An Investigation on Speedometer Pointer Residual-Value of Crashing Vehicle and its Application in Accident Reconstruction

Abstract

According to the experience of traffic accident investigation over the years, the pointer of some crashed vehicles’ speedometer will stay in one place because of collision spread or heavily vibration, which may indicate the vehicle collision speed. However, the correlation between the residual speed value and actual vehicle collision speed still remains to be examined. For the practical needs of traffic accident reconstruction, this research work is carried out. Based on the principles of traditional speedometers, vehicle impact mechanics and failure mechanism, the damage and failure mode of speedometer in collision are studied. Through the statistics of 15 real traffic accident cases, the features and law about the pointer information of damaged speedometers are obtained initially. As an example, one of these cases is analyzed and calculated to verify the assumption. The availability of the mark information on the indicated place of speedometer after accidents (i.e. the correlation between the speed value of pointers and actual vehicle collision speed) is discussed, which can provide effective means and references for accident reconstruction and vehicle speed identification.