Question

Insurance claim. Your friend has just been in a car wreck and is trying to get the insurance company of the other driver to pay for fixing her car. She believes that she was driving within the speed limit and the other driver was speeding, and so the accident was the other driver's fault. She hopes that you can use your command of physics to prove her conjecture. She takes you out to the scene and describes what happened. She was traveling north when she entered the intersection. There was no stop sign so she looked both ways and didn't see anything coming. When she reached the center of the intersection, she was hit by the other car which was traveling east. The two cars stuck together and skidded to a stop. The speed limit on both roads is 50 mph. From the skid marks, you determine that after the collision the cars skidded 56 feet at an angle of 30° north of east before stopping. On the internet you determine that the weight of her car was 2600 lbs while that of the other car was 3500 lbs. (You estimated the driver's weights and added that in.) The coefficient of static friction for a tire on dry pavement is 0.8, while the coefficient of kinetic friction is 0.6.

Answer 1

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