You may be right, however about two years ago I had the opposite experience.

I was driving a Hyundai i10 on a country trunk road with a fair amount of traffic. I followed a BMW as we overtook a line of vehicles on a long straight But he hadn't buried his foot hard enough and as he got to the front of the line he tucked in without leaving me space to get behind him. Clearly not using his mirrors. I was left in limbo on the wrong side of the road facing a bend. I was lucky that I managed to overtake this car as we went around the bend.

Overtaking must be done at full chat to minimise the time on the wrong side of the road. This enables others overtaking with you the chance to pull in also.

Shows what a Muppet this guy was that I could overtake his BMW in a Hyundai i10.

So you started an overtake with no idea where you were going to safely pull in? And then you blame someone else for you ending up on the wrong side of the road, approaching a bend? It was not the BMW driver's responsibility to make sure YOU could carry out a safe overtake!

And going as fast as possible past a line of cars is asking for trouble - if one of the vehicles you are overtaking decides to go too you have not left enough time to react.

So, yeah - muppet. Unless you are just having a laugh with your post, of course.

Only one way to find out :)

The problem i have with this dash cam shopping issue is where exactly does this stop, we the general public are not the police, some of us have got a bit carried away with this video footage phenomenon, we as a society will not benefit from this in the long run....apparently some potential concentration camp guard has shopped Becks for an alleged mobile phone offence...is this what was once Gt Britain, if it is i want out.

Even if you are sitting in the passenger seat, you get a completely different view of that which would be seen from the driver's seat, and you have no idea what the driver has planned from one millisecond to the next, so judging a driver's actions from another moving vehicle is going to be infinitely more distorted.

I'm not perfect by any means, and nor is anyone else, i've made mistakes and got things wrong on the road, over the course of my driving life i've saved accidents happening caused by other people and it's entirely possible other people have saved me having an accident when i made a mess of something, it's all part of driving on ridiculously overcrowded roads in an overcrowded country, and it's going to get worse as human rats in a cage react as one might have expected to this overcrowding.

If this footage is submitted, what if the police want the sd card, what are you going to do delete every sequence except the one showing this other driver making a mess of things in case they could find a few things wrong you did as well, ie stop signs, bit late crossing an amber light, and the biggie being you have gps enabled so showing every single one of your speeding violations, one of the reasons i deliberately do not have a gps equipped dash cam....what if a defence barrister wants all your footage should the bod's family be well heeled enough to defend it.

I have dash cams front and rear, they are only there as evidence for my benefit in the case of an accident, or being what i hope is a reasonable citizen, i would also offer that footage in case i witnessed an accident or happened to catch a criminal doing something nasty on it, if i wanted to shop every idiot thing i see in the road i'd have a permanent live feed to the traffic dept.

Edited by gordonbennet on 15/02/2019 at 09:03

I agree with GB. Sending dashcam recordings to the police is a bit like overtaking itself - if in doubt, don't.

In this case there is the risk that the police will prosecute the easier, although less appropriate, target - Leif, for being over the speed limit. Best to leave this sort of thing unless your dashcam picks up a criminal act or an obvious piece of dangerous driving.

As so often, the root of these problems is cars too close to each other - not so much tailgating when overtaking (which I agree can be dangerous) as the line of cars being overtaken being too close. Happy Blue would I'm sure have pulled in earlier, on discovering too late that the BMW in front was a gutless 318, if there had been room.

Nope, in this case there were gigantic gaps between each car. A rare situation indeed!

It occurs to me that if pedestrians behaved like drivers there would be rather a lot of punchups in the office canteen queue without the safety zone of a metal box on wheels with lockable doors!
In one of his stand up routines, Ben Elton once asked the audience to imagine that pedestrians behaved like drivers for a day. Parping some kind of horn at others, whipping a torch out and flashing it in their eyes, making the habitual hand gestures and other acts of umbrage and revenge. Hilarious when you think about it!

I try and remember that a person is driving the other car, and consider their thought processes.If they make a mistake, hooting and gesturing will not help.They probably know they goofed. If someone is a habitual dangerous driver, the kind that leaves no room for error, hooting or flashing lights achieves nothing as they will have an aggressive mindset, and will blame you for not getting out of their way. The Mercedes/BMW driver who lives in the ‘fast lane’ is typical of the aggressive type. A week back I was approaching Farnham on the A31, there were many cars about to join the road just ahead, and it looked a bit dangerous if I carried on. so I moved right to allow them to get on unimpeded. A Mercedes approaching in lane 2 had plenty of time to react to my manoeuvre, just gently lifting his foot off the accelerator would have done it, but he flashed his lights repeatedly in anger at my forcing him to slow by 5-10 mph for 100 m until I could pull back in. I do wonder who these uber important people are.

Interesting thread this as I have deep concerns about the dash cam proliferation myself. GB, I must congratulate you on your absolutely excellent posts on here, summing up the whole arguments for and against in a most complete and concise way. I agree with every word !

A high end car suggests he’s not thick, so why drive like a dork.

Driving a 'high end car' as you put it, doesn't have any relationship with intelligence.

I meant high end and newish. It suggests a certain level of intelligence, enough to earn the money to buy the car. That said I’ve met intelligent people who drive with a death wish. Not something I understand.