I had a chance to hear a little about EDR technology at a Toyota Technical class this last summer. We also reviewed the service procedures and reality of unintended acceleration in their vehicles.
There will be standardized EDR data coming I believe to the 2012 or 2013 vehicles much like the OBD-II standard for emission monitoring. As I was told there is a plan to make retrieval simpler and easier to display / graph. Currently most data is engineering based and requires specialized software to retrieve and someone trained in the interpretation of the data.
Here are a few links about the systems:
Introduction:
http://www.blackboxofsecrets.com/
Types of information recorded (this varies by mfg.)
http://airbagcrash.com/
State laws and privacy:
http://www.ncsl.org/IssuesResearch/T...5/Default.aspx