Looks to me like the tailgater either can't drive worth shit or their vehicle brakes are out of whack. Either way, they shouldn't be that close to anyone.

Brake check to a complete stop? Ya, that would have been dangerous and negligent. Looked to me like he just lit up his brake lights and the tailgater overreacted.

Absolutely the tailgater's fault. There's no way to know why the front car hit the brakes, but it doesn't really matter.

Awesome. I hate tailgaters. Suck ditch, loser.

It is ALWAYS the responsibility of the person behind to ensure they can react to things that happen in front of them. Nothing wrong with what the front driver did and i can't see any reason why you'd call him a dbag in the descriptor.

Imo he clearly brake checked. That is his legal right but I think he did it to get a reaction out of the tailgater. That's why I think he is a dbag. Also in most states, slower vehicles are legally obligated to move to the right hand lane.

It is not always the fault of the following driver either please see: https://www.quora.com/If-an-accident-occurs-due-to-someone-brake-checking-you-on-the-highway-who-is-at-fault

The transfer of rage occurred much sooner. Tailgater to Blocker (which could be argued negligence), Blocker to Tailgater, then Tailgater to High Heaven (but mostly Blocker).

There is blame enough for both.

I was going to disagree with you and remind you that "slower traffic MUST keep right", but watching again, I see that the car in front is passing traffic in the slower lane, so it not 'slower traffic'.
I rate it 99.8% tailgater's fault.

Both tailgating and brake checking are illegal. They're both equally douchey. Just switch lanes and let the prick run into somebody else.

In general, yeah, the brake checker should have pulled over.

However, if you look around the 20s mark, you can see another vehicle coming in from the on ramp, so he couldn't really pull over.

It also depends on what the speed limits are on the road and what speed they were travelling at. If the brake checker was travelling at or near the limit, then the tail gater has no right to expect him to pull over.

I think it's lame to argue for either driver being in the right.

A good driver being tailgated in this situation would wait till they could safely merge to the slow lane, do so, letting the tailgater pass safely. Brake checking (which I assume it is) shows incompetence behind the wheel.

The tailgater should not be tailgating. Always leave enough room for any emergency situation. If you must alert the driver in front of you that you would like to pass then a high beam flicker should hopefully do the trick. If not, suck it up, and deal with it like a reasonable driver. Don't be a dick head on the road.

This accident only happened, because there was a two for two, in the shit driving department. ALWAYS choose to be the bigger man/women on the road. Someones life may depend on it.

The tailgater was of the super aggressive type and 100% in the wrong for their actions. If they'd looked at the road situation they would have seen the merging car that meant moving to the right was a bad idea for the car in front, and waited the extra 10-20 seconds it would have taken for the first car to safely move over.

The front car did nothing wrong until they braked unnecessarily because they were upset at being tailgated. It is always the following cars fault if they rear end someone, but I wouldn't be surprised if the police were tempted to charge them with something like dangerous driving based on that footage. I'm sure they could argue their foot slipped or they thought they saw a deer though.

So yeah, both are jerks in my mind but the tailgater made it all possible.

upvote for brake-checker doing what I always want(ed) to do, but never felt like dealing with the paperwork if tailgater did hit me.

tailgater just needs to get some damn patience. There was plenty of traffic on that road that he would not have got to his destination more than 30 seconds earlier.

unless he really had to poop. then he just destroyed his suspension AND shit his pants.

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Why the fuck would anyone drive like this?! Were they trying to save 0.1% on mpg?

As has been said, both are douches (and depending on the state, both were guilty of driving infractions). Very real chance that by brake-checking, the tailgater is going to swerve into someone else (like the guy coming up from the on ramp). Even if that didn't happen, (s)he almost flew into oncoming traffic after losing control, which again would have caused damage to other cars and possible injury to innocent bystanders.

And even if the tailgater hadn't have lost control, the situation is escalated and you're looking at a possible road rage incident with the tailgater retaliating--which actually happened to me when I purposely drove slower (no brake-checking) while being tailgated. Guy jumped out of his car at the next traffic light and tried to get me out of mine to start a fight. I drove off when the light turned green and he actually chased me down, passed me, then skidded sideways and blocked the whole road with his car, again jumping out and wanting to fight. I backed up, turned around, and drove straight to the nearest police station (which was thankfully just a half-mile away)--he didn't follow me into the lot and just kept driving.

Now, if that guy had had a gun, I would almost certainly be dead. The smugness that comes from "teaching someone a lesson" is not worth the potential injury you may cause yourself or others when 2-ton vehicles travelling at high speeds are involved. As has been said, the proper response in these situations is to safely get out of the way and possibly call the police if the driving seems erratic enough to warrant it.

Couldn't agree with you more. Less pointing fingers. More acting like the mature adult you are suppose to be.

lol rekt.

Brake checks -are- a road rage incident. Outside of that little nit, I agree with you completely.

There has been a lot of construction around my city lately, so I've come to get pretty pissy about people not leaving enough room. We would all go faster if everyone left a gap ahead of them wide enough for another car to merge into all the time and you should always make extra room for another car that has to merge.

With a few other things, like polite zipper merging, I call this the "Aggressively Cooperative" driving style, and if you aren't driving that way, you're doing it wrong and messing it up for the rest of us.

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.2979587,-88.3199737,3a,75y,274.86h,68.87t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sRXgJ5x_hij3gkoEJTQf3DA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656?hl=en

I 99% agree with you, but:

Some of that responsibility we all assume when driving to be able to react to things happening in front of us is legitimately mitigated by assumptions that people are going to drive mostly sanely.

Like, on a highway with only 1 lane going each way, when there is an oncoming car in the other lane we assume that they are going to stay in their lane and not swerve right in front of us at the last second. Or, when going around a semi-blind curve on a road, we generally maintain speed and assume that nobody is going to stop / reverse down the lane (although causing accidents that way is a fairly common insurance scam trick).


The tailgater here was *NOT* giving himself enough space to react to 100% normal, sane things that could happen. The brake-check goes (slightly) beyond the normal, sane things that we would usually assume are going to happen when driving. The only problem that I have with it (the brake-check) is that like @SDGundamX said, it very likely could have resulted in an accident including completely innocent victims -- like the car pulling onto the highway or even oncoming traffic on the other side of the ditch.

Basically, the tailgater deserved what he got here. BUT, he could easily have smashed into bystander cars that wouldn't have deserved it at all. So, the takeaway for me is that I'd be hesitant to do a brake-check like that in a situation with that much traffic around. It is still 99.9% the tailgater's fault, and would have been that way even if he had smashed into somebody else. But I'd feel real bad if I brake-checked some asshole like that and he careened into somebody that did nothing wrong.

I've tapped brakes to get people to back off. If that doesn't work change lanes or slow down.

@MilkmanDan I remain unconvinced that it's even 0.00001% anyone's fault but the tailgater. If they smashed into someone after driving unsafely, that's still their fault. I don't know about brake check laws, but i was under the impression that you are allowed to brake if you think there is a need to, and who can say why they felt the need to? Anything can happen - are we assuming here? Perhaps we should not assume things when driving except that people will behave within the law. Any assumption beyond that means you're not driving safely (in my opinion).

@SDGundamX I think it's tragic and dangerous that you have to take into consideration being shot at when you make driving decisions. Does that now mean we have to drive dangerously at certain times in order to avoid being shot?

@dannym3141 -- I agree with your fault figure, from a legal standpoint. But I would feel bad / partially "responsible" from a moral standpoint if I brake-checked a guy in that situation and he smashed into someone else. It would still be overwhelming / entirely the tailgater's fault, BUT if I hadn't been there and/or I hadn't brake-checked, the outcome would have been different.

I didn't explain the "assumptions" that I'm talking about very well in my original post here. Anything can happen, but we make all sorts of assumptions that very low probability things that *could* happen won't. We also subconsciously prepare for some of those low-probability things to make them even lower probability (drive slower than legal speed limit in rain, etc.). That's the sort of thing I wanted to comment on, but I rambled and didn't make that clear. Sorry.

Say, you bring up a valid idea!

He wasn't tailgating, he was drafting!

My car has conditional cruise that follows the 2 second rule, If I use it on the motorway all the idiots that like to drive at 51 MPH to overtake a car at 50 MPH pull out in front of me. The guy that crashed seems to have little experience but the guy in front is a complete and utter **normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.