Accident Reconstruction

The investigation of a serious commercial vehicle crash has shifted, over the last two decades, from a primarily physical exercise — skid marks, debris fields, witness statements — to a largely documentary one. The recorded data set inside a modern Class 8 truck spans the engine control module, the anti-lock and stability control units, the federally required electronic logging device, the carrier's telematics platform, and increasingly one or more dashcams. Reconstruction work in 2026 is, more than anything, the discipline of correlating those data streams against the physical evidence to establish what the vehicle was doing in the moments before impact.

The articles below cover the data sources themselves, the legal preservation framework, and the post-incident pipeline that determines whether the data survives long enough to be analyzed. Related coverage on the equipment side appears under dashcams and ELDs; the privacy framework that constrains some of these collections is covered in our continuous monitoring piece.