Before I start to answer this question, I assume most of you already know what EDR is, but I want to make it clear for anyone who may not know. EDR is short for event data recorder, although there are other names which are used interchangably amongst practitioners, solicitors, legal teams and to some extent, the Courts. These include Bosch CDR, Bosch collision data retrieval (CDR) tool or just CDR.

To be clear from the outset, EDR is a device fitted to a vehicle (most and soon to be all modern vehicles) which is similar to an airplanes black box, where in the event of a collision or near miss event, it will record data about what the vehicle was doing around the time of the incident. It generally provides around 5 seconds worth of pre-incident data, but where two incidents occur in quick succession, that data can record up to 10 seconds worth of data.

CDR (Bosch CDR) on the other hand, is a tool which is commonly used to recover the data fitted on an EDR.

There are a number of factors that affect how long the data recored by your vehicles EDR will be kept for. Our advice is always to have the EDR downloaded as soon as possible, to give you the best possible chance of capturing that data. But in terms of specific times, we have found the following:

Data will be kept indefinitely,

Data will be deleted after a defined number of key turns (car key),

Data will be deleted after a defined number of engine starts.

The time the data is kept for will be different on a car by car basis as the manufacutrers will determine how long the data is kept for and what will result in the data being deleted.