A general event data recorder is a device installed in automobiles to record information related to vehicle crashes or accidents. The data provide a better understanding of how certain crashes come about. This study made a prototype of a driving behaviour-based event data recorder (DBEDR), which provides the information of driving behaviours and a danger level. The authors approach is to recognise the seven behaviours: normal driving, acceleration, deceleration, changing to the left lane or right lane, zigzag driving and approaching the car in front by the hidden Markov models. All data were collected from a real vehicle and evaluated in a real road environment. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieved an average detection ratio of 95% for behaviour recognition. The danger level is inferred by fuzzy rules involved with the above behaviours. DBEDR recorded the recognised driving behaviours and the danger level, and the places were stored with the assistance of a global positioning system receiver. By integrating Google Maps, the locations, the driving behaviour occurrences, the danger level on the travel routes and the recorded images, the proposed DBEDR could be more useful compared with the traditional EDRs.