I have one running every time we visit London because of the incidence of cyclist fraud (they push their bike into your car and claim you crashed into them.) I fitted the camera after seeing a Youtube from Russia where the guy does this, the guy in the car just points to the camera, and the cyclist runs away.
Fender scratches, perhaps a hood dent, better than a claim for injury from a Bulgarian with his two mates as “witnesses”.
The video certainly suggests it from the driver’s behavior.
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whut? this would be somewhere in the ballpark of 60 billion US$ (based on the nominal estimated GDP of 2016 from Wikipedia) or about 40 % of the global internet ad market
Post can’t be empty!
Dude, I was joking…
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As god as my witness, anytime I have to through some really tight area, say one lane due to construction with concrete barriers on either side, I grip the wheel and say, “Stay on target!”
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I have not seen this mentioned yet, although @thatspecial came close:
I don’t use cruise control, but my understanding is that the main way to get out of it and return to manual (pedal?) control is to tap on the brakes.
There’s a car in the passing lane, passing, and a car in the right lane, and a car on the on-ramp about to merge into the right lane. That’s the sort of situation where I would either speed up or slow down (depending on conditions) to make sure I wasn’t next to the right-hand car, in case they swerved into the left lane without looking because they just realized there’s a car merging into their lane. I would make the speed change even if I knew that the trajectory of all the cars was such that no one had to worry about the situation. Not everyone can judge distances/speed well. I can’t know if the guy to my right is a good driver or not. Better safe than sorry.
So, if I were using cruise control, I would want it off at that point because I would want to be able to choose how to alter my speed instantaneously.
Do I think that’s what happened here? Probably not, but there’s no way to prove otherwise.
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Yeah. Plausible deniability.
There are many reasons why the car in front of you might have to tap their brakes. If you can’t react without crashing, you’re driving too close.
I generally detest tailgaters. The only exception is when I’m in traffic and leaving a sensible braking gap, and someone decides they are going to use that space to pull out in front of me and cut me up (I seriously hate the way that people drive in Seattle, the lane discipline is awful).
I know I should just be sensible, drop back and reestablish that gap until it inevitably happens again, but I have a stupid side of me that says that those people are just fine with being boxed in, so sometimes I don’t drop back at all. It’s going to bite me in the arse some time, I suspect.
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Everything would be fine if people would just accept that they won’t be able to go as fast as they want to go every moment they are driving. The problem is that on a road with a 65 mph speed limit people who want to go 80 mph in the left lane get upset when there is someone going 72 mph in the left lane passing people going 67 mph in the right lane. There is no obligation for someone who is already speeding to speed MORE but too many people perceive such an obligation and freak out when it is not met.
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I remember looking up the rules for the HOV lanes in WA state, because I like driving in them when I can, it’s the nicest place to drive, but I won’t speed excessively, or pull over into the ‘fast’ normal lane to the right when I’m getting tailgated (because it should be going faster, if anything). Turns out in that situation you can get ticketed for speeding and/or impeding traffic flow. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…
How did Donald Trump get into this conversation?
so, 1/100 of the time, you try to kill the occupants of at least two vehicles because you don’t give a fuck? You’re joking right?
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Red Green has some tips for discouraging tailgaters:
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There hasn’t been enough time for monkey brain to evolve to understand that running games that work at 10mph are not a good idea at 70mph inside two tonnes of metal.
I hope, sincerely, that when self driving cars come in around 2020 - and I will be in the queue - people convicted of repeated tailgating, dangerous overtaking and the like will simply be banned from manual driving for life. This issue is going to have to be addressed because self driving cars are going to have to be able to deal with people who have passed driving tests, and people who have not. Some kind of electronic license is going to be needed so that people legally allowed to drive cars can get in, plug in a set of controls and take over. But this also gives us scope to disqualify people psychologically unsuited to drive, without a civil liberties argument. Sure you can buy the biggest Lexus out and travel around in it. You just won’t be allowed to touch a steering wheel.
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The “passing lane only” laws vary from state to state. http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
Same in California. Signs should be posted. Although years ago, the custom was “slower traffic stay right” and you’ll occasionally see the last few of these signs on Hwy 99. Now we have five to eight lanes in which everyone drives the speed limit and no one can pass.
We were both referring to a single state - Texas, as is obvious from the text and link.
You want to clarify that word you keep using? Because I’m not sure it means what you think it means. How is being an asshole to another drive for being an asshole to him - killing them? If someone doesn’t know how to drive then that’s not my fault for pointing out their deficiencies.
You know gun nuts say something to the affect of you can pry it from my cold dead hands… See the problem I have is the fact what a lot of people are saying in this thread is a hail to mediocrity. Sure we can punish the assholes, but just because one is a super safe driver, always doing the limit, always in the slower lane, always cautious in no way or shape means they are a good driver. If drivers education taught people how to drive safely at speed, how to react to a situation - and how their vehicle is going to react, how other drivers may react, ect… then I might be willing to go down the path of forcing people to not drive. When I see someone in a Lexus GX470 SUV yapping into cell phone and not paying attention to anything going on around them…that’s the people that need mandatory self drive. When I see the the asshole in the new Corvette zipping through traffic that’s not the person that needs a self drive car, that’s the person who needs to total their car and walk away with minor injuries (preferably into a guard rail, ditch, or tree). I have little sympathy for people who panic when there is little need to, just because someone is behind you it shouldn’t cause you to miss a beat. Just like that person on the other end of the phone is not nearly as important as your kid strapped into the 2.5 ton SUV you are blindly piloting down the interstate.
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I’ll mourn the day when driving ins’t necessary, but also think of being able to send your cat to pick up someone at the airport… Win / Win.
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