All Vehicles to be Fitted with SOS Black Box from 2018

Despite fears that the introduction of an ‘SOS black box’ encroaches the realms of ‘Big Brother’, the EU have approved a rule that will make it a standard feature of vehicles from 2018.

These in-built devices will contact the emergency service centre in the case of a collision. The cost? An estimated £90 per vehicle with the potential to cut road deaths across Europe by 10%. However, there are doubts to how safe-guarded drivers’ privacy will be with the use of these boxes.

This move had a lot of criticism from the UK government on the basis of cost and the belief that Britain’s road network was responsive enough to not require this level of emergency response to be implemented.

What does it do?

Quite simply, the device - called the eCall - will ring the nearest EU-wide emergency centre in the case of a cash. The benefit of this is that the system will work even if the occupants of the vehicle are in no state to dial themselves.

The eCall will provide the authorities with information such as exact location, time of crash, direction of travel and even the number of passengers in the vehicle.

Some automobile manufacturers already offer this service as a part of a wider package, while others widely approved of this introduction. The European Commission has suggested that this new law will help to reduce emergency response time and therefore could work to reduce the number of people killed in road traffic collisions.