If Your Car Looks Crushed in an Accident, That May Be a Safety Feature
If you are in a car accident, one way the defense will defend their case, is to refute how injured you are. That probably comes as no surprise to you. What may surprise you, is how they try to prove that you weren’t injured, because it has nothing to do with your body or the condition of your body.
Rather, it has to do with your car and the damage that it sustained.
Ever See a Damaged Car?
You know this yourself: you often pass by an accident on the road, see a car that looks demolished, and think to yourself “ boy that must have been a bad accident, I feel sorry for them.” We just naturally assume that the worse our car looks after an accident, the more injured we must be.
But that’s a false assumption, and the correlation between damage to our cars, and damage to our bodies, isn’t as close as you may imagine that it is.
The Use of Crumple Zones
One reason why that assumption is false is because modern cars have what is known as crumple zones. Cars with crumple zones (which are most modern cars) are designed to “cave in,” and crumple on impact. That crumpling looks terrible — but it is actually a safety feature.
By designing a car to crumple inward on impact, the car takes the brunt of the impact — not your body.
Crumple zones are a modern invention, and quite an interesting one. The car needs to crumple, but it can’t do so in certain areas — for example, it can’t crumple in on the engine, or on any part of the car that is flammable. It needs to crumple in but stop before there is intrusion onto or into the passenger cabin of the car.
Why Crumple Zones Work
Imagine a car that didn’t have a crumple zone — it is still, hard and rigid. When that car is hit, say, from behind, the car moves forward a lot more, and with that movement, it takes your body with it at the same speed, thrashing it around.
But when the car crumples in, the car (and thus, your body inside of it) remains stationary, as its hood or trunk smashes in.
This is why when Defendants flash pictures of cars that look hardly damaged after an accident in front of jurors and say “that car was hardly damaged, so the victims couldn’t be that injured,” that is actually the opposite of what is true; the lack of physical damage to the car often means that the person inside took the brunt of the force.
Explanation to The Jury
Despite the science, there is nothing that Defendants look at more than a victim’s car that hardly looks damaged. It is up to the victim, often with the use of experts, to explain these concepts to the jury, to show that damage to the car, often has nothing to do with the severity of the injuries to the people inside that car.
What tactics will the Defendant use in your case? Don’t let them do that– Get help now. Contact the Las Vegas personal injury lawyers at Cameron Law today.
