The car industries automotive test centre Thatcham claims to have found an answer to the fraudulent whiplash claims that have been said to have increased our insurance premiums. The company has devised a sophisticated piece of software that has been privately dubbed as the whiplash lie detector.
Claimants won’t be hooked up by wires to a machine though, instead details of the accident are imputed into a computer and the probability of a false whiplash claim is generated. The speed of the crash, the weight of the cars involved, the amount of visible damage and the models of cars are used to asses the likelihood of a fraudulent claim.
Thatcham rates car seats on their ability to prevent neck injury on a global scale making them the people best suited to devise such a test. Doctors however have warned that the tests accuracy is debateable.
“You’re unlikely to see any evidence because, if it’s there, it’s all in the soft tissue,” says Richard Cuerden, technical director for vehicle safety at the Transport Research Laboratory. “It’ll be able to say that, for these five per cent, pay out straight away. And for those five per cent, don’t. But for the 90 per cent in the middle, we just don’t know.”
Experts have also stated that the visible damage to a car and the injuries sustained by an accident show little correlation as improved build quality prevents cars from crumpling as they would have done in previous years.
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