Mandatory implementation for in-vehicle eCall: Privacy compatible?

The Engineering Economics, 2022

Increasing road traffic safety is a requirement for the growth and development of economies and society in general, and any endeavour contributing to an increase in the safety of road traffic participants must be evaluated and even encouraged, as there is no measurement for the value of human life. An important technological improvement that contributes to road traffic safety by reducing response time in case of an accident is the eCall In Vehicle System, which provides real-time data on-site, even without human intervention. The aim of the present study is to approach the introduction of the eCall In Vehicle System from a cost-benefit standpoint of equipping aftermarket passenger vehicles with this technology. To this end, we propose an analytic research approach in the form of a conclusive study on statistical data, in order to support decisions regarding future implementation.

2016

This paper describes the needed legal conditions to implement Event Data Recorder in public fleets of vehicles. These conditions are specific because vehicles are owned by the government or local authorities and can be used by different kind of persons. The legal terms concern technical conditions and have to ensure the recommendations of the authority protecting privacy and personal data. Potential drivers have to be informed about the presence of an EDR in the vehicles and about the recorded data. Users are free to agree (or not) for recording data and their hierarchy can't access these data against their employees. The EDR has to not affect the vehicle safety and all vehicles have to be declared to the government. All these legal conditions have been applied for a French project but are valid for all European countries since they are based on the human right and the European laws.

Trans. Comput. Sci., 2020

The European eSafety initiative aims to improve the safety and efficiency of road transport. The main element of eSafety is the pan European eCall project - an in-vehicle system which idea is to inform reliably and automatically about road collisions and even very serious accidents. As estimated by the European Commission, the implemented system will reduce services’ response time by 40%. This would probably save 2,500 people a year. In 2015 the European Parliament adopted the legislation that from the end of March 2018 all new cars sold in EU should be equipped with the eCall system. The limitation of this idea is that only a small part of cars driven in UE are sold yearly (about 3.7% cars in 2015). This paper presents the details of concept of an on-board eCall device which can be installed at the owners’ request in used vehicles. Proposed system will be able to detect a road accident, indicate the number of vehicle’s occupants and send those information to dedicated emergency ser...

Virtual ITS European Congress, 2020

All new types of M1 (cars) and N1 (light commercial vehicles) vehicle categories registered in the European Union from 31 March 2018 are required to have eCall functionality. Hence, more than 300 million vehicles that are already on European roads cannot benefit from the deployment of eCall. To define the standards and specifications and pave the way for deployment of aftermarket eCall systems, Project sAFE co-funded through the 2018 call of the Connecting Europe Facility was launched. As a part of the project, stakeholder requirements for aftermarket eCall systems were investigated with semi-structured in-depth interviews. It was found that although some requirements for aftermarket systems are same as regulated eCall systems, some requirements (i.e. installation and triggering) do not exist and/or different, and they need to be determined throughout sAFE Project for ensuring the full functionality, compatibility, interoperability, continuity and conformity of aftermarket devices across Europe.

Krytyka Prawa, 2021

In case of conventional vehicles, no or very little data was generated. The widespread use of autonomous vehicles, which have a large number of sensors and camera systems in addition to memory modules and carry out permanent data exchange, has the potential to reveal not only the entire living conditions of the passengers, but also those of pedestrians, and others. The increasing networking of vehicles increases efficiency and mobility. On the one hand, this networking is entirely voluntary, but it can also be mandatory, as in the case of the eCall emergency call system. Regulation (EU) 2015/758 made it mandatory for car-manufacturers from March 31, 2018 to equip their vehicles with automatic emergency call system, which in the event of an accident automatically transmits the position and other relevant data to the rescue services. Can this possibility of ubiquitous surveillance may create legal problems.? This increasing role of data requires special attention against the background of data protection based on fundamental rights and privacy.

The present use of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) can be defined as a hybrid between information and communication technologies to improve different aspects of mobility and transport. The potential value of the next generation ITS can be assessed as an integrated array of services satisfying customer preferences, optimising policy objectives and generating business revenues. Based on industry interviews, the analysis of a traffic information service and an 'emergency call' service permitted the multidimensional appreciation of deployment scenarios of these next generation Intelligent Transport Systems. The implementation of an on-board emergency call (eCall) is an ITS service which has already been deployed in different countries. Several private and public initiatives have already resulted into preliminary and purely private eCall services, mainly proprietary to the car industry, each with different underlying revenue and cost models. On the European level, a Memorandu...

The article deals with the eCall system that automatically allows announcing a traffic accident of a road vehicle to an emergency call line 112. Pursuant to EU legal regulations, the eCall system shall be mandatorily applied in all new passenger cars category M1 and light trucks category N1.

Interest in Intelligent Transportation Systems comes from the problems caused by traffic congestion, road accidents and air pollution. Traffic congestion continues to grow worldwide as a result of increased motorization, population growth, changes in population density and urbanization. Interest in ITS can also be attributed to reducing road accidents and increasing traffic safety. The most common causes for road accidents are excessive speed, inattentive driving and ignorance of the right-of-way rules. To eliminate these causes, experience, knowledge of traffic regulations and a new car are not enough – vehicle safety systems have to take part as well. Therefore, the European Union issued a directive on the installation of intelligent systems, whose functions are active support during driving, warning the driver in dangerous situations and alerting passengers of the car in case of irregularities in motor function or actions carried out by the driver that may cause danger, such as swerving while falling asleep. These systems help drivers to avoid accidents, and in the event of a collision, an emergency call is automatically made. Furthermore, they can be used to regulate traffic patterns or to reduce engine performance, which would reduce pollution. With these benefits in mind, the EU has indicated to the automotive industry that installation of these new Intelligent Transportation Systems should be mandatory in their new vehicles.

Sustainability

Ensuring a higher degree of road safety contributes both to the quality of transport services and to the level of the costs involved in rescue operations. The initiation points of managing a rescue operation are situational awareness on accident detection and the appropriate assessment of the required resources. The eCall in Vehicle System (eCall IVS) for passenger vehicles aims to minimize rescue team arrival times to accident sites, and meet assignment needs in the rescue chain. Implementation costs and benefits for the eCall IVS have been investigated, providing implications for rescue operations management. The findings show that the benefits of eCall IVS implementation outweigh the costs, and savings achieved in the rescue operations are obtained by shortening the time to reach the place of the accident and by efficient intervention through a more accurate allocation of the necessary resources, due to timely and relevant information.

2015

eCall, the pan-European automatic crash notification system, will facilitate road vehicles to contact emergency services autonomously when a potentially injurious crash has been detected by vehicle sensors. Type-approval requirements will set out conditions for assessing systems under which automatic triggering of eCalls will be mandatory. Research is needed to specify the accident typologies and severities represented by these conditions. This paper analyses what definition of accident conditions would ensure that a high number of casualties benefit from automatic eCalls. The conditions should also allow cost-effective type-approval testing, avoid excessive numbers of superfluous eCalls, and not restrict manufacturer’s design freedom. Two conditions were considered as being particularly suitable for the European type-approval system: − Condition A: Trigger in accident conditions similar to, and at least as severe as, a mandatory frontal or lateral fullscale crash test. − Condition ...