If you are involved in a serious personal injury accident involving a car or SUV, your vehicle’s “black box” contains useful information that can assist your personal injury attorney and accident reconstruction expert in a personal injury lawsuit.
A black box is actually an event data recording device. It records data regarding your vehicle’s speed, direction, braking and other information. For years in personal injury and product liability lawsuits Toyota has argued that event data recorders were unreliable. This of course was because the data that they collected was normally not very helpful for Toyota.
However, now according to the Los Angeles Times, Toyota seems to have done an about-face. The company is citing data from these devices in order to argue that driver error, and not product defects, are to blame for the sudden acceleration issues in some of its vehicles.
As quoted by the Times, according to Henry Jasney, senior counsel at Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, “It sounds duplicitous when all along Toyota has been saying this is unreliable, and now they are using it as their defense and they are not releasing the data to the public.”
