Over the last few years there has been a very significant rise in the number of onboard DashCams across the world. They first became popular in places such as America in which people would go out and buy these on board Dash Cams that would continuously record their journey on a loop, recording over the previous hour, however if the vehicle is involved in an accident or incident the camera data can be saved so that the event can be seen and shown to insurance companies or in court.
Its only been in the last year or so that the Russians have adopted this idea. With their extremely poor weather and road conditions and with numerous dangerous drivers on the roads the DashCams have become the perfect way to show their insurance companies and police who was to blame during an incident. In fact Russian Courts prefer DashCam footage to eyewitness accounts. In Russia last year there were 200,000 traffic accidents and 28,000 deaths on the roads.
The DashCams are relatively cheap from £30-200 and some cars have numerous cameras around their vehicle but the majority of the time it is the Dashboard footage which is used. The cameras can be used to show Road Rage, Incidents involved with pedestrians and vehicle collisions.
The rise of these DashCams has lead to a worldwide obsession and the amount of videos on sites such as youtube of crashes caught on camera has increased majorly. If you looked on the internet for vehicle collisions caught on camera 2-3 years ago, you would hardly see any videos. Now there are thousands. Some Youtube channels upload at least 4 videos a month containing about 30 incidents within one video lasting around 6 minutes. In the majority of crashes the drivers are unharmed and the videos show the poor road conditions and bad driving judgements but in some videos it could be questioned whether the drivers are seriously injured or killed. The videos however now some have over 3 million hits each.
Below is one of these videos, they are pretty interesting to watch and shows how dangerous it is drive in Russia. The videos come under "Car Crash Compilations.
The use of the DashCams also draws up some surprises, some videos show strange and funny moments. One video shows a tank which is being poorly driven and takes out a lamppost. Others show drivers arguing, police chases and flooding, bad weather and other phenomena such as Meteors! Earlier this year DashCams were the most common footage of the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor. The position of the vehicles at the time of the meteor and the movement of the meteor across the sky helped scientists create a trajectory and find out where the meteor had come from.
Overall, the videos make for good viewing and the use of DashCams is set to rise!
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