Case Study
Data is knowledge and knowledge is power. This is true across almost every industry, especially in transportation risk management and litigation.
Accident reconstruction opinions and expert testimony have historically hinged on physical evidence, experience, and collision-based physics calculations. In the past decade, and in the past five years in particular, the type and quality of commercial vehicle incident data has skyrocketed: Radar, audio, video, accelerometer, GPS, vehicle sensor, and ECM data are usually available (all or in part) after an accident.
Accident reconstruction is evolving. The most competent providers know where to find the data and how to analyze the data into a comprehensive reconstruction to inform clients about the causation of an accident.
In Cab Technology, LLC has developed a suite of tools for data driven accident reconstruction. DataAccess parses stored incident data from in cab devices for use in accident reconstruction. Analyses can be conducted from the visual data via host and target motion tracking and additional data streams can be utilized in a simulation based accident reconstruction. The following case study illustrates a reconstruction based on data accessed from a Lytx SV-2 in cab product.
The host tractor doesn't have an ECM with incident data. However, dash camera video, sensor and GPS data from the Lytx SV2 system provide informative data about the causation of the accident.
DataAccess was used to extract the A-V, GPS, accelerometer data streams and settings. DataCorrect was then run on the exported video frames to remove lens distortion.
From the accessed audio stream, it was calculated that the host vehicle driver yelled out approximately 3.1 seconds prior to the initial rear end impact (tractor to minivan) and 4.4 seconds prior to the secondary collision which involved the Drivecam equipped tractor. The forward camera video frame closest to the beginning of the yell is shown below.
Motion tracking and point cloud overlay matching enabled position, orientation, and velocity analyses of each vehicle in view.
The driver applied the brakes prior to impact, reduced his speed while maintaining his lane. The final seconds of the Lytx video illustrate an additional involved passenger vehicle to the immediate left of the host tractor. After the initial exclamation, the driver likely checked his left mirror in an attempt to move away from the impending collision to his right. However, the vehicle to his left required a lane keeping and braking response.
