Are we ready for biometric tachographs?

By Professor Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner

Driver inattentiveness is a significant cause of road traffic collisions. Alongside speeding and intoxication, being distracted by phones, pets and passengers is a contributory factor in many avoidable road incidents leading to death and serious injury.

Many countries have laws against using devices while driving but outlawing behaviour is the performative bit; what changes behaviour is enforcement. Historically, the most regulated source of distraction has been driver fatigue. For over 40 years the risk from heavy commercial vehicles has driven strict limits on hours-at-the-wheel and mandatory rest periods, right across what was the European Economic Community (now the EU). And the task of accurately and auditably recording compliance by drivers and their employers was given to in-vehicle technology – the tachograph.

Limiting hours and setting compulsory breaks was restricted to larger commercial goods and passenger vehicles, partly because other elements were unmeasurable, and principally because interfering with the driving of private cars has rarely been politically attractive. Nevertheless, driver inattentiveness remains a significant risk to road users. Onboard technology has evolved but generally followed the tachograph approach: taking data about the vehicle and drawing inferences about the driver and their driving. This methodology misses other major risk areas like taking your hands off the wheel or your mind off the driving.

So, what if manufacturers could offer smarter features that focused on both the vehicle and the driver to mitigate some of the other well-known and persistent risks to road safety? With in-vehicle biometrics, they can.

Manufacturers can now couple in-cab cameras focused on the driver with steering pattern analysis and lane deviations to detect aggregated signs of drowsiness. Dashcams that capture images and sound that may be of evidential value after a critical incident will soon be overtaken by attention support features that can tell the difference between drivers’ eyes blinking from sunlight and those blinking from fatigue. Still in its infancy, this is clever stuff and the ability to collect data about us as drivers and combine it with vehicle telemetrics changes the whole concept of onboard technology.

One signpost for the technology coming down the road is motor companies’ applications for patents. Recent applications in the US show how vehicle manufacturers are developing facial templates to support “biometric keys”, driver ID authentication, vehicle access and other user-specific features based on the driver’s own unique preferences. They reveal the next generation of onboard vehicle biometrics that will be able to detect facial muscle contractions that indicating illness or road rage and – crucially – to intervene and prevent the incident from happening. In-vehicle intoxication detection that prevents driving under the influence would be a potentially life-saving biometric application, as would fingerprint readers on steering wheels to check if the driver’s age or health requires additional considerations or if they’ve only recently passed their test.

The safety argument alone makes the case for biometric tachographs, but the wider in-vehicle ‘biometric offer’ is persuasive in several other directions. Advanced onboard technology offers potential solutions to intractable challenges such as the use of ultrawideband (UWB) radar in passenger compartments to emit vehicle data streams and biometric characteristics of occupants and ending the astonishing fragility of physical vehicle credentials as identifiers.

Self-driving vehicles may ultimately be the answer but if Artificial Intelligence (AI) is in the driving seat it risks breaking the rules (domestic and European-wide) on automated decision-making while, if a human in the vehicle is still ‘in charge’ of it, some criminal liability will continue to be operative.

For now, these innovations are a matter of buyer choice but their potential cannot be ignored and manufacturers are going full throttle after biometric solutions. Notwithstanding that potential, obligatory in-cab technology is controversial. The one-dimensional, non-biometric tachograph was met with vociferous opposition, with the basic concept being denounced as a “spy-in-the-cab” and it took a judgment by the European Court of Justice before the UK introduced mandatory tachographs on 14 January 1980.

Public attitudes to safety technology may have matured since but we are still ambivalent towards some biometrics, particularly where new technology is used for law enforcement. In that context, the evolution of biometric motoring will bring some considerable challenges. Any vehicle generating and storing unique data sets about both itself and its occupants would be irresistible for investigative or intelligence purposes (and bring some additional national security risks). How will access to such data – mandated or otherwise – by law enforcement be regulated? A framework for using and retaining biometric surveillance data by the police needs to take account of such a future, balancing what can be done with what must/mustn’t be done and what people expect to be done. This is going to be a challenge for policymakers.

When introducing the first tachographs in 1979, the UK transport minister described them as “an aid to road safety, helping to keep tired drivers off the roads”.

He went on to promote the technology’s ability to help drivers improve their skills and achieve substantial savings in fuel consumption as well as in wear and tear on engines and tyres. It could, he told parliament, provide valuable management information on the use of vehicles, helping to “increase efficiency and productivity”. Modern in-cab biometrics will turbocharge all those capabilities and more, leaving the tachograph era a long way behind.

The UK government’s road safety strategy doesn’t mention either biometrics or tachographs but it does promise consultation on new safety technologies and the creation of a ‘data-led Road Safety Investigation Branch’. If the strategic aim of all this is to build a safer future for road users, the sheer potential of in-vehicle biometric technology will have a significant role – and will make some form of mandated biometrics inevitable.

About the author

Fraser Sampson, former UK Biometrics & Surveillance Camera Commissioner, is Professor of Governance and National Security at CENTRIC (Centre for Excellence in Terrorism, Resilience, Intelligence & Organised Crime Research) and a non-executive director at Facewatch.

Article Topics

automotive biometrics  |  biometric monitoring  |  biometrics  |  consumer adoption  |  surveillance