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Occupant ejection may occur during planar and rollover collisions. These ejections can be associated with serious/fatal injuries. Occasionally, occupants will allege that they were wearing a seatbelt immediately before the ejection occurred. Some accident investigators have opined that a seatbelt became disengaged due to collision forces and/or occupant interactions, leaving the occupant essentially unrestrained and exposed to ejection from the vehicle. We present three case studies of collisions with documented seatbelt disengagement at or during the collision, as well as three controlled tests. The release of the seatbelt was always associated with dire consequences for the occupant's outboard upper extremity. Evidence of seatbelt webbing interaction with the occupant was always evident, and the interaction of the belt with the vehicle interior trim was also apparent.

There is a continuing debate in the scientific literature and among policy making bodies regarding the role of roof crush in the causation of rollover accident injuries. A question arising from field studies is whether the correlation between roof crush and injuries occurs because roof crush causes injuries or because roof crush is associated with accident severity, which is related to injury potential. Recent literature is reviewed to address this question. The Malibu rollover tests have been criticized for the level of “potentially injurious impacts” measured in the Hybrid III dummies used in these studies. Additionally, it has been asserted that the Hybrid III neck is excessively stiff in compression and that experimental testing with the Hybrid III produces results that are not representative of human occupant responses.

Many accidents involve questions regarding human visual performance. For example, drivers involved in accidents often report that they did not see what they hit, or that they saw it too late to do anything. In these cases, it is often necessary to determine if people or objects at the accident scene (pedestrians, motorcycles, other vehicles, debris, etc.) would have been visible to the reasonably alert person under conditions of a particular accident. This determination must be made with proper consideration of both inter- and intra-person variability The goal of accident reconstruction is to determine what happened in an accident, and why it happened. This process involves a thorough examination of the available evidence. More specifically, the investigator considers the physical evidence, accident reports, and statements of the involved parties and witnesses.