What is Accident Reconstruction
Field accident investigation, analysis and reconstruction is an automotive engineering discipline that involves the analysis of physical evidence, the application of physical laws, and the reconstruction of the vehicle and occupant motions based on accepted engineering principles. These reconstructed motions are arrived at in order to reconstruct how and why an accident occurred. Through a thorough understanding of accidents, countermeasures may be designed in order to prevent the same accident from occurring again. Industrial companies, fleet companies, fleet maintenance organizations, and insurance carriers all need to have a thorough understanding of collisions that occur so that standard policies can be critically examined with the aim of creating policies that will help to minimize the occurrence of accidents. Parties involved in litigation need to have a thorough and exhaustive accident reconstruction in order to fully evaluate the causal factors that led to the collision occurring. Complete and thorough accident reconstruction requires a solid educational background in the physical sciences in the form of a degree in engineering or other physical science. Accident reconstruction requires a thorough understanding of vehicle dynamics, vehicle structural properties and automotive engineering. However, the practice of accident reconstruction and presentation of the results also involves other disciplines that encompass various aspects of the Man (driver, occupant), Machine (vehicle) and Environment (road & weather). These additional disciplines often include Human Factors, Photography, Injury Analysis, Communications, and Art.