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Accident reconstruction and insurance scene sketches

After a fender-bender, a parking-lot scrape, or a more serious collision, someone often needs a simple top-down sketch of what happened — for an insurance claim, a police report supplement, an attorney exhibit, or a personal record.

Dedicated tools for professional accident reconstruction

Section titled “Dedicated tools for professional accident reconstruction”

For law enforcement, professional accident reconstructionists, and insurance adjusters working serious cases, drawtonomy is not the right tool — there is a mature market of purpose-built software:

  • SmartDraw — accident reconstruction diagram software with templates and symbols built for the use case; widely used by police departments and produces output suitable for reports and courtrooms.
  • Easy Street Draw (Trancite) — set as a standard for law enforcement, first responders, and insurance professionals; integrates with many RMS (Records Management System) products.
  • PC-Crash — a long-established forensic tool with thousands of installations across reconstruction offices, police stations, insurance companies, and the automotive industry; simulates collisions in 2D and 3D.
  • Leica Crash Investigation tools and PhotoModeler — measurement-grade 3D capture and forensic diagramming.
  • Dirigo AR Pro — accident reconstruction software designed for law enforcement, insurance, and reconstruction firms.

For light-weight personal use:

  • AccidentSketch.com — a free browser tool for drawing accident scenes by drag-and-dropping road and vehicle icons, designed to be printable or email-able to insurers.
  • Insurance-company-provided accident forms in PDF, often with embedded sketch fields.

For any case that will end up in court or in a formal reconstruction report, use one of the dedicated professional tools. They are designed for the legal and evidentiary requirements.

Where drawtonomy might help

Section titled “Where drawtonomy might help”

drawtonomy is a free browser-based whiteboard. It is not built for forensic accident reconstruction and shouldn’t be used as evidence in court. For non-professional situations it can produce a useful sketch:

  • A “this is what happened” diagram to attach to a personal accident note.
  • A figure for a blog post or news article discussing a road incident at a general level.
  • A teaching example of an accident type (cut-in, T-bone, rear-end) for driving lessons.
  • A reusable .drawtonomy.svg source for figures that get updated over time.

Output is .drawtonomy.svg (drawtonomy’s native SVG format, re-editable when the sketch needs revisions), or flat PNG / SVG that pastes into standard documents.

What drawtonomy isn’t:

  • Forensic evidence software.
  • A measurement-grade scene capture tool.
  • An RMS-integrated police diagramming tool.
  • An insurance claim management system.

For those needs use the dedicated software above.

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