Interesting Topics

It is a fascinating topic within reconstructing single vehicle incidents which transpires within bends in a road. Certain questions arise when speculating to what may have occurred and why did this incident initially occur.

Frequent questions come to mind, such as:

– Was the vehicle traveling too fast to successfully travel through the bend?
– Was “something” (an object; vehicle, animal, pedestrian etc.) within the road that led the driver to apply evasive steering which was a cause of loss of control?

When investigating such incident sites, we need to obtain certain facts before we may make a conclusion.

Formal practice we follow is to begin at the final rest position of the vehicle at the incident site. The area of final rest is very important for us to make our final conclusion.

Imagining a right hand bend in the roadway and the vehicle exited the road within the “inner-side” of the bend; the right shoulder. This enables us to further investigate the site for a probable initial over steer of the vehicle or did the driver evade a hazard when entering the bend. Further investigation needs to be conducted to conclude why the driver of the vehicle over steered or applied an evasive tactic.  

Should the vehicle have come to final rest on the outer-side of the right hand bend we need to further investigate and obtain certain evidence such as (not limited):

• Was any tyre marks present on the road surface; can the tyre marks be identified as skid marks or yaw marks (there is an initial difference within this tyre mark topic which we will shed light on at  another opportunity)
• Tyre marks also needs to be identified on the shoulder of the road to establish if the vehicle was skidding or in a yaw position (sliding manner) when it initially exited the roadway
• The exit area of the vehicle in perspective to the road; was it within the entrance of the bend? At the apex of the bend? Or between the apex and exit of the bend?
• Above mentioned is not limited to the specific reconstruction

These types of evidence we gather will assist us in to reconstruct the collision in the most accurate way.

Within reconstructing vehicular accidents we make use of certain and a specific physics method to determine the initial velocity the vehicle were in when the loss of control occurred.

We make use of the evidence observed which will guide us to what physics methods to apply.

For instance, when a vehicle exit the right hand bend on the “outer-side”, from the apex to the exit of the bend, we know that certain measurements needs to be taken to determine the radius of the bend. After calculating the radius of the bend, we may apply an equation to support the fact that the vehicle in question had exceeded the velocity/speed the vehicle may travel around the specific bend. This will lead to loss of control of the vehicle.