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.
So there's a big crash, and the dash cam guy hits the Eclipse, and so does the car next to the dash cam guy, and then the Eclipse takes out a large number of power lines and other road peripherals before finally coming to a complete stop.
Now, here's where it gets interesting: in the video description, the guy who uploaded it claims the Eclipse driver tried to say her light was green. Yes, that's right: the woman enters an intersection at full tilt, takes out two cars coming perpendicular to her, and then she tries to say that she had the green light.
Obviously, her argument is idiotic – but one major reason why it's easy to disprove her is because the guy with the dash cam had, well, a dash cam. So presumably when she was sitting there, staring over her damaged Eclipse, angry at the world for hurting such a precious ball of 4-cylinder joy, pissed off at the other drivers for running their red light, he says to her: "Bad news." And then he plays back the tape of her blowing the red light as if she was Al Cowlings in the O.J. chase.
And this leads me to today's question, which is: should we all just be driving with dash cams?
I say this because a) our society is rather litigious, and b) it can be tremendously hard to assign fault at the scene of an accident if you weren't there to witness it. Say you're a cop and you show up at an accident where one car has a damaged front end and another car has a damaged rear end. Rear end damage guy says he got hit from behind, while front end damage guy says the other person backed into him. Who do you believe?
It's the same deal with traffic lights. Two cars enter an intersection, and they collide. Which one is at fault? Who ran the light? How do you assign fault? The answer is: it's really hard. So you do the best you can, and maybe you make a mistake, and the driver who was ACTUALLY at fault gets off scot-free and sues the driver who WASN'T at fault for a sum of money roughly equal to the annual operating budget of Delaware.
If we were driving with dash cams, these problems would be a thing of the past. And indeed, that's what they do in Russia. People are so worried about fraud, everyone has a dash cam. Now it's installed in everything by default, so the fraud is over, and now there's a record of virtually every accident in Russia, including the ones involving farm animals.
So I've started to wonder more and more if this sort of thing should maybe be applied to us here in good ol' North America. No, we don't have the same level of fraud as they do in Russia. But by God, we probably have about the same level of accidents. And wouldn't it be nice, in an accident, to be able to look at the law enforcement officer on the scene and say, "Sorry, officer, I have it on tape"? Keep in mind that your other option is to be entirely at his mercy after he interviews everyone at the scene as if they were equals, even if they're driving a Mitsubishi Eclipse.
The post QOTD: Should We All Be Driving Around With Dash Cams? appeared first on The Truth About Cars.
from The Truth About Cars http://ift.tt/Jh8LjA
Put the internet to work for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment