investigation but with the camera pointing forward odds are any crash that does get recorded will be the fault of the person driving. As useful as the footage will be I don’t know too many people willing to provide proof of their own mistakes.
Could be useful if the data recorded logs the direction of impact and speed, as this could be used to reconstruct the accident on a PC with the correct software even if the camera misses it. Most rear end shunts are black and white in any case so the only real problem with this device is for sideways accidents at junctions and roundabouts.