reader to get the information from the electronic brain of the car. My firm has such a reader and I believe we are the only firm in my area that has one and that uses it regularly. You need to know that the insurance companies use these black box readers on a daily basis so you need to have your own independent report because you can never trust the insurance companies. IMPACT DURATION This is the amount of time the impact lasted, and it shows again the force of the impact. This can be measured in different ways, again by the black box reader and by judging the depth of the impact on the surface being hit. For instance, if you back into a light pole in a parking lot going one or two miles per hour you won’t have much of a dent because as soon as you hear or feel the impact your instinct is to brake and stop. On the other hand, if the collision collapses a major structure in the car such as a B pillar in a T-bone and moves that B pillar into the crumple zone by two feet then your impact duration will be measured as two feet. That shows the force of the impact needed to bend the steel and frame by that distance. COLLISION DISTANCE. This is the amount of distance that the collision event traveled after the impact. So back to the parking lot example, the distance would be in inches. On the other hand, in our examples, we have a larger vehicle striking a smaller vehicle and dragging it all the way across the intersection a distance of about 50 feet. Every one of the collisions that we're going to talk about in this book are based on a Ford F 350 Super Duty colliding with a small economy car designed to hold 4 passengers, two in the front and two in the back. The reason I did this is because we see these types of accidents all the time in our office. The effects on our clients are very severe. Now. If you have a small car hitting a small car, of course the values will change. But I believe that the way the body reacts will be the same. So, with all that in mind, let me just kind of give a couple of explanations and we'll get started. In the formula that I've cited, body mass is the mass of the body for which the force is to be calculated. And you can express it in pounds or tons. I've done it in pounds. Again, this is based on the gross vehicle weight rating and here I chose the middle value, 12,000 pounds. I chose this value because the range of weight is 10,000 to 14,000 pounds. The next value is impact velocity, which is the velocity of the car the moment it first contacts the vehicle it strikes and that's expressed in miles per hour. So, impact velocity is how fast the car is moving when it hits you. And I express that in miles per hour. Here we are using the value of 45 miles per hour based on the truck accelerating trying to beat the yellow light before it turns red. Next, we look at the value termed Impact duration, which is the total time of the impact with a collision during which the two vehicles are in contact with one another. So, this could be a very short time and distance as in a simple fender bender, where one car runs into another, and the damage is a dent in the fender. And that instance impact duration would not be very long. On the other hand, and our examples that we've used now, is a large truck going at 45 miles an hour and hitting a small car. That much smaller car is going to be dragged a good distance across the
Powered by FlippingBook