This might be decades away, but it could be implemented tomorrow. This is what we currently know:

1. There is a trend towards black box flight recorders for cars. Cars can measure impact forces to determine whether the air bags should be deployed. It is simple to record such data. Police and now civilians are using video cameras that record what is happening in front of the vehicle – for use as evidence for who is to blame in an accident. GPS systems are also being used for trucks, so that in an accident we know how fast they were traveling just prior.

2. People are happily trading privacy for benefits, and with time we are allowing more and more of our private life to become data.

3. Many accidents are caused by inattention due to:

• speaking on a phone
• texting
• opening / consuming food and drink
• sneezing
• lighting a cigarette
• falling asleep
• conversing / arguing with others in the vehicle
• being on drugs or alcohol

In many places phone use by drivers has been banned. And of course so has being drunk. The obvious next target for the authorities is anything else you might be doing with your hands and distracting you. They might want to ban eating and drinking while driving.

A good way of proving if someone was distracted just before crashing is to film the driver. Like store security cameras it could be on an overwrite loop of say 5 minutes. That way, if people knew it would:

• only ever be seen by crash investigators
• only contain the last 5 minutes

they probably wouldn’t mind it being there. And such a device would be dirt cheap to deploy, the trick is to get it to stop recording when an accident occurs.