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Prior EDR testing methodologies required setting events in the airbag control module in the vehicle during controlled driving behavior. Duplicating events was nearly impossible, and it was difficult to separate how much differences in recorded speeds to reference speeds was due to measurement error, wheel slip, reporting time delays, or data truncation within the EDR. Recording thresholds have also increased making non-deployment and deployment events closer in magnitude, increasing the risk of accidentally exceeding the deployment threshold while setting events. The new methodology eliminates the risk of accidentally deploying airbags while gathering GPS and CAN bus data in the test vehicle. The techniques presented in this paper also allows gathering of data in vehicle without tampering with the airbag control module, which reduces the potential liability to testers using rental or borrowed test vehicles.

Vehicles using controller area networks (CANs) for on-board device communications may have event data recorders (EDRs) that either capture or reflect network feeds from an array of sensors and other electronic control units. Using the data recorded in an EDR for investigative purposes requires external verification of accuracy. However, conducting external tests that set events can be expensive due to the time and equipment involved. This paper proposes a practical verification method that uses CAN bus monitoring tools to compare vehicle network traffic to external measurements. The premise of this work is that data reliability from an EDR can be determined if the reliability of the network data source for the EDR can be determined. Once the reliability of the source is determined, the reliability of the event data can be quantified based on effects of truncation and sampling.