Are EDR Devices Undoubtedly Helpful in the Reconstruction of a Road Traffic Accident?

All over the world, the vehicles introduced now into the market are usually provided with EDRs (Event Data Recorders), intended to measure and record the parameters that characterise the vehicle motion in the pre-, during-, and post-accident phases. The EDRs are to facilitate the description and reconstruction of possible road accidents. They are patterned on aircraft “black boxes” (flight recorders). Many of them have simplified design, disregarding three (of six) vector components that describe the motion of the vehicle body solid. In the paper presented, the authors used simulation models built by themselves to represent motor vehicle dynamics and the reconstruction of vehicle trajectory and velocities based on records obtained from two EDR types: “aircraft” one (EDR1) and “simplified” one (EDR2). Using a simulation method, they examined the impact of the said simplifications mentioned above on the quality of reconstruction of vehicle motion for four typical manoeuvres in road traffic. The calculation results obtained for input data adopted to rep-resent a medium-class passenger car have shown that the simplifications may cause considerable reconstruction errors. This particularly applies to the manoeuvres where significant changes took place in the roll and pitch angles of the vehicle body solid (to which the EDR was fixed) or where the changes were characterised by absence of symmetry in the parameters that describe the manoeuvre and by the constant sign of the vehicle body roll angles.