In 1869, near Parsonstown in Ireland, Mary Ward was thrown from an experimental steam carriage built by her own cousins and crushed beneath its iron wheel. She was forty two, an astronomer and a naturalist. Hers is the first recorded motor vehicle fatality in history.
In 1891, in Ohio City, James William Lambert lost control of an early single cylinder gasoline buggy on a tree root and struck a hitching post. The first recorded crash of a petrol car. He survived it.
Both are documented. Both were understood at the time. In the century and a half since, the industry has become extraordinarily good at describing what happened afterwards, and comparatively uninterested in the moment before.