Webinar Replay Video #73: Accident Reconstruction

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Steve Kessler: Good morning, everybody welcomes to the Infinit-I Workforce solutions, Fast Forward Webinar Series.

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Steve Kessler: My name’s Steve Kessler, and I’m going to host the program today.

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Steve Kessler: I have to tell you all we’ve got a really exciting program today. It’s something I’ve been trying to put together here for quite a while. Our program today is entitled Unveiling the Truth Technology and Techniques in Accident Reconstruction.

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Steve Kessler: You know, in this industry we all hear a lot about lawsuits and nuclear verdicts and big, huge settlements that are very damaging to trucking companies. Sometimes they even cause a company to go out of business.

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Steve Kessler: and over the years we’ve had a lot of attorneys come and talk about those things attorneys that defend trucking companies, and

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Steve Kessler: I have to say I don’t think I’ve ever had one of these attorneys talk to a group of our people without them mentioning the value of accident reconstruction.

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Steve Kessler: to get to the bottom, to find out exactly what happened.

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Steve Kessler: and who was involved in what caused the crash.

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Steve Kessler: So, I’m very excited to have this material for you all this morning

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Steve Kessler: a couple of housekeeping items, and then I’ll introduce our other panelists here.

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Steve Kessler: Everybody that’s logged in is muted so we can’t hear you.

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Steve Kessler: So, you have the ability in the little tray at the bottom to use the chat feature. There’s also a Q&A box down there that if you have a question through the program, feel free to type it in the chat or in the Q&A,

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Steve Kessler: and we’ll try to take those questions, probably at the end of the program, so we can try to address those then, but just know that anytime you think of a question during the program feel free to put it in the chat or the Q. And a

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Steve Kessler: while, as I get ready to, you know, introduce our guests. Why don’t you all just jump on the chat

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Steve Kessler: tell us who you are, where you are and what company you’re with. So, we kind of get an idea who’s out there.

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Steve Kessler: So, while you all are doing that, I want to introduce our regular co-host, Mark Rhea. Those of you that join our webinars frequently will recognize and know Mark

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Steve Kessler: Mark’s an industry veteran 35 years or so, I guess Mark, now. And I think in Mark’s history he’s been involved in quite a few lawsuits.

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Steve Kessler: Mark, what do you think about our topic today?

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Mark Rhea: Oh, it’s a fantastic topic. The

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Mark Rhea: the data shows that well, over 50%, I will say 70% of the truck

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Mark Rhea: car crashes. The fault does not lie with the truck now, that’s easy to say.

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Mark Rhea: but not that easy to prove, and their end comes in. Marcos and accident reconstruction and being able to

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Mark Rhea: to reconstruct the accident. So, you can validate and present

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Mark Rhea: a case of Hey? We weren’t at fault. We’re just motoring down the road, and something happened, but again easy to say.

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Mark Rhea: much more difficult to prove. And I think another thing that we need to keep in mind is when you have a serious accident. What?

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Mark Rhea: What do you need to keep? What data is out there, what pictures, what things that can be used for a reconstruction just because trying to do a reconstruction 6 months after the event

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Mark Rhea: can be a little challenging. So, I’m really looking forward to today’s presentation.

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Steve Kessler: Yeah, me, too. And I’m excited that we’re all going to kind of learn a little bit more about what accident reconstruction is, what they do, and perhaps maybe what we can do as a trucking company or people in the trucking industry, to

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Steve Kessler: make sure that we’ve done the right things to allow the accident reconstructionist to give their best outcome so, or in their best analysis. So let me introduce you all to Marcos Salinas. Is it Salinas or Salinas? I forgot to ask you.

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Marcos Salinas: Yes.

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Steve Kessler: Mark received his Bachelor of Science Degree in mechanical engineering, with a minor in business administration from the University of Texas at San Antonio.

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Steve Kessler: He is a senior mechanical consultant for Sea Limited.

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Steve Kessler: and is responsible for investigation and analysis of motor vehicle collisions.

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Steve Kessler: Mr. Salinas is experienced in the reconstruction of incidents involving passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians as well as rail and other large industrial equipment.

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Steve Kessler: He has expertise in the retrieval and analysis. Of electronic data, including passenger vehicle safety systems.

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Steve Kessler: heavy vehicle safety systems as well as other complementary systems, including but not limited to dashboard camera recorders, telemetry, devices, infotainment systems and GPS trackers.

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Steve Kessler: He’s experienced in video analysis, inverse camera projection for 3D camera matching and physics simulation.

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Steve Kessler: Mr. Salinas is proficient in the use of four-dimensional analysis for the evaluation of complex relationships dependent on space and time.

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Steve Kessler: Mr. Salinas, experience and expertise also encompasses the investigation and documentation of large-scale disasters, including marine explosions, crane collapses, pipeline failures and structural failures.

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Steve Kessler: He’s practiced in the creation of comprehensive forensic digital twins and high fidelity. 3D models by merging lidar low altitude, aerial video and photography, as well as terrestrial video and photography. Wow!

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Steve Kessler: Ladies and gentlemen.

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Marcos Salinas: And I.

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Steve Kessler: Please welcome Marcos, Salinas, Marcos! Take it away.

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Marcos Salinas: Thank you. Good morning to everybody I know. Steve

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Marcos Salinas: said a lot, and I appreciate all of those details. The takeaway here is the focus is on forensic preservation. Right? Any of the evidence you’re looking for any incident that occurs. The only thing I can analyze and thereby be able to communicate a disposition on

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Marcos Salinas: is wholly contingent on what information was preserved. If we don’t have information that was preserved, we don’t have evidence, there’s nothing for me to analyze. And there’s nothing for me to communicate to you.

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Marcos Salinas: So

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Marcos Salinas: today’s presentation is titled unveiling the truth, right technology and techniques in accident reconstruction prepared for today’s presentation.

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Marcos Salinas: I’m going to start by just kind of introducing you to S-E-A. S-E-A is a forensic engineering firm. You can see on the slide. We have over 16 offices and locations

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Marcos Salinas: across the United States. We service all, all of the 48 lower

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Marcos Salinas: with capabilities to go international as well, etc, etc. So, we’re here to help you in understanding. When an incident occurs.

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Marcos Salinas: understanding what it was that happened, both causal and contributory factors are what we focus on in any of our investigations right? Trying to get down to the truth.

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Marcos Salinas: So, I’m going to play a quick video here for you. Many of you probably have experience watching some of these, but we’re going to play through it right quick.

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Marcos Salinas: So pretty bad crash, right? And so, the 1st question being asked, right is, Well, who’s at fault?

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Marcos Salinas: Is it the truck for changing lanes? Is it the pickup truck for changing lanes? What are the stories, you know. Video says a lot, but it doesn’t necessarily say all of it. We’ll talk about this further in us in our as we wrap the program. But I wanted to give you a something to think about.

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Marcos Salinas: Here. We’re going to look at another video.

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Marcos Salinas: similar scenario, right? We’ve got a pretty bad crash

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Marcos Salinas: questions that that need to be answered right is well, what happened? What do we know? The video says a lot.

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Marcos Salinas: but it doesn’t say it and doesn’t communicate the full picture

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Marcos Salinas: generally.

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Marcos Salinas: So, think of those 2. We’ll get back to them like, I said at the end of towards the end of our presentation. We’ll look through those case studies. Those were 2 incidents that sea worked on in support of litigation.

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Marcos Salinas: And like, I said, we’ll talk about them more as we get to the end of our presentation this morning.

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Marcos Salinas: Steve has already done a great job of introducing me. I don’t think I need to go over that. So, today’s agenda, we’re going to focus on 3 primary parts to the to the reconstruction process.

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Marcos Salinas: One is the investigative process. Second is the analysis, and 3rd is communication.

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Marcos Salinas: each of these builds on the previous. So, as I mentioned to you before, I communicate to you or 2 stakeholders, right, which may include the jury. Your insurance carrier, safety director, personnel at your company. What the analysis says? Right? My analysis is wholly based on what I learned through the investigative processes.

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Marcos Salinas: If I have nothing to investigate, I have nothing to analyze. I can’t tell you anything.

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Marcos Salinas: So, keep that in mind as we go through today’s presentation

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Marcos Salinas: preservation is if there’s anything we take away from today, preservation is key.

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Marcos Salinas: If it’s not preserved, there’s nothing to analyze. There’s nothing to analyze, there’s nothing to communicate.

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Marcos Salinas: So, what is what kind of starts the investigative process? Right? You have an incident like we just showed in those 2 videos. Something has happened. So

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Marcos Salinas: after it’s happened, you receive the initial call. You get told, hey? I’ve been involved in an accident. We know what. You know.

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Marcos Salinas: What is your driver telling you? What details do we have? Sometimes those are really hard to come by. Because it’s you know. In certain instances. These crashes are traumatic events, right? They are incredibly violent. They’re very loud. They’re very disorienting. So sometimes it’s difficult for

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Marcos Salinas: your employee, your driver, to communicate. You know what’s going on clearly and concisely. But

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Marcos Salinas: as you get started in this process, right? That’s your first, your 1st order solution, right? The 1st approach is, what do we know? What can we rely on? Second of that we also look into? Crash reports, law enforcement, when called to one of these incidents will

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Marcos Salinas: prepare a crash report. Sure. Many of you have gotten your hands on crash reports. Reading through them sometimes can be a little challenging, I will caution you as well. Sometimes the information is, is

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Marcos Salinas: sometimes not as comprehensive as you would hope. Sometimes there’s some inconsistencies with the physical evidence compared to what you find in that crash report at the end of the day. These are all just pieces of information, right? That we’re pulling together in our investigative process. So, vehicle location is another one. Once you once you know that an incident has occurred. Where is that vehicle going to be taken to?

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Marcos Salinas: Is he going to go to a tow yard to go into your facility, to go into somebody else’s facilities is law enforcement, for example, going to impound the vehicle

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Marcos Salinas: with many vehicles. And we’ll talk about this a little bit further as well. Many vehicles today have electronic data recorders. That’s the EDR

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Marcos Salinas: we need permission. Right? If it’s your vehicle, we want to document that you’re giving us permission to go in and extract this information from your vehicle. Different states have different laws pertaining to who owns the electronic data that’s recorded on your vehicle.

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Marcos Salinas: A great example. If any of you guys’ lease vehicles from any of the

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Marcos Salinas: I would say, any of the major providers. 2 of them come to mind off the top of my head, but if you do.

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Marcos Salinas: those leased vehicles are owned by the company leasing the vehicle to you

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Marcos Salinas: in certain States that data belongs to them because they own the vehicle, and in order to gain access to that. Electronic data. We need the permission of the company that you’re leasing the vehicle from.

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Marcos Salinas: So sometimes this goes beyond. Just Hey, I’m leasing the truck, you go out there. It’s my permission

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Marcos Salinas: sometimes. That’s not how it works. Right? So, being familiar with those kinds of things is very helpful.

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Marcos Salinas: If you have a law enforcement contact. When your incident 1st occurs.

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Marcos Salinas: the law enforcement agent that arrives will usually communicate with your driver

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Marcos Salinas: their information so that they know you know. What’s the crash report number

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Marcos Salinas: who do I need to contact, or who might be contacting me? Having your driver, having this information available can be incredibly helpful as we move forward through the process. I have had instances where we’ve been called on a crash. Evidence is available, but it’s not clear exactly where the vehicles came to rest, for example, or where the vehicles were taken afterwards

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Marcos Salinas: being able to contact the law enforcement agent who is investigating the collision

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Marcos Salinas: they sometimes will provide us with a general understanding of Hey, this is what I found when I got out there. This is what I did. I left paint marks where I found the vehicles, or I found this evidence at this location. They can start to shed light on some of the

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Marcos Salinas: processes that they undertook while they were out there.

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Marcos Salinas: Another great resource in the investigative process is news and media research

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Marcos Salinas: today’s day and age. This is another great example, Instagram, which I know sounds counterintuitive, because that’s not a generally

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Marcos Salinas: it’s not a comment. It’s not a 1st go to for news or media. However, with the younger generation it has become, it has become one of those 1st resources for news and information.

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Marcos Salinas: A lot of people driving by. You have a major crash that happens in A in a you know, very populated area.

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Marcos Salinas: You might find that on Instagram Snapchat

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Marcos Salinas: at any of the social media platforms where you’ll find people who are driving by some looky-loos

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Marcos Salinas: going by. An incident will start recording, and they will post that to their media feeds. There are also even accounts that compile a lot of that information.

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Marcos Salinas: So that’s another resource of information that we look through, and that can be helpful and understanding

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Marcos Salinas: what happened in your incident. Right? Final rest. Locations, for example, seen evidence that’s volatile, like tire marks, fluid sprays, things of that nature. Debris patterns can all be gleaned from some of that, that digital information coming from the Internet

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Marcos Salinas: continuing through the investigative process. Once you gain the information about your incident, your vehicle vin number allows us to look for research specifications on your vehicle. What kind of electronic data we might expect

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Marcos Salinas: for a lot of you guys running commercial vehicles. You know, a Detroit Diesel engine is going to have slightly different information than a Cummins engine a Volvo or Mac engine is going to have different information than we would get from Cummins, a cat engine. All of these different engine manufacturers on the heavy vehicle side have some variation in the data that’s being recorded.

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Marcos Salinas: But the same goes for passenger vehicles

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Marcos Salinas: on passenger vehicles. You can get slightly different information from one passenger vehicle to another passenger vehicle.

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Marcos Salinas: Newer systems today are, for example, Toyota has a really comprehensive safety system with their Lane departure warning collision mitigation that allows us to go in and pull video potentially, or images

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Marcos Salinas: of a of a sequence leading up to a collision getting us that information, looking through that information is important because it allows us to not just set an expectation of what we might find when we go out for an investigation or go out for an inspection of a vehicle.

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Marcos Salinas: But we can also prepare ourselves with the equipment that’s needed to access those systems.

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Marcos Salinas: If I’m going to see, for example, a Ford vehicle late model for vehicle that’s got a infotainment system on it. That’s going to be a little bit different than if I’m going out to look at a an Isuzu vehicle that that may not have the same types of systems installed on it.

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Marcos Salinas: some other stuff commercial vehicle inspections, as I mentioned before, the equipment that we need also includes testing, for example, braking components. So that’s some other stuff that we do to prepare ourselves when we go out for inspections.

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Marcos Salinas: In support of these of these investigations.

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Marcos Salinas: Another part of what we do in the investigative process is not just the vehicle inspections but getting out to look at the scene. Right? What is what is the environment, the roadway geometry. Sometimes you can see here there’s a there’s an excerpt, a diagram from a law enforcement crash report or crash report prepared by law enforcement

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Marcos Salinas: got a lot of information in there, right? A lot of arrows pointing here and there a lot of unit numbers

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Marcos Salinas: sometimes these they do a good job of trying to communicate

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Marcos Salinas: where vehicles were, what the understanding is. But there is no substitute for getting out to a scene and looking at the physical evidence that actually exists on that roadway. Tire marks fluid spills. As I mentioned.

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Marcos Salinas: gouge marks scratches on the surface of the roadway. All of that tells a story that is unique.

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Marcos Salinas: The more information we have, the more unique a story that we can tell, less information, the more we must accept the possibility that other scenarios are plausible. Right?

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Marcos Salinas: Another thing to point out here is the use of unmanned, aerial, unmanned aerial vehicles or UAV systems. This is what we would generally refer to as a drone or other low altitude aircraft

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Marcos Salinas: that fly local spaces above a roadway or along a roadway corridor to document what that vantage point is, and we’ll get to some data here in a second to show you just what that different. What that perspective allows us to see.

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Marcos Salinas: One thing to keep in mind

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Marcos Salinas: is that when we go out to fly these unmanned aerial missions

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Marcos Salinas: with drones. There are

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Marcos Salinas: airspace restrictions around airports, around helipads, things like that. This is where getting good information on where your incident occurred. GPS coordinates are helpful.

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Marcos Salinas: You know, signage of where your driver was at can also be helpful as well, and identifying the precise area where we’re going to be investigating this collision so that we can prepare ourselves

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Marcos Salinas: to deal with any airspace restrictions.

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Marcos Salinas: So, let’s kind of talk a little bit about

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Marcos Salinas: the critical evidence that we find at a scene as I’ve talked about before. Tire marks is a very common one

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Marcos Salinas: gouge marks scratches, right? The roadway surface is permanently

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Marcos Salinas: permanently defaced because of these things. Right? Tire marks go away. Gouge marks and scratches generally are going to last until that roadway surface is repaved.

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Marcos Salinas: fluid trails. This is another one. Where.

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Marcos Salinas: oh.

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Marcos Salinas: that 1st rain that comes after the incident has occurred! Might wash away those fluids right. They might last a little bit longer than a single rain, but some of them don’t.

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Marcos Salinas: Water, for example, like

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Marcos Salinas: radiator fluid after it dries up it’s gone. Some of you guys dealing with the Diesel exhaust fluid that leaves a very specific type of crystal structure when it dries, that is

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Marcos Salinas: available until it’s dissolved by again that 1st ring. Right? These are the types of

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Marcos Salinas: evidentiary elements that we’re looking for when we go out on a scene inspection. There’s also debris

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Marcos Salinas: that can be important.

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Marcos Salinas: One thing to touch on the debris side. Keep in mind that

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Marcos Salinas: there are roadway crews right that run by, you know, cleaning up the sides of the road.

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Marcos Salinas: So that evidence is not going to stick around, you know, forever. Most likely

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Marcos Salinas: sight lines. This is another one that you know. If you have an incident where your driver tells you, hey? I couldn’t see, or I didn’t see, or you have any reason to suspect that

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Marcos Salinas: there was a line of sight, restriction, or visual obstruction that was present at your incident scene.

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Marcos Salinas: depending on what the obstruction was, for example, here it’s the roadway geometry that’s going to be there, whether I go today or whether I go in 6 months right? But if you have, for example, foliage, there’s a set of trees that are growing up along the side of the roadway there. If it’s fall.

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Marcos Salinas: the line of sight. Restriction is going to be a bit different than if it’s in the middle of spring, right? Because the season, in that sense or in that scenario is going to influence where the line of sight, or where the visual obstruction is that where it exists and where it resolves.

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Marcos Salinas: So that’s also an important piece.

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Marcos Salinas: final rest. Positions of the vehicles also really important. If your driver or parties that were involved were struck came to rest, but then moved the vehicles that changes where the how we do the calculation, how we analyze the subject incident right? A vehicle that was struck and came to a came to rest 10 feet after it was struck, is going a lot slower than a vehicle that is struck, and then travels an additional 100 feet right

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Marcos Salinas: without that information without knowing where it actually came to rest, and then was moved versus

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Marcos Salinas: not knowing that it was ever moved, changes what the what the outcome, or or what the what the science would say, because it’s dependent on some of the assumptions that are made as we go through that process.

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Marcos Salinas: Another one to point out is surveillance video.

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Marcos Salinas: You have an incident that occurred within a very populated area.

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Marcos Salinas: having us go out early on

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Marcos Salinas: to go and preserve the scene as well as any evidence in the area. Surveillance video is going to be a great one. Right?

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Marcos Salinas: One of the videos that I showed you earlier is from a surveillance system of an adjacent business to the intersection where that crash occurred.

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Marcos Salinas: If we don’t get that, if we don’t get out there or somebody doesn’t have the presence of mind to preserve that video.

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Marcos Salinas: Most surveillance systems are keeping or have a retention schedule somewhere in the weeks’ time of period or time period, in the sense that

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Marcos Salinas: some of these systems overwrite data 7 days after it’s recorded.

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Marcos Salinas: Some of them will last for or will keep data. The retention schedule is 2 weeks. Some of them do it until the system fills up with information. And then it starts overriding the oldest information.

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Marcos Salinas: None of these I would, I would caution you. None of these are a set, always and forever, type of scenario. It’s always a look and see, we’ve got to go. Ask the business owner. Hey? Did you capture this information? Did you save it?

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Marcos Salinas: On the front of surveillance video. Oftentimes, law enforcement doesn’t know how to interact with the system.

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Marcos Salinas: The business owner doesn’t know how to interact with the system. And so

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Marcos Salinas: the catch, all, or what the effort that’s made is to just record a video of the video

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Marcos Salinas: that limits what information or what analysis can be done with that surveillance video because it isn’t in the original format.

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Marcos Salinas: That’s especially true today, with generative AI, right where you can have artificial intelligence, create imagery or modify imagery or generate videos and sequences. So, it’s really important that we try to obtain the original footage. When we go out on these investigations.

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Marcos Salinas: some other critical vehicle, or some other critical evidence related to the vehicles. We’re looking at overall exterior and interior dimensions. What can be seen from a driver’s seat. What are the damaged areas? What do they extend to? Is it localized to the front corner? Does it extend along the full length of the vehicle.

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Marcos Salinas: What do these damage areas look like? Is the is the engagement such that it’s a shallow sideswipe, or is it a more pronounced deformation pattern where there’s a clear impact with

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Marcos Salinas: higher speeds.

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Marcos Salinas: All of these are pieces of information that help us as we go into the analysis portion of our investigation

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Marcos Salinas: tire condition. We’ve got a wet roadway where, you know.

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Marcos Salinas: vehicle control was an issue.

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Marcos Salinas: you know, you have a trailer that that yaws out or starts to jackknife on a driver. What was the condition of your tires, you know? Is there any avenue for somebody to pursue a, a.

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Marcos Salinas: an allegation. That maintenance is an issue documenting these things and knowing this early on can be incredibly helpful to the investigative process and the analysis that’s done later

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Marcos Salinas: lighting systems. You have a truck and trailer that’s traveling down the roadway has a collision at night.

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Marcos Salinas: Were your lights working where all the lights working are there components that are

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Marcos Salinas: or lights that were inoperable at the time.

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Marcos Salinas: and that cuts both ways right. If we can demonstrate that all of your lighting systems met the requirements that are stipulated by the CVSA.

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Marcos Salinas: then there’s no angle for somebody to pursue on that front. But how do we prove that? Do we have at scene photos? Does body cam document that the lights were on when law enforcement showed up

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Marcos Salinas: does dash, cam, do the same.

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Marcos Salinas: All of these are pieces of the puzzle that help us paint a more and more detailed picture, the more information we have, the more restricted the possibilities are on what it was that happened.

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Marcos Salinas: Retro reflective tape is another component in the in the conspicuity aspect of nighttime crashes. Right? Did your truck and trailer have

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Marcos Salinas: reflective tape for conspicuity? Treatments that were in good working order in good condition.

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Marcos Salinas: Is there? Re? Were they covered with mud and soil. Where they you know, were they just

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Marcos Salinas: put on? Have they been there for 3 years? Paying attention to these details are important, because this is what allegations will sometimes be levied right when these conditions are not met, when there are issues at play. Like, I said, related to conspicuity.

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Marcos Salinas: sometimes

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Marcos Salinas: it’s a

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Marcos Salinas: it’s important. That’s what I would leave it at that. It’s important to make sure that these systems are well maintained to demonstrate to a jury that you’ve done everything you can to run a safe vehicle on the roadway.

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Marcos Salinas: Another part that we look for in in our investigative process. Sometimes the odometer or engine hours or fault codes generated

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Marcos Salinas: on the vehicle can also help in the investigation. The odometer helps us establish a correlation between

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Marcos Salinas: the electronic data that’s retrieved from the engine control module, for example, or from an abs module

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Marcos Salinas: engine hours also help us correlate that data to our subject incident.

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Marcos Salinas: Sometimes you have an incident where we may not have electronic data in the form of a hard break or last stop record.

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Marcos Salinas: But given the scenario that occurred, fault codes can be correlated to our subject incident, and sometimes the information that is written along with those fault codes can be important or can be revealing in the investigative or in the analysis process.

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Marcos Salinas: I’d also point out that it. It can also help improving that either something happened

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Marcos Salinas: prior to an incident occurring, for example, a catastrophic loss of

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Marcos Salinas: of oil pressure or

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Marcos Salinas: fluid levels. Coolant is a is a common one. Etc, etc.

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Marcos Salinas: The other part, like I said, electronic data on these vehicles, incredibly helpful in our investigative and analysis process and communicating what we know from these vehicles

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Marcos Salinas: the system. Sometimes, if we, if the electrical system on the truck is compromised due to the collision itself, we can go in and identify these modules. We can pull these modules, and we can perform bench top downloads.

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Marcos Salinas: But again, there, there’s a lot of data that comes from these vehicles. Right?

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Marcos Salinas: So, let’s talk a little bit about the data preservation we’ve talked about. What stuff we’re looking for from a physical standpoint. Now, how do we go about preserving the data

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Marcos Salinas: and communicating what we find to stakeholders. So, what you’re looking at here are 3 examples of

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Marcos Salinas: data Lidar data that was collected with a 3D laser scanner.

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Marcos Salinas: These models are millimeter, accurate,

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Marcos Salinas: captured with a with a laser beam. So, the laser comes around captures these models we then process them, and that gives us the ability to take these models from wherever we investigated the vehicle itself or inspected the vehicle itself. We can bring everything together in a digital environment.

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Marcos Salinas: This type of preservation ensures that even if the vehicle goes gets sold or is put back in service is that we’ve had. We have a very accurate digital representation of that same vehicle

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Marcos Salinas: for the purposes of our analysis.

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Marcos Salinas: So here we have a motor vehicle, the scene of a motor vehicle collision that I had the opportunity to show up at. And everything is here. So, it’s a great example of

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Marcos Salinas: a crash that had just happened. And I’m going to use this as an opportunity to kind of run through some critical evidence that

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Marcos Salinas: goes missing very quickly or deteriorates very quickly after an incident occurs.

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Marcos Salinas: So, in this scenario we had a passenger. SUV passenger vehicle. It’s up in the top left corner of the image frame, and we had a motorcyclist who was going straight through an intersection.

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Marcos Salinas: Now, when I showed up.

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Marcos Salinas: I started laser scanning this environment and law enforcement was their firefighters were there. A whole staff of 1st responders were present.

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Marcos Salinas: and they allowed me the opportunity to come in and preserve this scene.

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Marcos Salinas: Now, at 1st glance it may look pretty straightforward. You’ve got the SUV. In the left. You’ve got the motorcycle kind of center frame. You can see a fluid trail moving back towards the SUV. Coming from the motorcycle.

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Marcos Salinas: Now, a couple of things to point out here

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Marcos Salinas: in this image is that we also have the position of a witness that red jeep in the top right corner of the of the laser scan of this image

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Marcos Salinas: was

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Marcos Salinas: able to give a statement to law enforcement, and because I was able to preserve the location of their jeep, we knew exactly where their vantage point came from right so correlating that with the witness, or with the statement that that witness gave to law enforcement was incredibly useful

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Marcos Salinas: in this. In this incident.

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Marcos Salinas: Now here, zooming into the motorcycle.

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Marcos Salinas: We have the location of the motorcycle, right? We have a damaged model of the motorcycle. But I’d also point out. You see the tennis shoe that’s to the right and down near the motorcycle near the fuel tank.

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Marcos Salinas: Beyond that we also have a damage model of the SUV.

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Marcos Salinas: Now, with this information, right, we see in the impact to the SUV is pretty much centrally located.

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Marcos Salinas: We have an impact just near the

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Marcos Salinas: logo, the emblem on the front of that SUV

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Marcos Salinas: the impact location impact orientation is well evidenced from what we have here. Now I point this out here, because shortly after I completed this laser scan.

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Marcos Salinas: firefighters came over and put a pickaxe through the hood to peel the hood back in order to cut the battery cable.

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Marcos Salinas: So sometimes, right in this instance, for example, sometimes the evidence is going to change, even while the vehicles are still at the scene.

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Marcos Salinas: Another element here that I want to point out is when this motorcyclist was involved in the collision. He was actually thrown from his motorcycle and landed across the intersection.

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Marcos Salinas: This was only evidenced by 2 blood splatters that were on the pavement when I completed my laser scan.

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Marcos Salinas: Now you can bet that those blood stains which memorialized where this writer came to rest and would then be used. In our analysis.

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Marcos Salinas: these blood stains would have very quickly deteriorated either with 1st responders, firefighters in particular, washing the roadway surface, because, generally speaking, 1st responders try to clean up the area to protect the general public from seeing this type of evidence on the roadway.

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Marcos Salinas: so like, I said, if I had not been there to collect this evidence, or if photographs had not been taken to preserve or memorialize this location.

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Marcos Salinas: We are left in the analysis portion of this process. We’re left to either rely on what the officer has stipulated in his report, or what he has documented. And sometimes that documentation is not as accurate as we would hope it would be.

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Marcos Salinas: Here’s an example, an interactive example or video fly through example of the same laser scan data that we’re using to preserve and memorialize the evidence both at the scene and of these vehicles.

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Marcos Salinas: This is a laser scan that was done in New York City.

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Marcos Salinas: But, as you can tell, as we fly through this area, right? We have very accurate

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Marcos Salinas: details on a lot of the information that’s in these environments or in this environment, particularly, right? And this was in park.

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Marcos Salinas: This consists of something along the order of 62 scans done over the course of a 12 h period.

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Marcos Salinas: but you can see just how massive an area that was preserved here

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Marcos Salinas: and at any moment. Right? Because we have this digitally preserved in a 3D environment, we can return to that environment, to explore different perspectives, to review the evidence that was that was present, and to search for evidence that perhaps wasn’t

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Marcos Salinas: abundantly obvious. Given the 1st set of information we received but became more obvious once we received additional information about the incident.

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Marcos Salinas: So, let’s talk a little bit about aerial imagery. So, as I mentioned before, running a drone overhead.

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Marcos Salinas: right gives you a whole different perspective for

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Marcos Salinas: what is happening on a on a roadway on the scene, right? You can see

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Marcos Salinas: from ground level, you can only see so much, seeing it from a different perspective, gives a whole other appreciation to where or how the evidence connects with each other.

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Marcos Salinas: What may not be obvious when looking at it at ground level might become very intuitive when looking at it overhead.

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Marcos Salinas: So, this little video here just kind of runs through how we utilize drones in our data collection process. And just to kind of speak through the text that’s on the screen here.

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Marcos Salinas: When we fly a drone mission overhead.

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Marcos Salinas: we’re using automated flight paths. What that allows us to do is run a very structured photography or a very structured grid overhead of how photography is going to be taken over a scene

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Marcos Salinas: and allows us then to utilizing photogrammetry software allows us to stitch all those photos back together

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Marcos Salinas: to get an orthographic aerial representation. And overhead representation of the environment as well as what you’re watching now, which is again a, a, an interactive 3D model.

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Marcos Salinas: Using this right allows us to

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Marcos Salinas: essentially capture a digital twin of the environment that we can then bring into a digital environment, capture a digital twin of your environment to bring into a digital environment where analysis can be performed.

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Marcos Salinas: We can take these 3D assets and start to apply, you know. Known constraints, right? Where was the vehicle when

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Marcos Salinas: impact was occurring? Where did the vehicles come to rest. Collecting all of this allows us to really flush through a really comprehensive look at what it was that happened, based on the evidence that’s preserved.

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Marcos Salinas: So, beyond the laser scanning the drone usage.

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Marcos Salinas: We’ll touch now on the electronic data sources that come from some of the vehicles that are out on the roadway.

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Marcos Salinas: So, with passenger vehicles, we’re typically looking at airbag data because most of the vehicles manufactured today have airbags in them.

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Marcos Salinas: When you have an airbag, there’s got to be a module that’s making a decision as to whether or not that airbag should deploy.

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Marcos Salinas: Now.

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Marcos Salinas: generally speaking, about 90, I think 90 or 90 plus percent of vehicles on the roadway today have some sort of airbag control module that is capable of recording event related data.

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Marcos Salinas: another source of electronic data comes from your heavy vehicle engine control modules.

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Marcos Salinas: Now, as we speak spoke about earlier, right? What we get from a Cummins engine is going to be different than what we get from a Detroit Diesel engine or what we might get from a cat engine.

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Marcos Salinas: Similar. We’ve also got driver assistance systems, right safety systems, for example.

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Marcos Salinas: like a lane, keep assist, or a collision mitigation system.

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Marcos Salinas: All of these, as they become more and more integrated into our vehicles or into vehicles that are on the roadway today. All present the possibility

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Marcos Salinas: of being a data source or source of information that helps us understand what was happening in your specific crash.

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Marcos Salinas: Another one that’s also very common or is becoming more prevalent. These days are dash cameras.

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Marcos Salinas: The video on the right. I’m going play it again.

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Marcos Salinas: And the video on the right comes from a Bendix Wingman Fusion System.

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Marcos Salinas: The video itself was extracted from the safety direct offering from Bendix which actually now is, is offered by Rand McNally. But this is a service that

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Marcos Salinas: comes available. If your truck has appendix

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Marcos Salinas: the Bendix Wingman Fusion System on board, but it does carry a subscription if you’re paying for the subscription would highly recommend. You get familiar with it. Because I can’t tell you the number of times where I’ve spoken to people. This system is on their truck, but they don’t know how to extract the video, or they’re not familiar with

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Marcos Salinas: going in and seeing events that have been that have been one automatically tagged as an event of interest.

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Marcos Salinas: But 2 being tagged be having the ability to manually tag an event of interest.

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Marcos Salinas: If any of you guys are running Linux for example, we know that lyrics provides the ability to manually tag an event of interest even in the event that a triggering threshold was not met. That comes in really handy for your

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Marcos Salinas: very shallow side swipes lane. Change maneuver incidents where it’s like, he said, she said, because there’s no physical evidence on the roadway. Your dash cam system, even if a triggering threshold was not met.

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Marcos Salinas: Your dash cam system may provide you the ability to go in and manually tag an event of interest which might exonerate your driver entirely.

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Marcos Salinas: So, let’s dig in a little bit to the passenger vehicle data recorders. So, as I mentioned before, we’re looking at airbag control modules. Typically.

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Marcos Salinas: these airbag control modules are typically monitoring accelerations and making decisions based on the accelerations being experienced by the module, and thereby the vehicle

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Marcos Salinas: to determine whether or not safety systems should deploy safety belt pretensioners side curtain, airbags, torso bags. Some even have knee bolsters now, as well as some additional systems now that are.

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Marcos Salinas: If anybody’s watched or come across a Volkswagen commercial here recently. There’s some preemptive stuff that Volkswagen is doing that. Will

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Marcos Salinas: a pull up slack in your seat belt right if it anticipates a collision is imminent.

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Marcos Salinas: Other aspects of the data that are that is being collected by these airbag control modules can include Ya as well as role rates. Which all, all come in handy. In the analysis component of our investigative process.

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Marcos Salinas: So again, these systems command restraint systems to fire. Some of these passenger vehicle EDRs also include

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Marcos Salinas: limited or some capacity to record video footage, either through still frames or through traditional video that can be extracted. Again, if the vehicle is equipped with that. With that hardware.

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Marcos Salinas: Some other systems that also exist provide GPS tracking

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Marcos Salinas: for anybody who has a GM vehicle. When you purchased the vehicle, it came with a OnStar

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Marcos Salinas: subscription.

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Marcos Salinas: OnStar can, in certain instances, with particular hardware, have the ability to provide track logs or GPS tracking.

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Marcos Salinas: as I mentioned earlier, Ford vehicles with the sync system SYNC.

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Marcos Salinas: There are different variations. So, you have a sync, Gen. One, Gen. 2, Gen. 3. I think there’s even a Gen. 4 now. But

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Marcos Salinas: the forward systems have the ability to record track logs sometimes. That might be the only information that comes from a vehicle.

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Marcos Salinas: So again, be aware that

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Marcos Salinas: data sources are out there. And again, there’s no once one, ever, always and forever sort of approach. It’s always looking at. What’s the latest information that’s available because these systems are ever changing.

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Marcos Salinas: Here’s a here’s a diagram just to kind of introduce you to, or sort of lay out what kind of systems we’re seeing now. But again, this is always subject to change. What you’ll see is, you know your adaptive cruise. Emergency braking, pedestrian detection collision avoidance. Some systems that are more advanced are using lidar stands for light detection and ranging.

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Marcos Salinas: That’s the type of technology that we’re using with our laser scanner. So

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Marcos Salinas: these Lidar systems that are on some of the vehicles that are out on the roads today are actually doing in dynamic environment mapping typically referred to as slam, simultaneous localization and mapping.

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Marcos Salinas: Those systems are capturing 3D models, volumetric models of the environments that they’re traveling through in order to make decisions on how the vehicle should respond. The automated systems have to have some information on the environment

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Marcos Salinas: to make decisions on how they should react to the environment.

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Marcos Salinas: If anybody lives in a market where you’re seeing autonomous vehicles, autonomous vehicles are running these Lidar sensors on their

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Marcos Salinas: autonomous vehicles are running these Lidar sensors.

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Marcos Salinas: And they’re capturing again, volumetric representations. 3D representations of the environments that they’re driving through. And those vehicles are utilizing that Lidar data to make decisions on conflicts, conflict, resolution, you know, do I break? Do I steer? Do I do a combination of the 2, etc, etc.

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Marcos Salinas: So commercial vehicle EDRs. And again, EDR, we’re talking here about electronic data recorders. Now, typically the systems that we’re imaging for. For these data sources, the data sources where this is coming from.

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Marcos Salinas: they’re generally geared towards managing mechanical and electrical systems. That’s why you hear us talk about engine control modules or ABS modules like a Bendix or a Wabco module. Safety systems like Detroit Assurance. The Bendix Wingman Fusion, etc, etc.

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Marcos Salinas: The data sources extend to several ECMs on a truck as I was just discussing. They do come from the engine; they can come from the transmission. They can come from. Some of the emission controls that are on these vehicles. Cabin chassis controllers brake control. Excuse me, brake controllers.

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Marcos Salinas: You will find on some of these Cummins is a great example where there are caveats that are included with these printouts that indicate they are not intended for accident reconstruction.

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Marcos Salinas: However.

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Marcos Salinas: through research

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Marcos Salinas: done within this field, we’ve been able to show that the data is reliable for the purposes of accident reconstruction. So just be aware, even if you hear that being tossed around, there are ways, or there are, there is effort put forward to validating the data that we’re relying upon, and if we can’t validate it, then that’s a that’s something we

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Marcos Salinas: account for as we go through our analysis process

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Marcos Salinas: similar to passenger vehicles with GPS tracking logs. As I mentioned before.

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Marcos Salinas: heavy trucks also sometimes have the capability to include GPS tracking logs, aftermarket systems like Geotab.

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Marcos Salinas: I want to say smart drive also has the capability to have a GPS antenna that is tracking

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Marcos Salinas: your vehicle’s position over time analytics is another one that has the potential to have GPS tracking logs to be aware that those data sets do exist

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Marcos Salinas: and similar. As I mentioned before, dash cameras, right? Linux. Smart drive motive. There’s a variety of these on the road today, many of you, I’m sure, are familiar with

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Marcos Salinas: what you have installed on your fleet

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Marcos Salinas: being familiar with the interface and the capabilities of those cameras is something I would highly recommend. Because you don’t want to be learning on the fly when you’ve got a large exposure with a really bad crash. That’s not generally the time to start

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Marcos Salinas: perusing the system, to try to learn some things, test it, be familiar with it. If you have questions, you know. Somebody like myself who has experience with these systems can be very helpful to the overall

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Marcos Salinas: data collection and preservation processes.

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Marcos Salinas: safety systems for commercial motor vehicles. Again, Bendix Wingman Fusion. Wabco’s got some systems that are out on the field or out in

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Marcos Salinas: out in the real world today.

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Marcos Salinas: They’re doing a variety of tasks, blind spotter, pedestrian, forward collision, mitigation lane. Keep assist. Be familiar with. You know what your trucks have, I’m sure.

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Marcos Salinas: If any of you have fleets with these with these vehicles

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Marcos Salinas: on the road. Some of your

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Marcos Salinas: older, more traditional drivers probably give you a fuss every now and then, when the systems engage one of the common topics I hear from older drivers

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Marcos Salinas: is that they don’t like when the safety system intervenes. Right? But they’re there for a purpose, and

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Marcos Salinas: it doesn’t mean that they’re always doing the right thing or always

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Marcos Salinas: correct in the way that they react. Sometimes, you know, you get false positives. It’s a balance, right? One thing I would use this opportunity to point out

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Marcos Salinas: is knowing also how to

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Marcos Salinas: circumvent. No, that’s not the right word how to override a system intervention, and I’ll give you a quick example for anyone running a vehicle, a fleet with the Detroit assurance system.

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Marcos Salinas: Detroit assurance system has the capability to apply

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Marcos Salinas: vehicle breaking all the way up to a full stop when a collision is triggered or collision, mitigation, trigger is met.

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Marcos Salinas: Now, one thing drivers don’t know or may not know, right is that when that happens and the vehicle comes to a complete stop, or as the vehicle’s safety system is intervening.

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Marcos Salinas: they can override the system by hitting the gas pedal.

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Marcos Salinas: A recent incident that I’m working right now involves a vehicle that met the collision. Mitigation, threshold.

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Marcos Salinas: emergency, braking, automatic emergency braking was applied brought the vehicle to a stop, but the driver did not know how to override. He didn’t know how to get the vehicle to continue moving down the roadway. He ended up being rear, ended by another driver who was inattentive.

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Marcos Salinas: But those kinds of issues can be

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Marcos Salinas: mitigated by training your drivers or making staying familiar with these systems.

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Marcos Salinas: So, kind of electronic data summary as you can see here on the screen.

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Marcos Salinas: 99% of passenger vehicles produced in 2020 had electronic data recorders.

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Marcos Salinas: most heavy vehicle or commercial. Most heavy commercial vehicles have some sort of

343
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Marcos Salinas: electronic control module on them engine controller, abs controller, etc, etc.

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Marcos Salinas: As we continue to move into the future. Automated driver. Assistance systems, like the one I was just discussing are becoming more common.

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Marcos Salinas: Dash cameras as well are gaining in popularity. So is GPS fleet tracking with the electronic logging device regulations that are coming into effect.

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Marcos Salinas: So, here’s an example of some engine control module data that was retrieved from a Cummins engine.

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Marcos Salinas: Now, what we’re looking at here in terms of what you see here will retrieve from the ECM.

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Marcos Salinas: The graphical representation, which is what you see on the left.

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Marcos Salinas: Now in in a tabular representation, which is what you see on the right. The graphical makes it easy to view changes in the data. The graphical or tabular data. Excuse me. The numerical data that’s on the right helps us understand the precision or the

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Marcos Salinas: the level of precision that’s available from the from the system, right?

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Marcos Salinas: It’s easy to see where changes are happening on the left. When you represent the data on a graph, or you plot the data on the graph.

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Marcos Salinas: But it can be helpful to our investigation to be able to look at the numerical values to be able to calculate precisely, for example, what was the decel. rate based on the reported vehicle speeds? What was the change in the engine rpm, or what was the throttle percentage being put in helps us understand some of these to a finer degree.

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Marcos Salinas: Moving into an example of what we get from safety systems. So, you’ll recognize the video on the right is one that we saw earlier

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Marcos Salinas: coming from a safety direct or a Bendix Fu Wingman fusion system.

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Marcos Salinas: Along with the video, right? We see the graphical representation of data in the bottom right corner of that image frame. There is numerical data that comes along with this. That’s an example of the Bendix safety system.

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Marcos Salinas: On the left side. We have an

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Marcos Salinas: Aba event or a record and automatic breaking

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Marcos Salinas: application, I believe.

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Marcos Salinas: I have to double check on that. But the Aba event is referring to, or is, let me back up there. The Aba event record on the left is from a Detroit assurance system. This specifically comes from the video radar decision unit.

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Marcos Salinas: and you’ll see that in the representation and the data that’s been presented here.

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Marcos Salinas: you’ll see that we have column headings for object detected. That’s indicating when the object in front of the vehicle was detected.

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Marcos Salinas: It also gives columns for optic, acoustic warning, haptic braking, emergency, braking

363
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Marcos Salinas: the start of a start and end of emergency braking

364
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Marcos Salinas: and then we also see if the object got was lost. So, if they’re steering inputs, for example, or if the vehicle leaves the area of interest in front of the vehicle that has the system equipped.

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Marcos Salinas: All of that information can be learned from this from this event record.

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Marcos Salinas: So how do we prevent data loss? We’ve talked about all the data that could be on a vehicle. Right?

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Marcos Salinas: But how do we prevent, or how do we prevent that data from being overwritten or being destroyed entirely just by a movement of the vehicle? So

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Marcos Salinas: so, part of this is understanding that again, there is no

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Marcos Salinas: always and forever approach that can be applied to these systems.

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Marcos Salinas: However, some good, hard, fast rules can help understand these things, right? So, we’d understand that you guys want to get your equipment back on the road, because any day that a truck sits idle, it means that it’s not generating revenue.

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Marcos Salinas: with an event where we have expectation that a hard breaking record may have been created. It’s helpful to understand that hard break events will be stored until they’re overwritten by new events.

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Marcos Salinas: And so, what that means is that if you have an event today, a hard break event that’s created today. And let’s use, for example, a Detroit Diesel engine which carries 2 hard breaks and one last stop.

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Marcos Salinas: If you’re too hard, break events, let’s say one of them is today, and the other one was some other point in time, right? Not related to the collision.

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Marcos Salinas: If your driver is a very aggressive driver.

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Marcos Salinas: those hard break. Events might be overwritten in that same day. Right? If you have a very conservative driver, I’ve seen trucks on the road where we went out a year after the incident occurred to determine or to pull ECM data

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Marcos Salinas: and

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Marcos Salinas: the

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Marcos Salinas: hard break events were over a year old.

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Marcos Salinas: It all depends on how the truck is being driven, and what exactly is

380
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Marcos Salinas: what exactly, is occurring with that truck. So again, be aware that hard break events typically aren’t overwritten until a new event is created.

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Marcos Salinas: Again, we know we want to move the vehicle after an accident. But on a Detroit Diesel, for example, that last stop record

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Marcos Salinas: when the vehicle was involved in the collision and came to a stop. That vehicle should have written a last stop record again. This is using a Detroit Diesel engine as an example.

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Marcos Salinas: if that truck moves because law enforcement says, hey, get that truck moved down the road. I want it taken off, or you know your drivers instructed to do something, or and it doesn’t matter what it is right. It can happen while it’s at scene. It can happen when the vehicle is at a record yard. If that record yard doesn’t understand that this truck should not move.

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Marcos Salinas: There’s been times where

385
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Marcos Salinas: I show up to a record yard, and the record thought it’d be convenient to move the truck forward to get it pulled out so that we could get around it.

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Marcos Salinas: and in doing so they moved it under the vehicle’s own power. And that record that last stop record was overwritten.

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Marcos Salinas: Similar can happen if

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Marcos Salinas: even if the truck is moved not under its own power. If the if a wrecker hooks up to the truck and the key is still in the on position.

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Marcos Salinas: If the vehicle’s speed sensor registers a non 0 value

390
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Marcos Salinas: typically, in excess of about 2 and a half miles an hour. If it registers that that non 0 value.

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Marcos Salinas: and the vehicle speeds up and comes back down that that will overwrite a last stop event.

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Marcos Salinas: Dash camera footage

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01:00:57.140 –> 01:01:01.529
Marcos Salinas: as we were talking about before learning how to preserve an event now.

394
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Marcos Salinas: but learning how to preserve an event can be incredibly powerful for you.

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Marcos Salinas: In the event that a triggering threshold was not met. Now, typically, if a triggering threshold is met, that video will be locked and cannot be overwritten or deleted in a

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Marcos Salinas: without intention, because typically there’s going to be some checks in your system to avoid deleting something of interest. However.

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Marcos Salinas: if a recording threshold was not met. And you have video that’s contained in the dashcam, let’s say.

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Marcos Salinas: a system that’s keeping a runtime buffer like a lytic system. If you don’t go in and manually tag that event within a within the retention period.

399
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Marcos Salinas: then that can also overwrite an event of interest.

400
01:01:49.980 –> 01:01:58.919
Marcos Salinas: The same is true with continuously recording dash cameras. For example, you have an aftermarket camera that has an Sd card

401
01:01:58.960 –> 01:02:06.880
Marcos Salinas: that Sd card is just always accepting data from the camera, and if a triggering threshold was not met.

402
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Marcos Salinas: the data being recorded by the camera is not locked, and therefore will be overwritten by subsequent trips. One thing to suggest, because I’ve run into this in the past, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring it up

403
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Marcos Salinas: is, drivers who have their own dash camera and install it in their truck are involved in an incident. Say, yeah, I I have the video.

404
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Marcos Salinas: Tell them to just pull the card. Don’t put that card back in because we’ve had it happen where

405
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Marcos Salinas: a driver thought. Oh, well, I was involved in the crash. It’ll be locked. The video was not locked.

406
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Marcos Salinas: and subsequently, when he reinserted it into the S. Into the car, into the camera. Excuse me.

407
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Marcos Salinas: and drove off.

408
01:02:47.270 –> 01:02:58.879
Marcos Salinas: His event was overwritten. So, he had looked at the data, but he assumed that it was locked because it was in a vehicle was in a collision. He thought a dash camera should know that I was in a collision.

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Marcos Salinas: and it should preserve the video should lock the video restrict editing of the video.

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Marcos Salinas: And unfortunately, it did not. So. All we had then was his statement, his testimony of what he had seen, which obviously there’s a conflict of interest there.

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Marcos Salinas: The other thing to be aware of is that

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Marcos Salinas: without preserving or preventing the data loss, right? If you put your equipment back on the road before the data is preserved, you run the risk. Exfoliation claims.

413
01:03:28.730 –> 01:03:36.469
Marcos Salinas: We’ve seen more of them here recently, as attorneys are becoming more familiar with where what data can be available.

414
01:03:36.520 –> 01:03:41.140
Marcos Salinas: If you have the expectation that a claim may go into litigation, we highly recommend

415
01:03:41.484 –> 01:03:53.170
Marcos Salinas: preserving that vehicle creating, you know, documenting the damage, even if there’s very little damage downloading the engine module because we might get a last stop record, or we might have a hard break event

416
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Marcos Salinas: that can be overwritten. It’s volatile.

417
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Marcos Salinas: basically

418
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Marcos Salinas: tow it, park the truck. Let us get the. Let us preserve the data. Then you can get the truck back out on the road. You know, or repaired, etc, etc.

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Steve Kessler: Hey! Marcus!

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Marcos Salinas: Yes, sir.

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Steve Kessler: Yeah, I don’t know how much you have left, but we’ve people are needing to go, I think, after we’re at about an hour or so, and there’s about.

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Marcos Salinas: Are we there already.

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Steve Kessler: Here

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Steve Kessler: you can help us out here just a little bit. And get

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Steve Kessler: folks questions answered. Thank you.

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Marcos Salinas: Absolutely. So we’ll run through these quickly. So, CVSA, right, as you guys know, I’m sure you’re familiar with the out of service criteria handbook. Be prepared for those that’s an often that’s something that’s oftentimes being looked at in heavy vehicle collisions. If somebody, if your driver is out there

427
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Marcos Salinas: if they know that a CVSA

428
01:04:55.550 –> 01:05:14.910
Marcos Salinas: inspection was completed that can be very helpful if Law Enforcement’s already done their break exam. You already have an idea of what you’re going to be facing. Right. We always recommend that if law enforcement finds something out of service, let’s double check, just to make sure that they did the inspection, the way we expect them to do the inspection

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Marcos Salinas: systems. And we’ve talked a lot about. Or we’ve talked about a lot of these already? These are the common systems on the vehicle that we’re looking at. Let’s get into how we utilize the data very quickly. So hard break events. A hard break event will give us vehicle speed

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Marcos Salinas: brake, application, throttle, position, clutch, position. All that information comes in handy in understanding what driver was doing. Leading up to the incident was you was your driver over the speed limit? Was he below the speed limit? Was his? You know

431
01:05:54.280 –> 01:05:57.460
Marcos Salinas: again, what was going on with the vehicle coming up to

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01:05:58.030 –> 01:06:16.030
Marcos Salinas: incident. Odometer helps us correlate an event to the subject event, right? If our current odometer on the vehicle, as you can see. Here is 12.1 miles, and the incident odometer is 3 tenths of a mile behind. Most likely related right if

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Marcos Salinas: incident or current odometer is 12.1 miles, but the incident odometer is 1.9.

434
01:06:21.590 –> 01:06:26.759
Marcos Salinas: There’s an 11 mile an hour, 10 mile an hour. 10-mile difference, right?

435
01:06:26.920 –> 01:06:42.289
Marcos Salinas: Unless we can explain why that vehicle odometer is 10 miles more. Maybe he drove it to the Oc. Maybe it was. You know. Take your pick right as long as we can explain it. That’s what we’re looking to do with this data. Here’s a last stop record

436
01:06:42.400 –> 01:06:45.859
Marcos Salinas: odometer and last stop odometer match. Precisely.

437
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Marcos Salinas: You’ll notice that each one of the graphical representations was slightly different.

438
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Marcos Salinas: Here’s the tabular format on the EDR data. As I mentioned, vehicle, speed brake, clutch, throttle positions, cruise control.

439
01:07:01.210 –> 01:07:02.400
Marcos Salinas: let’s see

440
01:07:02.410 –> 01:07:12.029
Marcos Salinas: Bendix data. So, from an abs controller vehicle speed and steering, I’m going to use these to point out as an example. If we have vehicle speed and steering angle

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Marcos Salinas: that will uniquely identify a path for that vehicle. Because if you know the speed, and you know the steering angle. You know exactly what path that vehicle was traversing.

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Marcos Salinas: You don’t know Lane position from steering angle and vehicle speed, because it doesn’t give us enough information to place us on the roadway, but it does uniquely identify a path which can be very powerful in

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Marcos Salinas: investigating any of these incidents.

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01:07:40.660 –> 01:07:43.639
Marcos Salinas: There’s an example of what the drone data looks like.

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Marcos Salinas: Again, I’m going to run through these really quickly. This is an example to show you what kind of clarity we get from the drone.

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Marcos Salinas: Here’s a close up of our Lidar data.

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01:07:54.110 –> 01:08:00.699
Marcos Salinas: some laser scan measurements that we do as a part of our investigation. And then here’s what we do with the data. Here’s a scene

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01:08:00.800 –> 01:08:11.110
Marcos Salinas: on the left we have the evidence of where the vehicles came to rest on the right. We’ve taken our digital replica or digital model of the vehicle and placed it at the scene.

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Marcos Salinas: Once we can do all this. This helps us understand, you know. Where did the vehicles come to rest? What are we learning? What are we looking at?

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Marcos Salinas: These were the case studies, Steve. I think this is a good point, or if it’s a good place to stop, if you want to answer some questions, if anybody wants to hang around. I’ll go through the case studies, but I think this would be good to take a pause.

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Steve Kessler: Awesome man. This is fantastic information, Marcos. We do have some questions that have come in. I want to make sure the folks

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01:08:42.100 –> 01:08:44.799
Steve Kessler: get their questions answered if we can.

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01:08:44.819 –> 01:08:50.250
Steve Kessler: 1st question is, typically, how soon can sea be on site?

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01:08:50.350 –> 01:08:58.050
Steve Kessler: Does the drone get flown to the scene? 1st accident. Scenes change fast to get vehicles off the road, towed away, etcetera.

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Marcos Salinas: So that all depends on when you let us know. So, I can give you an example. 3 weeks ago

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01:09:04.782 –> 01:09:10.720
Marcos Salinas: I had a client who contacted me said, hey, I had an incident that occurred today at 9 Am.

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01:09:11.050 –> 01:09:15.070
Marcos Salinas: And they asked me. They called me at noon. I was out there by 2.

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Marcos Salinas: So, it depends on when you alert us. If you, as soon as you alert us, that an incident is has occurred.

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Marcos Salinas: If it’s you know, I can tell you. That’s 1 example of getting there within 4 h of the incident. There’s been times where you know. Incident happened at 3 Am. And 7 am. I’m out there because I’m waiting for the sun to come up, and I want to be there at 1st light.

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Marcos Salinas: because you’re absolutely right. Seeing evidence does change, and it does change quickly.

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Mark Rhea: Isn’t that fun? Isn’t that fun? Yeah, it’s a joy.

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01:09:47.680 –> 01:09:48.604
Steve Kessler: Perfect

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01:09:49.779 –> 01:09:57.189
Steve Kessler: another question has come in when it comes to phone records of the driver. Have you seen it used against the driver

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01:09:57.270 –> 01:10:03.119
Steve Kessler: for listening to podcast music books at the time the crash happened. Do you get involved in that.

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Marcos Salinas: Great question. So, I had an incident, and we had dash, cam footage, interior facing dash, cam footage of a driver looking at his phone as he was traveling down the roadway, and he struck a vehicle that was broadside across the roadway trying to help a good Samaritan trying to help somebody who was stuck in the ditch in the bar ditch.

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Marcos Salinas: So

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01:10:25.330 –> 01:10:37.070
Marcos Salinas: if a driver and this is how the jury found in this particular venue, so I think it would depend on your venue, and how far, how far you may want to defend this. But I would tell you in this incident

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01:10:37.480 –> 01:10:44.470
Marcos Salinas: what was proven was that the driver was looking at Spotify. He was in the process of changing his music.

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01:10:44.540 –> 01:10:51.580
Marcos Salinas: The conclusion the jury came to is that they were not going to hold it against the driver or manipulating the radio.

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Marcos Salinas: Because and that was the relationship they drew. The correlation was that, hey? It’s typical for a driver to manipulate the radio while driving him looking at his phone to change the radio station is substantially similar, and they did not use it against him.

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Marcos Salinas: but that is, I will tell you that, especially with juries today. That’s

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01:11:13.730 –> 01:11:18.059
Marcos Salinas: that’s a tossup, because it depends on your jury, and how your jury would interpret that.

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01:11:18.060 –> 01:11:24.139
Steve Kessler: Absolutely someone else asked, how long is the EDR’s data available in a truck.

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01:11:24.780 –> 01:11:37.879
Marcos Salinas: So, going back to the conversation we had earlier about the EDR, it depends on the system that you have. So, the if you’re looking specifically at an engine. Right? Cat is different than Detroit is different than Cummins is different than Volvo and Mac.

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01:11:38.420 –> 01:11:46.869
Marcos Salinas: It really depends on what system you have a last stop record, as I mentioned, will get overwritten as soon as the vehicle is driven again.

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01:11:47.543 –> 01:11:52.989
Marcos Salinas: A hard break event won’t be overwritten until a subsequent hard break event is generated.

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01:11:54.300 –> 01:12:05.809
Marcos Salinas: Cummins has 3, so you have a better probability of avoiding or mitigating the possibility of overriding a hard break event, because you’ve got 3 of them that would have to occur in order to overwrite the subject.

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Marcos Salinas: But Detroit Diesel only has 2.

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01:12:08.370 –> 01:12:08.920
Mark Rhea: Oh, God!

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01:12:08.920 –> 01:12:12.569
Marcos Salinas: Mac and Volvo only have one. So

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01:12:12.620 –> 01:12:32.240
Marcos Salinas: how long it lasts is contingent on the system you have, and how your driver, or how the vehicle is being operated. Very aggressive drivers might generate multiple heartbreak events in the same day. Very conservative drivers might only generate events once a year one or maybe even less than that.

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Marcos Salinas: So, it really just depends. There’s no time limit on the availability of data. It is contingent on system parameters and recording thresholds that are programmed in the system.

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Steve Kessler: Great one last question. And then I have a couple of things I’d like to say, and then we, because we need to wrap it up because people have to go here. So

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Steve Kessler: last question is, with regards to moving a vehicle after a collision.

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01:12:59.240 –> 01:13:04.709
Steve Kessler: parties involved have different priorities. Police priorities get all vehicles off the roadway.

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Steve Kessler: How do you prioritize preservation in a scenario like this, especially when injuries are a primary concern.

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Marcos Salinas: I think.

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01:13:16.490 –> 01:13:28.089
Marcos Salinas: and there’s a couple of approaches here, but I think it’s through coordination with law enforcement. If law enforcement, and most times I would say, law enforcement, who’s investigating a collision with severe injury.

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Marcos Salinas: understands?

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01:13:30.450 –> 01:13:39.030
Marcos Salinas: Excuse me, understands that there is electronic data or could be electronic data on a vehicle. They, if they’re aware of that.

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01:13:39.770 –> 01:13:45.880
Marcos Salinas: the consensus is that they would tow that vehicle so biasing towards towing the vehicle

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01:13:45.970 –> 01:13:50.220
Marcos Salinas: and educating your driver to turn the truck off

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01:13:50.450 –> 01:13:56.960
Marcos Salinas: and take the key. The reason, I say, take the key is because that ensures that anybody who wants to move that truck

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01:13:57.670 –> 01:14:07.269
Marcos Salinas: if they intended to do so under the truck’s own power, they would have to talk to the driver, right? It’s not just somebody getting in the truck and saying, hey? I need to move this. Just move it down.

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01:14:07.650 –> 01:14:09.830
Marcos Salinas: It’s that’s 1 aspect.

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01:14:09.870 –> 01:14:26.230
Marcos Salinas: 2 is the tow truck driver may not know that a key is still on, and they’re not looking at it from a from a forensic perspective of trying to preserve data. So, they just hook up to the truck and start it down the road. But if your driver left that key in the on position.

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Marcos Salinas: it could be overriding data, so my suggestion would be to mitigate the possibility of losing data. I would say when it, when your driver is communicating with law enforcement, that they request the vehicle be towed, especially again, if injury or you know you have a high likelihood of litigation, I would recommend that approach as one piece of this

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01:14:49.870 –> 01:14:54.890
Marcos Salinas: 2 would be your driver, taking the key out, making sure the vehicle is off.

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01:14:54.910 –> 01:15:01.559
Marcos Salinas: and they’ve taken the key to ensure that the vehicle is not going to be started or turned on at some later date.

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01:15:01.730 –> 01:15:04.179
Marcos Salinas: I think those 2 are big ones. There.

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01:15:05.040 –> 01:15:05.900
Steve Kessler: Very good.

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01:15:06.180 –> 01:15:12.989
Steve Kessler: Marcus. I think we’ve kind of gone past our normal time. But this was really fantastic

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01:15:13.509 –> 01:15:30.250
Steve Kessler: information, and I really greatly appreciate what you presented this morning. I did want to say that I think in based on what I’ve heard from you. It can be helpful for trucking companies out there to make sure that they have

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01:15:30.290 –> 01:15:35.830
Steve Kessler: properly trained their drivers on what to do at the scene of an accident.

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01:15:36.288 –> 01:15:51.619
Steve Kessler: Have make sure they understand about moving the truck. Make sure they understand about taking pictures correctly and do all the right things to help you achieve your task as best as possible.

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01:15:51.650 –> 01:16:04.680
Steve Kessler: And I want to point out to everybody that’s joined us today that we have just recently introduced a new package of content. These are videos. There are 25 of them all together.

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01:16:04.780 –> 01:16:16.790
Steve Kessler: some for the company, some for the drivers to help everybody be as prepared as possible to when these accidents occur.

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Steve Kessler: So, we’ve actually put together a package of videos that we call the Ultimate Defense Video series.

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01:16:26.150 –> 01:16:34.949
Steve Kessler: If you have interest in that content and need some content to train your drivers and your other company people

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01:16:35.332 –> 01:16:41.389
Steve Kessler: just reach out or say yes here on the poll, and we’ll reach out and provide you with some information.

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01:16:41.640 –> 01:16:53.469
Steve Kessler: There are 25 videos altogether, and I think it will tie very nicely into making sure that when you do need an accident reconstructionist like Marcos, that

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Steve Kessler: you have done everything you can do

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Steve Kessler: to make sure that

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Steve Kessler: Marcos can do what he needs to do and get all the available information.

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Steve Kessler: Marcos, you have any final con comments. Thank you so much, sir. It was.

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Steve Kessler: it’s 1 of the best things I’ve ever listened to in a long time. I wish I could have listened for the next few hours

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01:17:18.810 –> 01:17:22.790
Steve Kessler: on the chat. There are a whole lot of people saying, Thank you. Fantastic.

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01:17:22.790 –> 01:17:23.310
Marcos Salinas: I do?

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01:17:23.310 –> 01:17:26.270
Steve Kessler: Fantastic, fantastic. So, thank you, sir.

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01:17:26.630 –> 01:17:45.520
Marcos Salinas: No, thank you guys for having me. I appreciate everybody for listening. I think the takeaway I would give. Everybody just remember that if we don’t have, if we don’t have it preserved, there’s nothing to announce to analyze. And if we don’t have anything to analyze, there’s not necessarily anything we can communicate. But I would tell you that

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01:17:46.170 –> 01:17:54.050
Marcos Salinas: preserve preservation is key both at the scene, both post and as you go through that process. It’s a

522
01:17:54.680 –> 01:17:59.859
Marcos Salinas: it’s a sticky process, but stick with it like, said the. The preservation is

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01:17:59.950 –> 01:18:05.330
Marcos Salinas: the most important aspect of what we do. And how you guys can be helpful to us, since

524
01:18:05.410 –> 01:18:07.489
Marcos Salinas: you know you’re getting it firsthand.

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01:18:08.460 –> 01:18:26.370
Steve Kessler: Absolutely fantastic, sir. Once again, Marcos. Thank you, Mark Ray. Thank you. And thanks to everybody for joining us, we always enjoy having you on and look forward to the next webinar. We’ll be letting you know, Marcos. Thank you, sir. Have a great day.

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01:18:26.400 –> 01:18:28.969
Steve Kessler: thanks to everyone, for joining today.

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01:18:29.510 –> 01:18:30.399
Marcos Salinas: Thank you. Guys.

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01:18:30.710 –> 01:18:31.530
Mark Rhea: Thank you.

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Steve Kessler: Bye, everyone.