The Traffic Accident Reconstruction Origin -ARnews-

Swerving to avoid a collision

Eddie Baart (pheb@giraffe.ru.ac.za)
Sat, 26 Apr 1997 05:43:22 -0400 (EDT)

A question which frequently comes up in court cases is whether a driver
could have avoided an impact by swerving. This relates to the sideways
acceleration one can get by steering. Does anyone have any figures for this ?
It seems to me that since maximum sideways force is reached for a slip angle
of something like 15 degrees, the sideways acceleration would be about one quarter
of the coeff of friction times "g". Is this reasonable ?
Eddie Baart
Eddie Baart
pheb@giraffe.ru.ac.za

NOTE: You are reading in an archived session of ARnews. It is possible that this topic is still being discussed. To see if this topic is still active, or of there were any more recent posts on this topic, check later archives of ARnews.

If there is no current post, and you would like to add to this topic, link to the Current ARnews Discussion and begin a new thread. Be sure that if you are starting a new post that the thread title does not contain the abbreviation RE: Placing RE: at the beginning of a new post will confuse Hypermail and prevent others from answering your post in the future.

For example, to continue this discussion look for a thread titled

Swerving to avoid a collision

If this thread does not exist in the current archive, you can begin another one by using that title.