Anthony Bocchichio, BMET ’03, can tell when you’re lying—and he wouldn’t even need to see your face or hear your voice. He’d just need to check out your car.
As a mechanical engineer with CED Investigative Technologies, Inc., it is Bocchichio’s job to investigate car crashes to determine how and why they occurred and who might be at fault. Put simply, it’s forensic science for gearheads. Clients, like insurance companies, hire Bocchichio and his colleagues to get to the bottom of accidents and occasionally to testify in court as expert witnesses. They pore through police and eyewitness reports. They inspect vehicles from bumper to bumper. They scrutinize tire marks. And they use crash test data in order to get to the truth.
Bocchichio recounts a recent incident in which a runaway car totaled eight vehicles in a parking lot, racking up more than $250,000 in damage. Investigators were able to download the car’s “event data recorder”—like the automobile version of an airplane’s “black box”—which allowed them to examine five seconds of precrash data, including the vehicle and engine speeds, throttle position, and brake application. The brake, it appeared, had never been applied, which meant that they had on their hands either a case of fraud or, more likely, an incident where a driver panicked and hit the gas pedal. The driver—the lone witness to what was happening inside the car at the time of the crash—assured investigators that he was literally standing on the brake pedal to get the car to stop.
But that couldn’t possibly be the case. Such a stunt, says Bocchichio, would only have failed to stop the car if the brake system was damaged or faulty. Instead, it was in perfect condition. The truth was right there, under the hood.
—Maureen Harmon
