#Dashcams

On our never-ending quest to improve this place by listening to feedback from the B&B, we are taking a new tack with these product posts, choosing instead to focus on items we use and may have purchased with our own meager income. After all, if we’re giving you the truth about cars, we ought to give you the truth about car accessories.

There are many good reasons to stick a dash cam in yer car – not the least of which is the potential for capturing the bonkers behavior of other drivers and then posting it to YouTube for all eternity. Practical reasons such as being able to prove you weren’t the one who ran that red light are also top-of-mind, naturally.

In which camp does your author reside? As it turns out: both. 

It's time for another TTAC Giveaway! It's time for another dash cam -- this one from ThinkWare.

Surrounded by hundreds of miles of tinder-dry forest, Fort McMurray, Alberta seemed to ignite in an instant when wildfires overtook the oil-producing Canadian city earlier this week.

As the 88,000 residents fled in their vehicles, in many cases with just the shirts on their back, dashcams captured their flight towards safety.

It’s harrowing stuff, especially when you consider there’s only one highway leading into the city — an artery that quickly turned into a parking lot as flames encroached on both sides. Amazingly, no lives were lost in the fast-moving disaster.

Watch the horror for yourselves after the break:

If you’re planning a road trip this weekend, take a few pointers from this Russian dashcam video on how not to merge.

Everyone knows Russians are unable sustain injury on the roadways (or so it would seem), but this fact wasn’t known until videos started rolling in from the insurance fraud-prone country. Their problems are our gain, however, as these misadventures from the land of Putin and honey hold valuable road safety lessons.

Qui custodiet ipsos custodes? When it comes to police and their dashcams, the answer appears to be “nobody, due to suspicious technical problems.”

Last Friday, the Washington Post released a scathing indictment of the Chicago Police Department and its officers’ intentional sabotage of their dashcam equipment.

The same department is already under siege from all quarters. Homicides are soaring by 75 percent year-over-year in 2016, senior officials are leaving in droves, and a recent report has shown that a minor group of “untouchable” policemen is responsible for over $34M in settlements since 2009.

So I’m screwing around on the Internet the other day, minding my own business, and I come across this video of an accident with a red light runner.

For those of you who can’t or don’t want to watch this video, allow me to explain what happens. In one second, some guy is driving along in Anytown, USA, next to a mall, and a couple of shops, and some charming angled parking spots, and some nicely maintained grass. And in the next second, he goes through a green light and hits a person in a Mitsubishi Eclipse who has run the red light coming the other direction.

Now, any idiot can see what happened here. In one lane, you have the driver with the dash cam, who’s cruising along at a normal rate of speed like a normal person, abiding the law and doing everything by the book. And in the other lane, you have someone who chose to spend their hard-earned money on a Mitsubishi Eclipse.

Russians apparently love their dashboard mounted video cameras. Those cameras have provided us with eye popping as-they-happened views of car crashes, truck crashes, and even a plane crash or two. Sometimes the videos are of very close calls, others record vehicular mayhem, injuries and, sadly, fatalities. So it’s refreshing to see that someone has made a compilation of Russian dashcam videos that show human beings at their best, people stopping to help elderly and infirm pedestrians get through traffic safely or folks lending a hand to motorists and others in need of help.