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Vehicle fire investigators often use the existence of burn patterns, along with the amount and location of fire damage, to determine the fire origin and its cause. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of ventilation location on the interior burn patterns and burn damage of passenger compartment fires. Four similar Ford Fusion vehicles were burned. The fire origin and first material ignited were the same for all four vehicles. In each test, a different door window was down for the duration of the burn test. Each vehicle was allowed to burn until the windshield, back glass, or another window, other than the window used for ventilation, failed, thus changing the ventilation pattern. At that point, the fire was extinguished. Temperatures were measured at various locations in the passenger compartment. Video recordings and still photography were collected at all phases of the study.

The primary purpose of this paper is to evaluate the accuracy of speed data recorded in the Ford PCM under steady state conditions. The authors drove 3 different test vehicles at 5 different steady state speeds from 48 to 113 kph (30 to 70 mph), making 6 runs at each speed. The authors collected PCM data after each run. For the first vehicle a GPS based Racelogic VBOX III was used to measure speed. For the second and third vehicle a purpose built speed trap with .0001 second resolution was used. The authors compare the readings and calculated differences and statistical limits. The secondary purpose is to deliberately create conditions that could result in errors of speed measured, document the conditions, and to quantify the error.