According to the following poll, taken last year concurrent with my summertime feature on the growing in-cab or on-the-truck presence of camera equipment, whether road-, cab-facing or both, about 1 in 5 of you run with a forward-facing camera on the truck. The picture above is of independent owner-operator Brad Willis’ Blue Tiger camera unit positioned on the windshield of his Freightliner Columbia. “You can set it for the amount of force needed to make it record,” he explained to me last year. Otherwise, “it will record in a loop on a mini-SD card,” saving over itself unless triggered manually or by a force incident, such as a hard bump or braking maneuver.
The reason I bring it up is that we’ve launched a new section of the site. Here’s to introducing…
We hope Dashcam Central will grow into a repository of reader-submitted rolling-video work (such as with a mounted GoPro camera) and dashcam clips that show compelling events, whether another of those reckless motorists cutting you off, documentation of a fellow driver’s (or your own) save up ahead or other incident.
The idea is driven simply by the attraction of offering you another way to share information with an audience of your peers, but for my money such a repository could also be another chip in the needed reinforcement in the public imagination of the serious implications so many motorists’ unsafe on-highway actions have for the pilots of big trucks.
The submission form, accessible via this link, contains fields for your first and last names, a title field for what you would like to call the video, and a description field. When you complete the form and click submit, a story will be created and listed on this linked page showing the embedded video, followed by the description you input.
For an example of how the videos will display, refer to the first four there at present, all videos that we’ve called out here on the website in the past:
**A collection of dashcam clips edited together
**A single dashcam clip documenting a near-miss with a four-wheeler out on the road
**A GoPro-shot time-lapse from a truck-stop fuel island and
**Another GoPro-shot video of a haul over Loveland Pass in the brutal 2013-’14 winter I suspect many regular readers will remember
And keep in mind this crucial piece of the process: It’s difficult to accept such large files as videos for any website, particularly when they’re more than just a dashcam clip, via the forms that can built for such. That’s why, as with the Trucker Talent Search submissions ongoing, you’ll need to first upload your video to YouTube in order create your story in Dashcam Central. After the upload, just grab the share link to the YouTube video and drop it in that field on our form.
So, driver, got a good video with a story behind it? Jump over to Dashcam Central and kick the tires a bit.
