Dash Cam Videos

About

Dash Cam Videos, short for Dashboard Camera Videos, are surveillance-style clips taken from the dashboard of a person’s car. Online, they’re usually uploaded to share footage of car accidents or arrests.

Origin

Dashboard cameras became common in police vehicles in 1990 after two officers from Houston, Texas bought a standard video camera with their own money in 1988. The camera was a way to provide more evidence in court to help prosecute drunk drivers, as their impaired driving and demeanor would be captured. Between November 1989 and April 1990, all 17 videotaped arrests lead to guilty pleas in Franklin County, New York.^[1] As early as 2002^[2], local news websites began hosting dashboard-filmed videos of accidents or car chases released from the police.

Spread

As dashboard mounted cameras became more affordable throughout the 2000s, these clips were no longer limited to police surveillance video. In June 2006, the YouTube channel t1sutton^[6] launched, featuring solely dashboard cam and helmet cam videos made by its creator, Tony. As of December 2012, the channel hosts more than 200 of these videos. In 2007, The Break^[3] began featuring these videos with the tag “dashcam.” The same year, LiveLeak^[4] began featuring these videos as well, which range from highway accidents to gory accidental deaths. Viral Viral Videos^[5] also maintains a “dash camera” tag to highlight videos that are gaining popularity on YouTube. As of December 2012, there are more than 92,000 results for “dash cam” on YouTube^[7] and more than 500 dash cam videos have been submitted to Reddit.^[8]

Notable Examples

In Russia

In January 2011, a LiveJournal community^[11] dedicated to discussing dash cam accident videos was created, generating more 570,000 comments in just under two years. The community organizes the videos with several tags including “поциент”, a wordplay on the Russian term for “schmuck”, for videos with people put in unfortunate positions, “летчик”, or pilot, used on videos where a driver will speed by and crash at the end of the vido, “кирпичи”, short for “shitting bricks”, which describes videos where the driver is shouting, and “железобетонное очко”, or “anus of concrete” (shown below, left), used to laud drivers who were able to avoid an accident while remaining calm.

Throughout 2012, discussions of Russian dash cam videos took place on the Straight Dope message board^[12], Radio Free Europe^[13] and Yahoo! Answers.^[14] In June 2012, Animal New York^[9] investigated why these types of videos are incredibly popular in Russia. Since the country’s insurance rates are quite expensive, hit and runs are common in the country.^[10]

2013 Russian Meteor

2013 Russian Meteor Explosion refers to the meteorite impact event that took place over the Chelyabinsk region in Siberia, Russia on February 15th, 2013. The spectacle of the meteor streaking across the sky before exploding in mid-air was recorded on several dash cameras from multiple vantage points near the impact site, the footage of which was subsequently uploaded to YouTube later that same day.