Anatomy of a Car Crash

Every year 1.3 million people are killed in car crashes all over the world - that's over 3,500 each day and rising.

The life-changing effects of these incidents rarely command wider attention.

This award-winning documentary takes one of these tragedies and traces the profound physical and emotional toll on all those involved, dissecting exactly what happens in the brief awful instant of a single collision on a road. This study then tracks the long-term consequences from the perspectives of everyone involved.

When two cars collide, in that split second, a chain reaction is set in motion which reverberates through so many lives: victims, families, witnesses and friends, along with many professions - emergency services, accident investigators, doctors and lawyers.

Most crashes merit just a few column inches in the local press. From the moment of impact to the coroner's verdict, this programme traces the search for explanations and the background of grief that follows.