Beginning on Monday, China will launch a national technical standard for the manufacture of vehicle travel data recorders which will help companies keep track of vehicular movements.
Industry insiders estimated the market for such recorders will be huge and worth several billion yuan annually.
These devices, acting like black boxes that are common in aircraft, record speed, distance and hours of driving. From next week, these data can be used as evidence in the courts and will provide proof for insurance compensation.
"These recorders are also helpful in fleet management for logistic and taxi firms as executives can get up-to-date figures about how their vehicles have been running," said Shen Lei, general manager of
Shanghai IS Instrument and System Co, a recorder producer.
By 2000, Chinese logistic companies operate a combined fleet of more than 5.7 million vehicles.
Given the device's current average price of 2,000 yuan (US$241), industry insiders estimate the combined market size for vehicle recorders will exceed 10 billion yuan in the following three years.
Domestic producers are hopeful of an even rosier outlook as they view the launch of the official standard as the Chinese government's first step to follow the European Union in making it compulsory for all new cars to install digital recorders.
Last July, the European Union passed a law to require all new cars to install the digital recorder from August 5, 2004.
With recorders monitoring the drivers' every movement, they will be more careful during driving.
"Such a law, if adopted in China, will help the recorder companies bank on the country's fast-growing auto market," said Xu Bin, vice general manager of
Shanghai Data Recorder Technology Co, which is cooperating with
Shanghai IS to add graphic functions to the recorder.
In the first half of this year, vehicle sales in China surged 31.99 percent year-on-year to reach 2.03 million units.
"Such devices are good for the government to reduce traffic accidents but the government will not make it compulsory to install them yet," said an unidentified police officer in Shanghai.
