If you’ve ever followed someone too closely, you’ve participated in tailgating. And whether you thought you had a good reason for it or not, you didn’t. But more importantly, you might want to discontinue that practice after watching this dashcam video. This particular footage captured a highway close call that found a vehicle towing a trailer that, as we like to say here, messed around and found out
The clip shows a red pickup towing a utility trailer loaded with what looks like a side-by-side UTV, with a light-colored sedan traveling close behind it. Traffic is moving at highway speed across several lanes. The footage looks normal enough while the trailer holds its lane, the cars are moving with the flow of traffic, and there’s a sedan doing some seemingly harmless tailgating, right? Then the sedan behind the trailer loses control.
The car turns sideways and spins across the lanes as the other drivers brake and steer around it. The dashcam vehicle, capturing everything and staying far behind, stops well ahead of reaching the sedan. You can then see some debris on the pavement near the path of the spin.
It seems the sedan had followed too closely, didn’t see what was coming up in front of it, and ended up overcorrecting. That led them to have a terrible day on the highway. It was persistently close enough to the vehicle ahead that there was almost no time to react once something changed, while the dashcam driver, several lengths back, had room to slow down safely.
Why Following Too Closely Is Risky
You should be keeping a decent distance behind vehicles in front of you at all times, as they teach you when you’re learning to drive. But this is especially important if you’re behind a trailer or other road implement. They can add hazards that a regular vehicle doesn’t. They block more of the view down the road, which makes it harder to see brake lights, stopped traffic, or debris beyond the vehicle doing the towing.
Trailers also behave differently from the vehicle pulling them. They can bounce over bumps, sway with the wind, drift within a lane, and react unevenly overall. Even when the driver towing is doing everything right, the driver behind needs more room than usual to account for that unpredictability.
When a trailer throws off debris or a tire fails, the vehicle directly behind is the one with the least time to respond. So the moral of the story here, kids? Don’t tailgate. And leave plenty of space to react.