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Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the Office of Management and Budget for Review and Approval; Event Data Recorders Publication: Federal Register Agency: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Byline: Raymond R. Posten Date: 17 March 2022 Subjects: American Government  , Safety, Software
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[Federal Register Volume 87, Number 52 (Thursday, March 17, 2022)]
[Notices]
[Pages 15302-15304]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2022-05570]
[[Page 15302]]
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DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
[Docket No. NHTSA-2021-0058]
Agency Information Collection Activities; Submission to the
Office of Management and Budget for Review and Approval; Event Data
Recorders
AGENCY: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA),
Department of Transportation (DOT).
ACTION: Notice and request for comments on an existing collection in
use without an OMB Control Number.
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SUMMARY: In compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (PRA),
this notice announces that the Information Collection Request (ICR)
abstracted below will be submitted to the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB) for review and approval. The ICR describes the nature of
the information collection and its expected burden. This ICR is for
approval of an existing collection in use without an OMB Control Number
on event data recorders (EDRs). A Federal Register Notice with a 60-day
comment period soliciting comments on the following information
collection was published on August 26, 2021. Four comments were
received in response to the notice.
DATES: Comments must be submitted on or before April 18, 2022.
ADDRESSES: Written comments and recommendations for the proposed
information collection, including suggestions for reducing burden,
should be submitted to the Office of Management and Budget at
www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAMain. To find this particular information
collection, select ``Currently under Review--Open for Public Comment''
or use the search function.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: For additional information or access
to background documents, contact Carla Rush, U.S. Department of
Transportation, NHTSA, 202-366-4583, 1200 New Jersey Avenue SE, West
Building, Room W43-417, NRM-100, Washington, DC 20590.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Under the PRA (44 U.S.C. 3501 et seq.), a
Federal agency must receive approval from the Office of Management and
Budget (OMB) before it can collect certain information from the public,
it and a person is not required to respond to a collection of
information by a Federal agency unless the collection displays a valid
OMB control number. In compliance with these requirements, this notice
announces that the following information collection request will be
submitted to OMB.
Title: Event Data Recorders.
OMB Control Number: New.
Type of Request: Approval of an existing collection in use without
an OMB Control Number.
Type of Review Requested: Regular.
Length of Approval Requested: Three years.
Summary of the Collection of Information: 49 CFR part 563, Event
data recorders, specifies uniform, national requirements for vehicles
voluntarily equipped with EDRs concerning the collection, storage, and
retrievability of onboard motor vehicle crash event data. More
specifically it requires voluntarily installed EDRs in vehicles with a
gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) of 3,855 kilograms (8,500 pounds) or
less to:
Record 15 essential data elements;
Record up to 30 additional data elements if the vehicle is
equipped to record these elements;
Record these data elements in a standardized format, with
specifications for range, accuracy, resolution, sampling rate,
recording duration, and filter class;
Function after full-scale vehicle crash tests specified in
FMVSS Nos. 208 and 214; and
Have the capacity to record two events in a multi-event
crash.
In addition, part 563 requires vehicle manufacturers to make a
retrieval tool for the EDR information commercially available, and
include a standardized statement in the owner's manual indicating that
the vehicle is equipped with an EDR and describing its purpose. Part
563 helps ensure that EDRs record, in a readily usable manner, data
valuable for effective crash investigations and for analysis of safety
equipment performance (e.g., advanced restraint systems).
Description of the Need for the Information and Proposed Use of the
Information: Under 49 U.S.C. 322(a), the Secretary of Transportation
(the ``Secretary'') is authorized to prescribe regulations to carry out
the duties and powers of the Secretary. One of the duties of the
Secretary is to administer the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle
Safety Act, as amended. The Secretary has delegated the responsibility
for carrying out the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act to
NHTSA.\1\ Two statutory provisions, 49 U.S.C. 30182 and 23 U.S.C. 403,
authorize NHTSA to collect motor vehicle crash data to support its
safety mission. NHTSA collects motor vehicle crash information under
these authorities to support its statutory mandate to establish motor
vehicle safety standards and reduce the occurrence and cost of traffic
crashes.\2\ NHTSA also utilizes crash data in the enforcement of motor
vehicle safety recalls and other motor vehicle highway safety programs
that reduce fatalities, injuries, and property damage caused by motor
vehicle crashes. In 2006, NHTSA exercised its general authority to
issue such rules and regulations as deemed necessary to carry out
Chapter 301 of Title 49, United States Code to promulgate 49 CFR part
563.\3\
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\1\ 49 U.S.C. 105 and 322; delegation of authority at 49 CFR
1.95.
\2\ See 49 U.S.C. 30101 and 30111.
\3\ 71 FR 50997, August 28, 2006.
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NHTSA issued part 563 to improve crash data collection by
standardizing data recorded on EDRs to help provide a better
understanding of the circumstances in which crashes and injuries occur,
which will in turn lead to the development of safer vehicle designs.
EDR data are used to improve the quality of crash data collection to
assist safety researchers, vehicle manufacturers, and the agency in
crash investigations to understand vehicle crashes better and more
precisely. Similarly, vehicle manufacturers are able to utilize EDRs in
improving vehicle designs and developing more effective vehicle safety
countermeasures, and EDR data may be used by Advanced Automatic Crash
Notification (AACN) systems to aid emergency response teams in
assessing the severity of a crash and estimating the probability of
serious injury.
Additionally, the agency's experience in handling unintended
acceleration and pedal entrapment allegations has demonstrated that, if
a vehicle is equipped with an EDR, the data from that EDR can improve
the ability of both the agency and the vehicle's manufacturer to
identify and address safety concerns associated with possible defects
in the design or performance of the vehicle.
60-Day Notice: A Federal Register notice with a 60-day comment
period soliciting public comments on the following information
collection was published on August 26, 2021 (86 FR 47719). Four
comments were submitted in response to the notice. The commenters were
the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and Highway Loss Data
Institute, the National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies,
Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and the Center for Auto Safety.
All commenters supported the information collection;
[[Page 15303]]
however, the comments did not address the estimated cost and hour
burden of this information collection. The comments instead made
recommendations unrelated to this information collection for NHTSA to
mandate event data recorders and expand the number of data elements
required in part 563 and to make the data available to the public for
certain vehicles. These comments, however, cannot be addressed by this
process of seeking approval for the information collection for the
current part 563. NHTSA also notes that the Driver Privacy Act of 2015
assigns ownership of EDR data to the vehicle owner, provides
limitations on data retrieval from EDR data, and generally prohibits
access to EDR data with specific exceptions to this general rule.
Affected Public: The respondents are manufacturers that voluntarily
equip passenger cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles, trucks, and
buses having a GVWR of 3,855 kg (8,500 pounds) or less and an unloaded
vehicle weight of 2,495 kg (5,500 pounds) with EDRs.
Estimated Number of Respondents: The agency estimates that there
are approximately 18 manufacturers of vehicles subject to part 563.
Estimated Total Annual Burden Hours: NHTSA estimates that there are
no annual reporting or recordkeeping burdens associated with part 563,
except for the owner's manual statement requirement which will be
incorporated into the consolidated owner's manual requirements
information collection (OMB Control Number 2127-0541). Vehicle
manufacturers are not required to retain or report information gathered
by EDRs because the devices themselves continuously monitor vehicle
systems and determine when to record, retain, and/or overwrite
information. The information is collected automatically by electronic
means. Data are only required to be locked and cannot be overwritten
when a recordable event occurs (e.g., an air bag deploys in a crash
event). When recordable events do occur, EDRs only capture data for a
few seconds. NHTSA estimates that there is no annual hourly burden
associated with the information standardization requirements of part
563.
Estimated Total Annual Burden Cost: In the August 2006 final rule,
the agency estimated that the costs associated with the final rule were
negligible. Several factors contributed to this determination. First,
NHTSA estimated that about 64 percent of new light vehicles in 2005
already added the EDR capability to the vehicles' existing air bag
control systems. Thus, the EDRs were simply capturing information that
was already being processed by the vehicle. Additionally, in the final
rule the agency sought to limit the number of EDR data elements and
associated requirements to the minimum necessary to achieve our stated
purposes. At that time, NHTSA determined that the industry's current
state-of-the-art EDRs largely met the purposes of part 563. Thus, it
was unnecessary to specify requirements for additional sensors or other
hardware that would increase EDR costs appreciably. NHTSA stated in the
final rule that the most significant technology cost could result from
the need to upgrade data storage.
The cost of data storage, long-term or short-term, has drastically
reduced over the years.\4\ Regardless of the storage type, costs are
now a fraction of what they were even 10 years ago.\5\ A recent study
from NHTSA looking at EDR technologies reported that information
provided by industry indicated that a typical recorded event requires
about 2 kilobytes (Kb) of memory depending on the manufacturer.\6\
Information from manufacturers also indicated that the typical
microprocessor used in vehicle applications, in approximately the 2013
timeframe, had 32 Kb or 64 Kb of flash data as part of the air bag
control module (ACM) and that only a fraction of the memory is
dedicated to the EDR data. This study also estimated the total memory
usage for all Table I and Table II data elements, listed at 49 CFR
563.7, recorded for the minimum required duration and frequency
requirements in part 563. It reported that to record Table I and II
data elements would require 0.072 Kb and 0.858 Kb of memory storage,
respectively.
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\4\ https://www.computerworld.com/article/3182207/cw50-data-storage-goes-from-1m-to-2-cents-per-gigabyte.html.
\5\ https://hblok.net/blog/posts/2017/12/17/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage-4/.
\6\ DOT HS 812 929, https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/light-vehicle-event-data-recorder-technologies.
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In addition, NHTSA now estimates that 99.5 percent of model year
2021 light vehicles have a compliant EDR, meaning manufacturers have
largely already incurred the cost of meeting the part 563 requirements.
Given that EDRs are installed on nearly all new light vehicles, the
large amount of storage that is part of the air bag control module (32
kb or 64 kb), the small fraction required for EDR data (<1 kb), and the
negligible costs for data storage, NHTSA continues to believe that
there would be no additional costs or negligible costs associated with
the part 563 requirements. Therefore, the cost burden for this
collection of information is discussed qualitatively.
Part 563 only applies to vehicles voluntarily-equipped with EDRs.
Therefore, any burden is based on the differences in cost between a
compliant and non-compliant EDR. In considering additional burden for
compliant EDRs, NHTSA considered: (1) The additional burden of meeting
the 10-day data crash survivability requirement; and (2) the additional
burden of meeting the data format requirements. Part 563 requires that
an EDR must function during and after the compliance tests specified in
FMVSS Nos. 208 and 214. The EDR's stored data is required to be
downloadable 10 days after the crash tests. This requirement provides a
basic functioning and survivability level for EDRs, but does not ensure
that EDRs survive extremely severe crashes, fire, or fluid immersion.
The burden for data survivability can include costs for an additional
power supply and enhancements for computer area network (CAN) such as
wiring, data bus, and harness. However, before part 563 was established
the agency had not documented an EDR survivability problem except in
rare and extremely severe events such as fire and submergence. Thus,
the agency does not believe vehicle manufacturers incur additional
costs to comply with the ability to retrieve the essential data
elements 10 days after the crash test.
With regard to the memory capacity required to meet the part 563
data requirements, due to proprietary concerns, the adequacy of
existing memory capacity of part 563 non-compliant vehicles is not
known. However, we believe that the part 563 requirements are
comparable to the current industry EDR practices. In terms of the
burden associated with software algorithm changes to meet the data
format requirements, the agency believes that, in the event a vehicle
manufacturer needs to redesign their software algorithm, the redesign
would be minor (e.g., changing the specifications in their codes). The
agency estimates that the cost of algorithm redesign would be
negligible on a per vehicle basis and it would be an upfront cost
(i.e., not a recurring burden).
Public Comments Invited: You are asked to comment on any aspects of
this information collection, including (a) whether the proposed
collection of information is necessary for the proper performance of
the functions of the agency, including whether the information will
have practical utility; (b) the accuracy of the agency's estimate of
the burden of the proposed collection of information, including the
validity of the methodology and assumptions used;
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(c) ways to enhance the quality, utility and clarity of the information
to be collected; and (d) ways to minimize the burden of the collection
of information on respondents, including the use of appropriate
automated, electronic, mechanical, or other technological collection
techniques or other forms of information technology, e.g., permitting
electronic submission of responses.
(Authority: The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995; 44 U.S.C. chapter
35, as amended; 49 CFR 1.49; and DOT Order 1351.29.)
Raymond R. Posten,
Associate Administrator for Rulemaking.
[FR Doc. 2022-05570 Filed 3-16-22; 8:45 am]
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