Statistical Modelling of Pre-Impact Velocities in Car Crashes

Abstract

The law wants to determine if any party involved in a car crash is guilty. The Dutch court invokes the expertise of the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) to answer this question. We discuss the present method of the NFI to deter-
mine probabilities on pre-impact car velocities, given the evidence from the crash scene. A disadvantage of this method is that it requires a prior distribution on the velocities of the cars involved in the crash. We suggest a different approach, that of statistical significance testing, which can be carried out without a prior. We explain this method, and apply it to a toy model. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is performed on a simple two-car collision model.