5 jaw-dropping videos that prove you need a dashcam right now

Dashcam videos
Dashcam videos

Dashcam videos illustrate the world's most shocking road anomalous that you would never truly believe if there weren't for verifiable proof.

Yet, believe it or not, we need to catch up to Eastern Europe with this sort of affordable car tech. It's especially popular in Russia in part due to traffic police corruption and notoriously bad drivers.

YouTube is filled with dashcam videos that identify the actual guilty drivers in accidents, but also footage from natural disasters, freak accidents and, yes, even brief UFOs.

Here are the most jaw-dropping dashcam videos that you need to see to believe - ones that will have you believing in buying a dash cam.

After viewing these jaw-dropping videos for the first time, I did just that by ordering a Black Box Dash Cam, and now I find myself rolling down the street with this footage-rolling technology.

Blamed for accident until dashcam video shown

When it comes to non-fatal accidents, there's something worse than simply being in one: being in one and being wrongfully blamed for it.

That's exactly what happened at the scene of this dashcam video, according to YouTube user cristian1994ipod. "I was on my way home from school. I cross the intersection and see the van coming, but I thought she was going to make a right turn," he says in the description.

"The police arrive and talk to her. I make my way to the van where the police are. The officer ask 'can you tell me what happened? She says she had a green light and they you ran it.'"

Clearly, the HD dashcam video shows the Honda S2000 driver making the yellow light, well before it turned red. That means the van driver blew the red light.

"I pulled the officer to the side and told him I had the crash on video to see if the lady would keep lying. As soon as I showed him the video he started writing her tickets."

Motorcycles need dash or 'helmet cams,' too

Just because you don't have a proper dash doesn't mean you should go without a dashcam. Motorcyclists, for example, can mount a helmet camera to their lifesaving gear.

The best dashcam video example we found in the subgenre of helmet cams comes from San Francisco, where the popular Contour ROAM is used to record an accident at an intersection.

"The driver of the car clearly blows his red light and hits me in the intersection at least 5-6 seconds after his light had turned red," notes YouTube user Legitimate Business Man.

"My heavily customized 2011 Daytona 675 was destroyed in an instant, but I managed to land on my feet after getting launched into the air by his windscreen."

The motorcyclists credits his protective gear with saving his life and says that this video is "the birth of [his] ninja skills." Clever, and lucky.

Otherwordly accidents, like meteors

Dashcam videos are good for more than car accidents, as evidenced by the number of meteors caught on camera by Russian and Taiwanese drivers.

There's no way to capture these otherworldly phenomenona, except to have rolling footage all day, everyday. That's why, after looking to the sky, we immediately look to dashcam drivers.

Chelyabinsk's unforgettable meteor may not have been anything but a blip on our radar back in 2013, if it weren't for the viral video footage from Russian cars.

The devastating explosion was calculated to have had 30 times the energy of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to NASA. It didn't top the 1908 Tunguska event, but it'll always be more memorable due to this dashcam footage.

Meteors can happen all over the world, and police often field emergency calls about blazing fireballs in the night sky. Without dashcams in cars, these mysterious UFOs may remain UFOs for many.

Matt Swider