Speed plays an important role in many auto accident cases.  Evidence of speed can be used to determine forces of impact and punitive damages for reckless driving among other things.  Some of the new automobiles have “blackboxes” similar to those in airplanes and most tractor-trailers have them as well as GPS tracking devices.  But what about cars where there is no blackbox?  An accident reconstructionist can use skid marks, the weight of the car, and various friction factors (tires and road surface characteristics) to estimate the speed before impact.  This is only an estimate and ABS brakes, which prevent skidding, complicate the calculations.

I recently discovered a very reliable alternative method for capturing this data on cars that do not have blackboxes.  A GPS tracking company that provides a product for tracking children’s driving behavior recently reported its device helped overturn a speeding ticket.  A police officer testified his radar gun tracked a teenager driving 62 MPH while the driver’s GPS data had him driving 45 MPH.  The GPS evidence was challenged by an expert for the police department.  On appeal, the expert was forced to concede the GPS data was accurate to within 1 MPH.  Please keep in mind this GPS device was not the kind sitting on most people’s dashboards, but a much more data intensive kind like you would find in tractor trailers.  The product is marketed to parents who want to monitor their teenage drivers.

Going forward, when I have an auto accident case where the other driver was a minor I am going to investigate whether a GPS device such as the one reported above was in use.  This provides yet another method of obtaining objective data for my client’s case.