Welcome to another edition of It’s in the Details, a short newsletter intended to provide helpful information for those in the litigation industry who deal with forensic engineering experts and their work.
No Vehicle Photos or Repair Records After a Crash? No Problem!
Taking the deposition of the owner of a crash vehicle can provide valuable insight into the history of the vehicle, including whether it's been involved in any other crashes, or whether it had damage that pre-existed the subject crash. But, the memory of the owner can be fallible, and the owner can have incomplete or nonexistent vehicle records. So how to learn more about the history of the vehicle before you take that depo?
One great source of such information is the well-known database from Carfax. Carfax reports can provide a wealth of data about a vehicle. This can included date of manufacture, date of first registration, numbers of owners, what dates it changed ownership, how many miles it has been driven over time, and of course, how many collision incidents it's experienced and on what date(s) those occurred. Although not inexpensive (running $25 to $45 per report for individual users), the information in these reports can be invaluable when taking an owner deposition, helping you evaluate the deponent's credibility, and assisting your forensic expert in determining whether a black box collision event is related to your crash.
Even more compelling and informative than the written words and numbers supplied in a typical Carfax report are the photographs potentially available in the reports generated by the online database EpicVIN. This database contains not only historical data for a vehicle (like Carfax does), but sometimes contains up to dozens of low-resolution photographs of a crash vehicle before it was sold at auction. Naturally, such photographs can be a goldmine for your forensic expert when analyzing vehicle damage. And, those images can help you as an attorney or insurance adjuster evaluate the veracity of the claim being made as well as the extent of the damage to the vehicle. Best of all, these reports are relatively inexpensive, running from just over $5 to as much as $15 per report, depending on how many you purchase at once.
So, the next time you or your forensic expert has hit a dead-end with regard to information about the history of an accident vehicle, keep these two valuable databases in mind. Thanks for reading, and feel free to reach out to us with any technical questions you might have about this or other topics related to forensic engineering.