Yesterday I went to Houston, and left around six forty-five, just at the tail end of rush hour. As I neared the outskirts of the city going around sixty and keeping six car lengths from the car in front of me, a blue car pulled *right* in front of me, like so close I couldn't see the tail-lights. I slammed the breaks, and spent the next half our or so thinking about that incident.
It occurred to me "holy fuck, what if I hadn't just replaced the breaks, or what if the person behind me couldn't break? I'd have had an accident doing sixty (and the only reason I wasn't going faster was that that was as fast as traffic allowed); I'm pretty sure this is the closest I've come to having an accident on the freeway, and it was terrifying.
And I remembered that there's generally a rebuttable presumption that the the car which rear-ends another car is at fault, which might be why blue asshole was willing to risk that maneuver in the first place. Which made me think "there probably won't be witnesses to come forward to a freeway accident, maybe I should get a dashcam, in case something like this happens again."
I looked into it, and the cheapest dashcams don't have SD cards, which seems to render them pointless, except as a deterrent for robbers maybe. The cheapest dashcams with SD cars are around forty bucks, while most dashcams seem to be in the one to two hundred range.
So I'm wondering, given that I have liability insurance and drive a car which is worth maybe a thousand dollars at best, is it worth getting a dash cam in case something like this happens again and I have an accident? And if so, does anyone have any suggestions for the cheapest reliable dashcam I can get?