Michio Hasai
In Russia, a huge percentage of cars on the road are equipped with dashboard cameras. The trend has spread to other countries as well as insurance fraud and law enforcement abuses prompt the need to keep a digital record of what’s happening in front of you when you’re behind the wheel.
“You can get into your car without your pants on, but never get into a car without a dash cam,” Russian motorist’ rights activist Aleksei Dozorov told Radio Free Europe.
Many Americans were amazed by last month’s Russian meteor footage. It wasn’t just the spectacular streaking light show itself that blew people away. It was the abundance of videos capturing the short event. The reason, we learned, was the dominance of dashboard cameras.
It goes beyond catching corrupt cops and flying rocks. There are some pretty amazing videos of everyday occurrences that hit the web as well. Many of them are immediately pulled from YouTube as their policy against shocking videos keeps gruesome videos off the site, but the ones that don’t appear to be deadly can still yield incredible footage such as this Subaru Impreza spinning out as it overtakes a car with a dashcam.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pNhqdsh2XU
There are plenty of reasons to have them and only cost as the lone reason not to make it happen. In Russia and other countries, the devices and flash memory to store the videos is extremely cheap. They aren’t as inexpensive in America, but they’re not so expensive that we can’t afford to “go Russian” on this particular issue.
The government can’t do it. They’re cutting expenses left and right. Citizens won’t do it for themselves without a reason. This leaves one obvious choice: the insurance companies. Wouldn’t it behoove them to take advantage of some of the amazing technologies that could help them avoid fraud? They pay out enough money to fraudulent claimants to buy all of their customers dashcams if it would reduce overall costs, right?
This may be a topic worthy of posting to the WeThePeople site. The government might not be able to afford to do it themselves, but with the right incentives they could nudge insurance companies in the right direction.
We want more meteors and spinning out Subarus!
Dash cams are more and more popular in Western countries as well!
Not surprisingly, as they prove invaluable whenever something happens that you’d like to keep track of. Doesn’t even have to be an accident, might be a rare event like a meteor strike, or something more common i.e. wildlife or scenery.