“An Idiot (driver) finally got to me,” this driver with a years long clean record titled his post.
Presumed Floridian and Redditor /u/Blaze4G posted up disappointing dashcam footage from earlier last week (May 16, 2024) from Ft. Lauderdale, FL showing an InDrive driver pulling off from the side of the road without yielding properly and side-swiping OP as he drove by.
Check out his dashcam footage below.
[oc] An idiot finally got me…I’ve avoided so many. Kind of disappointed I couldn’t avoid this one and keep my clean record. Kept rewatching to see what I could have done differently.
byu/Blaze4G inIdiotsInCars
The incident happened in the 2500 Block of SW 36th ST. in Fort Lauderdale, FL (Exact location on Google Maps linked here.)
As OP’s dashcam video shows, he pulls out of SW 26th Terrace to turn left.
Slowly accelerating up to the speed limit, OP continues to drive along SW 36th St.
An InDrive driver in a Toyota Corolla can be seen stopped on the side of the road in the cross-hatched area.
The driver in the Corolla then pulls out without giving it a proper look and yielding the right of way properly.
OP reacts as best he can, flicking his steering wheel to the left, but gets clipped by the driver.
The video abruptly ends, but the damage, likely in the thousands, is done.
“Kind of disappointed,” OP captioned his video. “I couldn’t avoid this one and keep my clean record. Kept rewatching to see what I could have done differently.”
“(You could have done) nothing (different.) Idiot thought he was playing taking turns, “/u/NamiaKnows commented.
“Completely out of your control. You can’t read that driver’s mind. If they had brains, they would have pulled off into the shopping center to do what they needed to do,” /u/ScenicPineapple commiserated.
“But like many entitled drivers, they used the white hatched area and made an illegal u turn into you with no signal, and they didn’t even look to see you were there.”
“So they messed up so many times in this video, you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Other comments echoed what these commenters said, that he likely couldn’t do anything better to avoid the crash.
In these types of accidents where you have a split second to decide what to do, you can either slam on the brakes to mitigate the force of the crash, swerve, or a combination of the two.
With another car approaching, OP probably did as best he could by doing a slight swerve.
Braking hard would’ve likely caused an even larger, on-center T-bone-like crash.
As defensive drivers, you can only control what you can and your reaction, that means making sure your car is in tip-top shape, you’re insured properly, and driving defensively (in other words, risk mitigation.)
Like this situation, oftentimes life throws you a curveball despite your best risk mitigation practices.
