Motorized agricultural vehicles (MAVs) are a relatively rare sight on Germany‘s roads, meaning that the incidence of accidents involving these vehicles is relatively low. According to data provided by the German Federal Statistics Office (Destatis), however, an above-average number of people are seriously injured or killed as a result of such accidents. MAVs are also comparatively often the main cause of the accident. This has prompted the German Insurers Accident Research (Unfallforschung der Versicherer - UDV) together with the insurance companies Allianz and Landwirtschaftlicher Versicherungsverein Muenster (LVM) to look into and analyse what kind of accidents involving MAVs happen and also where and under which circumstances these occur. An accident database covering 1,010 accidents was set up and analysed for this purpose. The database comprises information to general accident data, to the persons and to the vehicles involved. All of the tractor accidents contained in the database are to real third party liability claims involving personal injury, which were reported to the two insurance companies, Allianz and LVM, between 2006 and 2008. Out of all of the personal injury accidents caused by MAVs, the cases associated with the highest claims expenditure were evaluated. Essentially, third party liability claims caused by MAVs all over Germany were recorded. This means that as a first approximation, the data provides an overview of the accidents caused by MAVs in Germany. A whole range of vehicles can be licensed and insured as MAVs. In addition to tractors (Picture 1), these include combine harvesters, forage harvesters, farm loaders, trucks or quads. 98.3 % of the motorized agricultural vehicles in the database are tractors and the average vehicle age is 15.4 years. (Author/publisher)
Abstract