Vehicle Telematics: What Data is Your Car Collecting?
This could either be good news or bad news depending on how you look at it. Modern vehicles are now collecting all kinds of data about you as you’re driving and as you’re using the vehicle. It’s called vehicle telematics, and telematics records everything from: Are the doors open? Are the lights on? Are you pressing on the brakes? What’s the speed? Are the turn signals on? What are you listening to on the radio? It can even gather information from your smart device when you connect it via Bluetooth.
How Vehicle Telematics is Used in Investigations
These data points can be used in investigations. This article talks about how when the Las Vegas truck incident occurred a couple of months ago, the police used it to find out what happened. But this can also be used in private litigation and civil cases. We’ve handled many cases where we have extracted records and data from vehicles, sometimes surreptitiously. If you are a person who owns a vehicle and a spouse or a child or somebody has used that vehicle, and you want to know how they used it, where they went, or how fast they were going with somebody else in the vehicle, you can find that out by extracting information from the black box of these vehicles.
Using Telematics to Detect Infidelity
Even something as simple as whether somebody was sitting in the passenger seat can be determined. If you suspect your partner is cheating on you, you can find out if somebody was sitting in the passenger seat and if the door was opened. For example, if you see that somebody was sitting in the passenger seat, the driver’s door opened, the driver’s door closed, and then the passenger door opened a minute later, that indicates somebody walked around and opened the door for that passenger it wasn’t just somebody who jumped out. That could indicate infidelity.
How Can You Tell If Someone Was in the Passenger Seat?
How do you know somebody was in the passenger seat? Well, airbags are set to be active if there is weight on the seat, so that’s how you can tell. Vehicles collect more information than you can imagine window switches, light switches, heating and air conditioning, whether the seat heater was turned on, whether the steering wheel heater was on. Using this information can really provide a lot of benefits and intelligence in civil cases, criminal cases, lawsuits, asset recovery, and even tracking locations via GPS.
