The purpose of this SAE Recommended Practice is to offer simplified and prioritized guidelines for collecting and preserving on-scene data related to motor vehicle crashes. It is intended that these guidelines improve the effectiveness of data collection, which will assist subsequent analysis and reconstruction of a particular crash.

This document is intended to guide early data collectors whose objectives include documenting information related to the crash. It may be used by law enforcement personnel, safety officials, insurance adjusters and other interested parties.

This document identifies categories of scene physical features that deteriorate relatively quickly and recommends documentation task priorities. Detailed methods of collecting data are not part of this document. However, some widely used methods are described in the references in Section 2.