# Dashcam Videos Dashcam Videos are surveillance-style clips shot from cameras mounted on car dashboards, usually showing crashes, close calls, police stops, or bizarre roadside incidents[1]. The format got its start in 1990s American police cruisers and blew up online in the 2000s and early 2010s, thanks in large part to a wave of Russian dashcam uploads and the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor footage[2][3]. ## Overview Dashcam Videos, short for dashboard camera videos, are first-person clips filmed from a camera mounted on a car's dashboard. Most of the ones people share online show car accidents, near misses, road rage, arrests, or freak events caught by drivers who happened to be recording[5]. The genre started as police evidence footage in the United States and turned into a huge chunk of online video culture during the late 2000s and early 2010s, when consumer dash cameras got cheap and Russian drivers in particular started uploading their clips en masse[1][2]. The look is instantly recognizable: fixed windshield view, timestamp in the corner, radio chatter or engine noise on the audio, and something wild happening in front of the hood. ## How It Spread By 2007, aggregator sites were treating dashcam clips as their own category. The Break started tagging uploads with "dashcam", and LiveLeak began hosting a steady stream of them, ranging from highway pileups to graphic fatal crashes[5]. YouTube filled up in parallel, with more than 92,000 results for "dash cam" and over 500 dashcam submissions on Reddit by the end of 2012[5]. Russia is where the format really took off. In January 2011, a LiveJournal community devoted to Russian dashcam accident clips launched and racked up more than 570,000 comments in under two years, sorting videos with slang tags like "поциент" (a play on the Russian word for schmuck) for hapless drivers and "железобетонное очко" ("anus of concrete") for drivers who kept their cool through a near-miss (translated from Russian)[6]. In June 2012, Animal New York looked into why Russians film so much, pointing to expensive insurance and common hit-and-runs as the practical reason drivers wanted their own footage[7]. The genre broke fully into mainstream awareness on February 15th, 2013, when the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded over Siberia and was caught from multiple angles by Russian dashcams, with clips uploaded to YouTube the same day[5]. Years later the format got a second life as a joke template, when Redditor FalseSprite posted a "Nobody:" dashcam meme to r/dankmemes on March 10th, 2019, using the Literally No One format and pulling in over 65,800 upvotes in three days[8]. Copycat posts hit r/dankmemes and r/me_irl in the following days, often swapping in non-dashcam imagery while keeping the setup[5]. ## How to Use In its raw form, sharing a Dashcam Video typically means posting a clip with the windshield view and dashboard timestamp intact, letting the crash, chase, or weird sighting speak for itself. As a joke template, the common convention borrowed from the 2019 Reddit run is a "Nobody:" or "Literally no one:" caption on top and a Russian-style dashcam still on the bottom, with the second line describing something absurd about to enter the frame[5]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Dashcam Videos? Dashcam Videos are surveillance-style clips filmed from a camera mounted on a car's dashboard, usually showing accidents, arrests, or unusual roadside incidents[5]. ### Where did Dashcam Videos come from? The format started with US police cruiser cameras in the late 1980s and early 1990s and moved online in the 2000s once consumer dashcams got affordable, with the YouTube channel t1sutton posting only dashcam and helmetcam clips as early as June 2006[3][5]. ### What does Dashcam Videos mean? "Dashcam" is short for dashboard camera, and online the term generally refers to first-person driver-view clips of crashes, near-misses, police stops, and other real-world road incidents[5]. ### How do you use Dashcam Videos? People typically share the raw footage with the windshield view and timestamp left in, and in 2019 Reddit users turned the format into a "Nobody:" joke template where a Russian-style dashcam still is paired with an absurd caption[8]. ### Is Dashcam Videos still popular? Dashcam clips are still a classic online video category with dedicated subreddits and YouTube channels, and the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor footage and 2019 "Nobody:" Reddit run are the most-referenced moments in the meme's history[5][8]. ## References 1. [https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/17/us/drunken-drivers-now-facing-themselves-on-video-camera.html]() 2. [https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-dash-cam-craze/24816013.html]() 3. [https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/17/us/drunken-drivers-now-facing-themselves-on-video-camera.html?ref=drunken-drivers]() 4. [https://965thepoint.com/police-dash-cam-footage-of-a-high-speed-chase-in-eau-claire-wi/]() 5. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dashcam-videos]() 6. [https://ru-chp.livejournal.com/]() 7. [https://animalnewyork.com/2012/dash-cams-russias-last-hope-for-civility-and-survival-on-the-road/]() 8. [https://www.reddit.com/r/dankmemes/comments/b0eqy5/math_book_example_5/]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/dashcam-videos Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library