Bottom Line Up Front: 

If there was an injured person, a cop came to the scene, your vehicle was towed or any vehicle was damaged over $2,500, Oregon car crash reporting requirements mean you should report it.   

The Long Answer:

The Oregon DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) makes a lot of their information and requirements public.  With a few exceptions, they try to make a lot of information accessible to the public.  That said, not all of their information is easy to decipher and if you don’t know what you are looking at or can’t interpret the information then it really isn’t useful to you.  I will try to make it easy.  The first question to ask yourself if you are wondering if you should report a crash in Oregon to the DMV is: “Am I required to report this?” Below is the DMV form as of January of 2025:

ORS 811.720, one of Oregon’s accident reporting laws,  sets out these requirements in a much clunkier and more legalese way, but it is pretty simple.  The four bolded items would all trigger a mandatory report to the DMV.  You might be asking yourself “why did you tell me I had to report if a cop came to the scene?” and the answer to that is because if the police officer wrote a report and submitted to DMV even if you don’t think you need to report, DMV will potentially think you need to report based on the information from the police officer. 

An Injury or getting towed from the scene seems pretty easy to determine and pretty obvious for most people, but I do regularly get questions about how people can determine whether the damage to your vehicle or the other vehicle is over $2,500 and therefore whether it is required to submit an accident report to the Oregon DMV.  In my personal opinion, because repairs are so expensive anything beyond very minor damage is likely over $2,500.  I think a decent rule of thumb is that if you think the vehicle needs to go to a body shop then the damage is probably over $2,500. 

Why are Oregon car accident reports important?

This may seem like another silly thing where the DMV requires you to fill out forms that fall into an endless bureaucracy stored in some computer somewhere, but in my opinion these are actually important.  These reports allow for a large amount of data to be aggregated and evaluated over a period of time to identify dangerous stretches of road.  Oregon, for example, houses their data here in a searchable database which maps the data.  This crash data is compiled from Oregon DMV accident reports and police reports submitted statewide. If I control for Springfield, Oregon I get:

And I can further limit that to just fatalities (Keep in mind this is only 2014-2023 data as of the time of this writing) and then I get this

And if I limit further to just those fatal crashes in Springfield involving Alcohol I get this:

If I zoom in on Frankling BLVD I can see three fatalities between 2019 and 2022 wherein alcohol was involved:

DMV, or even researchers have the ability to use this information to try and make roads safer and to make us safer. 

If you were injured in a crash:

As always, if you find yourself in a situation where you need our help please give us a call at (541) 486-5464 and we will be happy to help.  We might even surprise you with our ability to access data and leverage that information to help build your case.