In an unprecedented action London City Police released some useful photos of the collision that occurred between a pick-up truck and a Tesla passenger car on November 26, 2025 on Adelaide Street near Victoria Street in London, Ontario. This is a rare, helpful action as it allows the public to obtain a further understanding of such collisions. In almost all serious collisions in London such helpful actions by its city police service never occurs.
Background
Collision reconstruction is a complex affair that requires the analysis of good quality evidence. In the thousands of collisions examined for over 40 years, Zygmunt Gorski has had the opportunity to review all the details of a police investigation, including their, notes, measurements and photographs. Accompanying this it has been possible to examine the collision sites and involved vehicles to collect evidence independent of those police investigations. But those actions have occurred when Gorski was either employed to conduct investigations for Transport Canada, or has been officially retained by some party in a civil litigation matter or related to some criminal charges. It is a different affair when the news of a collision is published by a news agency where the quality and quantity of useful evidence is scarce, or sometimes non-existent.
When the collision on Adelaide Street occurred there was essentially no useful evidence to review. Some long distance photos from news media provided some indication that a significant collision had occurred but nothing else. However a single photo posted in a London Free Press article drew our attention to the fact that a structural failure occurred along the left (driver’s) side of a passenger car.
Structural failures are not a good thing. Engineers have worked very hard over recent decades to produce some very clever designs that have been tremendously successful in reducing the severity of injury. Even as vehicles have sometimes become smaller, faster, and their abilities to accelerate have increased. And government expectations through various safety standards have pushed engineers to the limits. And this has been a good thing. But no one designs vehicles for structural failure in a collision. There is no benefit to such a result and it often means that bad injury results can be expected.
Further Analysis
NHTSA has been using a side-impact test procedure since 1998 to evaluate the safety performance of new vehicles. A view of that set-up is shown below. Due testing difficulties the test procedure does not replicate the forces in a real-life collision where rotations (yaw) are involved. This has been a long-time concern as the possibility of structural failure in real-life collisions may be increased by rotation and this may not be detected through government side-impact testing.
It is important therefore to look closely at those incidents in real-life side impacts where a structural failure occurs. As police are the only ones who have exclusive access to a collision site, when important and fragile evidence could be documented, it is up to them to gather such safety relevant information. Unfortunately that rarely happens.
On December 11, 2025 London City Police released some reasonably good photos of the collision and also provided the following statement summarizing the collision on Adelaide Street:
“On November 26, 2025, at approximately 6:40 am., a suspect male was operating a 2021 Tesla eastbound on Huron Street, approaching Adelaide Street North. He approached the intersection, where another vehicle was stopped at a red light in their direction. The suspect proceeded to move into the left turn lane before turning right, without making any attempt to stop at the red light. The suspect accelerated to speeds of approximately 130 km/hr in a posted 50 km/hr zone while passing other vehicles travelling southbound on Adelaide Street.
Another driver was operating a pickup truck northbound on Adelaide Street North when the suspect drove his vehicle into oncoming traffic, ultimately colliding with the pickup truck. The entire incident was captured on video surveillance and dashcam footage.
Emergency crews responded to the collision, and both drivers were transported to hospital by paramedic services. The driver of the truck sustained minor injuries, while the suspect driver sustained serious, but non-life-threatening injuries.“
This description suggests the collision occurred in a manner similar to scenarios that occur on rural highways where two vehicles approach each other from opposite directions on a two-lane highway. Such scenarios have been identified over many years on rural highways but rarely in urban environments. In a 1991 research paper (“Practical Problems Related To Side Impact Field Data Accuracy And Its Importance To Side Impact Protection Assessments”) Zygmunt Gorski presented the following figure and text describing such scenarios:
While the above description may appear different from the Adelaide Street collision there are similarities.
In the Adelaide Street collision it is likely that the Tesla was approaching impact from the wrong side of the road and the driver was likely attempting to return to the proper (southbound) side of the road. This is likely because of how the left side of the Tesla was exposed to contact by the Pick-up over an extended distance without rotating away from that contact. Such a result has been observed in many previous collisions. During this extended contact, as the left front of the Pick-up was scraping across the left side of the Tesla, the separation occurred. The mechanism by which this separation developed should be examined but it likely will not.
The travel speed of a vehicle can sometimes be a red herring when examining injury mechanisms. This has been mentioned many times before and it is worth repeating. Although the Tesla may have reached a speed of 130 km/h that does not mean that the severity of the collision was equal to a velocity change of 130 km/h. It is the change-in-velocity that describes the severity of the impact and what forces existed to cause structural separation and injury. While the Tesla eventually came to a stop and therefore lost all its pre-impact velocity, the dissipation of its kinetic energy came from several factors.
Whether the Pick-up truck and the vehicle behind it were travelling forward at the time of impact needs to be determined. If not then all the kinetic energy of the crash would come from the pre-impact velocity of the Tesla and we would begin to add up how that velocity change occurred. Some of it would result from pushing the Pick-up truck backwards and into the front end of the vehicle behind. Some of it would occur from the Tesla moving (sliding?) from impact to rest. And some of it would be lost from producing crush to the Tesla and Pick-up. The only component of this speed loss (velocity change) that would be relevant to injury potential is the crush to the two involved vehicles. This is how the ground (travel) speed of a vehicle may be inaccurate in defining the threat to the vehicle occupants because that ground speed is lost through other forms besides the impact itself. This is how confusion is created when it is announced that there has been a very high ground (travel) speed and therefore persons assume that this must indicate a certain severity of a collision.
For police purposes it is often sufficient to produce evidence that the Tesla driver was reckless due to the Tesla speed and because it was on the wrong side of the road. And there is no need to go further. Yet, from a road safety standpoint, a structural separation like this could occur in a different scenario where the driver of a Tesla was not speeding or riding on the wrong side of the road. Consider the scenario if a young mother was driving a Tesla and transporting her children in the back seat. An alcohol-impaired driver of the Pick-up truck drove into her lane and she reacted by steering to the right, away from the Pick-up. Such a scenario could also cause a similar scraping across the driver’s side of the Tesla and a structural separation might occur. This could place the young children in grave danger due to that separation, yet through no fault of the young mother. Would it be acceptable that we only focus on charging the impaired pick-up truck driver? Surely we should also be interested in understanding how the structural separation developed and if something needs to be done to prevent it in a future collision. So we need to examine these results for the possibility of a future collision to protect occupants from needless injury.
Details of Tesla Collision Event Recordings
Further collision information could be available from the Tesla. It has not been revealed by London City Police what actions they completed to obtain collision event data and how they determined the pre-crash speed of the Tesla. Not all police personnel are aware of how collision data is recorded and stored by different vehicle manufacturers. A recent post by an expert in one of our collision reconstruction chat groups provided this detailed information about Tesla:
“If a Tesla is involved in a “Critical Safety Event” such as a crash which triggered EDR recording or airbag deployment, the Videos are uploaded to Tesla Servers and saved “indefinitely.” Only the Selfie Cam is “Anonymized.” There are times when none of the video is uploaded, but that’s due to connectivity issues or because the crash is catastrophic and a power interruption occurred. When things work “perfectly” the video is saved in the SavedClips folder of the flashdrive and uploaded to the servers. EDR data and CAN signals are saved locally and uploaded Over The Air (OTA) to Tesla Servers. EDR data can be imaged locally; while CAN data is saved on the SD Card, only Tesla can ingest the encrypted CAN signals.Sometimes, when there is a power interruption, the last video clip doesn’t make it to the flashdrive and is lost forever.
Regarding CAN data, that info is saved on the SD card in the main computer and is also uploaded to TeslServers. Again, connectivity issues can prevent the upload. If there are diagnostic issues, CAN data is periodically uploaded to the servers and can be requested by the owner thru a “Data Privacy Request.” Lately, if data is requested for an event that didn’t trigger an EDR event, the request returns no CAN data (unless there is a Diagnostic issue; think “Active Check Engine light”). If a Data Privacy Request isn’t made within 30 days (when there isn’t at least a non-deployment level event) no CAN data is returned. All recorded video is saved in the RecentClips folder of the flash drive until it’s overwritten. Video is never uploaded to servers unless it’s a “Critical Safety Event” as referenced above. Sometimes, “Alerts” can be viewed on the “Service Menu” on the display screen and includes date & time, but that’s password protected and is quickly overwritten. In all these cases, “time is of the essence” in trying to recover Alerts and CAN data.“
An Example For Why Speed Cameras Are Needed
As a further comment, recently the Ontario provincial government of Doug Ford enacted legislation that prohibited the installation of speed cameras by Ontario’s municipalities. Ford indicated that these cameras were being used as a cash grab rather than as a method of improving road safety. To some degree that is likely the case as municipalities allowed third-party owners of the speed cameras to set low thresholds for speed infractions and therefore money was generated for those third parties and to the municipalities. Ford had the opportunity to correct this by allowing speed cameras to exist but to require a higher speed threshold for infractions. But he did not. Even though numerous organizations and individuals indicated that this was a step in the wrong direction Ford ignored those warnings. The Adelaide Street collision is an example of things to come as a result of Ford’s foolish thinking.
The only reason why the reckless Tesla driver was caught is because he caused a very dangerous collision. Police indicated that a dashcam captured the incident and that surveillance videos did the same. But neither of these sources will effectively prevent such dangerous situations until a collision occurs and then it is too late. But speed cameras have the capability of identifying the vehicle involved and, in some instances the driver can be identified. Speed cameras can identify dangerous actions before a collision occurs. And speed cameras can operate 24 hours a day, every day of the week. This is a very large step toward removing dangerous persons off the streets. Ford claims that larger speed limit signs and speed bumps (humps) will do the same but that makes no sense. Studies conducted at Gorski Consulting confirm that this makes no sense. Ford’s belief that greater police enforcement will replace speed cameras is also a falsehood. Police budgets are tight and, even now, there is little attention paid to road safety as compared to the issues of various violence, murders, robberies, etc. Greater police enforcement of vehicle speeds will take police away from these other important activities while being far less efficient than speed cameras.
Many members of the public are against speed cameras likely because many persons have been caught by them and charged even though their elevated speed was not inherently dangerous. It has never been revealed how many of these drivers were given a ticket travelling just slightly over the speed limit. But such a process does not help to form a positive view of speed cameras in the public’s eye. Municipalities failed to ensure that speed camera programs were transparent and this is why many have turned against these programs.
In the view of Gorski Consulting the greatest benefit of speed cameras is that they efficiently detect that small number of dangerous drivers who are at the top of the danger pyramid.
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