New needs to consider during accident analysis: Implications of autonomous vehicles with collision reconfiguration systems

•Collision reconfiguration systems (CRSs) can mitigate harm due to collisions.•Differences in CRS’ decision-making lead to different outcomes in accidents.•A new Safety Surrogate Measure dealing with accident severity is proposed.•New sources of unobserved heterogeneity will emerge due to CRS.•Information sharing on collisions need to increase between road traffic stakeholders.