Code 58: horse runs into vehicle
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Everyone has seen it – a skid mark on the motorway: sometimes straight, sometimes in the direction of the crash barrier; it’s nothing unusual. What is unusual, however, is the ability to read the skid marks as if they were police reports. “In most cases, I know what happened,” says Andreas Georgi, accident researcher for Bosch in Schwieberdingen.
With this manual, accident researchers do not miss even the smallest detail. What was the weather like at the time of the accident, and what were the road conditions and wind speed? What were the tire pressure, mileage, and color of vehicle? What about the set angle of the sun visor and the chipping behavior of the windshield? How long were the driver’s arms and legs? How high were his or her heels? Everything is recorded, because: “Only by doing that the demand for the development of new safety systems can be measured reliably,” group leader Reiner Marchthaler says.
Thus, for every crash, more than 3,500 individual data are collected and converted into number codes. In this way, Andreas Georgi can analyze and compare the cases. Where does the alarm go off? At the fire brigade or the police? How long does the emergency doctor take to get there? Was the driver smoking seconds before the accident, or eating or reading? “The on-site teams always talk to the people involved in the accident as well, if at all possible,” Georgi explains. More often than not, it is also necessary to visit them in hospital at a later stage.
From pupillary signs to polytrauma
The X-rays are included in the file, the injuries are broken down into several hundred parameters, covering everything from pupillary signs and polytrauma, to crushed organs and buzzing in the ears. And what is especially time-consuming: “For every injury, we want to find out the precise cause,” Georgi explains, “because, especially where passive vehicle safety is concerned, these causes are of central significance.”
Hours and hours of meticulous work for just a fraction more safety
To ensure active safety, i.e. in order to prevent an accident in the first place, it is especially important to know the cause and circumstances of the crash. For this reason, the sequence of events is reconstructed by means of simulations and then broken down into categories and variables: with what, for example, did the vehicle collide? A tree, fence, bird, donkey, or cat – everything is assigned a number. And that means everything: if, for example, a horse runs into a car, the incident is referred to by accident researchers simply as a “58.”
But there’s one thing that’s not in the manual: the experience needed in order to analyze the enormous data volumes. “Faulty interpretations are something we cannot afford,” Marchthaler points out. This means that the researchers sometimes spend hours reconstructing an unusual accident, looking for that crucial detail or for yet another piece in the complex puzzle of vehicle safety…
