Determining the approach and the collision speed are main components of reconstructing accidents. Conventionally, these speeds are determined by impulse, energy and damage considerations.

Due to the increasing amount of recorded data in a vehicle, stored speeds can sometimes be recovered from ECU data after an accident. One tempting way of determining the speed would be equating the approach speed with stored data from error codes and freeze frames.

This approach will be critically assessed in the following article.

(EVU-members can download the full article)