The Damage to Your Car Was Minor, So How Could You Really Be Hurt?
If your car came out of a crash without much visible damage, but you’re the one dealing with real neck or back pain, you may already have heard some version of this from an insurance adjuster. In cases with anything less than serious vehicle damage, insurance companies routinely hire an expert—often called a “biomechanics expert” or “biomechanical engineer”—whose job is to tell a jury that the crash simply wasn’t hard enough to cause the injury you’re claiming.
This article explains what a biomechanics expert actually does, why “the car looked fine” is not the same thing as “the crash couldn’t have hurt you,” and what kind of evidence refutes this defense.
What Is a “Biomechanics Expert,” and What Do They Actually Say?
A biomechanics expert is someone with training in engineering and, sometimes, some medical background, who is hired to estimate the physical forces in a crash and compare them to research about how much force it generally takes to cause a particular kind of injury. Jim Mitchell & Frank Guerra IV, Expert Witness Power Hour: Deposing Biomechanical Experts (presentation slides) at 4.
In a low-speed rear-end crash case, the typical opinion works like this: an accident-reconstruction expert first estimates how much the vehicles’ speed changed during impact (sometimes called “Delta-V”), a computer program then estimates the forces that change in speed put on the occupant’s body, and finally the biomechanics expert compares that estimated force to published research on how much force is generally needed to injure a particular body part. Loren Peck, How Sound Is the Science? Applying Daubert to Biomechanical Experts’ Injury Causation Opinions, 73 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 1063, 1089–90 (2016).
Can I Still Recover Compensation If My Car Had Little Visible Damage?
Yes—minor vehicle damage does not mean minor injury, and it does not by itself defeat a valid injury claim. But you should expect the insurance company to make you prove causation with more than just the fact that you hurt.
Research reviewing the biomechanical literature on low-speed rear-end crashes has identified real limits in the science that insurance-side experts rely on to make the “too minor to hurt you” argument. Researchers at the National Biomechanics Institute found that the injury “thresholds” these experts compare your crash to were developed mostly from cadavers, animal testing, and healthy young volunteers under laboratory conditions that don’t fully match a real-world rear-end crash. Meaning those thresholds “may theoretically overestimate the threshold to injury” for an actual person in an actual crash. Rami Hashish, Omid Komari & Manon Limousis-Gayda, Determining Cervical Disc Injury Potential in Motor Vehicle Collisions, Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Biomechanics (2018).
In plain terms: the tests used to build these injury thresholds often don’t account for your age, your weight, your prior health history, or the fact that human tissue responds differently to a quick jolt than a slow, sustained push—which is exactly the kind of force involved in a real crash.
What If I Had a Prior Neck or Back Problem Before the Crash?
You can still recover for a pre-existing condition that the crash made worse. This is sometimes called the “eggshell plaintiff” rule. The relevant Texas jury instruction provides that a jury should not award anything for a condition that existed before the crash, except to the extent that condition was made worse by the crash. State Bar of Texas, Texas Pattern Jury Charges, PJC 8.8 (2008), cited in Mitchell & Guerra, supra, at 22.
In practice, this means an insurance-side expert who admits a collision could have aggravated an old injury has admitted a great deal, even while insisting the collision “couldn’t have caused” the injury from scratch.
What Evidence Actually Helps Prove My Injury Was Caused by the Crash?
A clear “before and after” medical timeline is one of the most persuasive kinds of evidence in these cases.
Biomechanics experts are usually not medical doctors, so they are not qualified to diagnose you, and they typically have to accept what your medical records actually say. That makes the medical record itself extremely important. If your records show you were not complaining of pain before the crash, and that you began complaining of pain—and sought treatment—soon after the crash, that timeline is difficult for an insurance expert to explain away.
Statements from family members, coworkers, or friends describing what you could do physically before the crash, compared to what you can do now, can reinforce that same timeline.
Does It Matter If the Insurance Company’s Expert Didn’t Review All My Medical Records?
Yes, it matters a great deal, and it happens more often than you might think.
It is common for the insurance company’s lawyers to fail to give their own expert the complete set of medical records. When that happens, the expert’s opinion is built on an incomplete picture, and that gap can be exposed and used against the defense.
Talk to A Trained Personal Injury Attorney in Soft Tissue, Back and Neck Injuries
If an insurance company has told you your crash was “too minor” to have caused your injury, don’t take that as the final word. It is a defense with real, documented limitations, and the medical timeline you build from the day of the crash forward is often the strongest answer to it. An experienced personal injury attorney can help you gather that evidence and respond to a biomechanics-based defense before it derails a legitimate claim. If your case involves a collision on the road, the car accident attorneys at Ammons Law Firm regularly handle exactly this kind of dispute.
