Rant: That crash at the 7-Eleven on Route 9 made me stop trusting dashcam footage

Last Tuesday I was grabbing gas at the 7-Eleven on Route 9 and saw this fender bender in the parking lot. Two cars tapped bumpers, nothing major, but the guy in the SUV claimed the sedan backed into him. The sedan driver showed me his dashcam clip and it clearly showed the SUV rolling forward into him. But the SUV guy pulled up his own dashcam and it showed the exact opposite. Both cameras had timestamps matching, both looked legit. Now I just assume any video can be edited or faked since both drivers seemed so sure. Has anyone else run into evidence that seemed solid but turned out to be totally conflicting?

2 comments

2 Comments

park.adam15h agoRising Star

That thing about frame rates messing with perception is wild, but here's another angle I haven't seen mentioned: what if both drivers were actually moving at the same time? I mean, if the SUV rolled forward at exactly the same moment the sedan backed up, both cameras would show movement from their own perspective, and neither would be technically wrong. Insurance adjusters probably hate dealing with that kind of simultaneous motion, since each driver honestly thinks the other one moved.

vals3816h ago

Yo have you ever seen two dashcams totally cancel each other out like that? It's wild. My buddy Dave had something similar happen a couple years back. He was sitting at a red light and got rear-ended, the other guy said Dave rolled back into him. Dave showed his cam that clearly showed him stopped, but the other guy had a cam that showed Dave's car moving backwards too. Turns out the other dude had a cheap cam that recorded at like 15 frames per second and it was skipping the part where Dave was fully stopped, making it look like he was drifting. So the timestamps matched but the frame rates were totally different, making each video look legit from each guys point of view. It took a forensic video guy to explain it to the insurance company.