Collision Reconstruction in Geotab: Reading the Seconds Before and After an Impact

Every GO device carries a three-axis accelerometer sampling many times a second. In normal driving it feeds the harsh braking and cornering events on the driver scorecard. When it senses forces consistent with a collision it switches to high-resolution logging, capturing the seconds before and after at full detail and flagging the event to the platform. The raw record is a set of curves: forward and lateral acceleration, speed, and heading, with GPS position, stamped to the fraction of a second.

Collision Reconstruction reads that record and produces a report: the moment and direction of impact, the vehicle's speed at impact and in the seconds before, whether and when the brakes were applied, the deceleration profile, and the vehicle's movement after. It draws the sequence on the map and as charts, and states the findings in plain terms — 'vehicle travelling at 47 km/h, braking began 1.8 seconds before impact, impact from the front-left' — so the reader does not have to interpret the curves themselves.

The insurer, first: a report that shows the fleet's truck was stationary when struck, or braking hard before a car pulled out, changes how a claim is assigned. Lawyers in the litigation that follows a serious collision. The fleet's safety manager, reconstructing what happened for the internal review and the coaching conversation. And, paired with a camera, the report sits beside the video, so the numbers and the picture confirm each other.

The add-in reads the accelerometer data the GO device already records; there is no additional hardware. It is installed from the Marketplace into the fleet's database and produces a report for any collision-flagged event. High Point GPS deploys it alongside camera systems for fleets in Quebec, Ontario and the northeastern US.