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Knowledge about vehicle rolling resistance is required to calculate speed loss of accident vehicles during portions of their pre-impact and post-impact trajectory when they are not braking or sliding directly sideways. The accuracy of assumed rolling resistance values is most important in accidents with long post-impact roll out distances. Very little hard data are currently available1 and the accident reconstructionist must usually make estimates of drivetrain losses and normal and damaged tire rolling resistance to determine overall vehicle rolling resistance. In the first part of this study, the rolling resistances of various vehicles with different drive configurations are determined, based on accurate measurements made with a 5th wheel. In the second part, sensitivity analyses are done with PC-Crash2, a computer simulation program, to determine what effect the error in assumed rolling resistance has on speed calculations for various types of post-impact trajectories.

This paper presents the trajectory and collision models on which PC-CRASH is based. PC-CRASH'S model for predicting the 3D kinematics of a vehicle's pre- and post-impact trajectory, which is based on a discrete- kinetic time forward simulation of vehicle dynamics rather than empirically-derived “spin-out coefficients”, is described. ...PC-CRASH is a windowso-based accident-reconstruction program which combines the simulation of pre-collision, collision, and post-collision dynamics for multiple vehicles in a graphical environment.