On a winter highway that looks merely wet, a dashcam catches the moment control simply vanishes. The steering wheel barely twitches, yet the car snaps sideways, slides across the lane, and becomes a passenger on a sheet of invisible ice. In a few seconds, black ice turns a routine drive into a near-crash that feels less like bad luck and more like physics taking over.
That same split second plays out again and again in recent clips from patrol cars, commuters, and truckers, each one showing how quickly a hidden glaze can grab a vehicle. The footage is gripping to watch from a safe screen, but for the people in those cars, it is a reminder that winter roads can flip from fine to terrifying faster than anyone can react.
When the road looks fine and suddenly is not
In one patrol clip shared from Jan, a trooper radios that he has “just had a commercial bobtail lose it on the bridge,” noting the truck is sitting on the berm at the 213 marker after losing traction on what looked like a normal span of pavement. A matching dashcam angle from the same Jan incident shows the cruiser rolling up as the bobtail, with no trailer weight to pin its rear axle, suddenly fishtails and slides toward the guardrail, a textbook case of how a light truck reacts when it hits a frozen patch mid-bridge, where cold air wraps the concrete from all sides. In a second version of that same scene, again tied to Jan and the 213 reference, the trooper’s camera captures how little warning the driver gets before the truck is simply along for the ride.
Another clip from the same stretch has the officer calmly reporting that he has “just had a commercial bobtail lose it on the bridge” and that the truck is “at the 213” before adding that a second crash has now blocked the eastbound lane. That sequence, echoed again in a separate upload that repeats the 213 callout, shows how one unseen slick spot can trigger a chain reaction of spins and impacts before anyone has time to slow traffic.
Black ice, troopers on foot, and the physics drivers forget
Earlier this year in Ohio, a trooper’s camera captured two separate crashes where drivers lost control on a frozen highway, part of a broader pattern as multiple States dealt with the same storm system. In a related Jan reel, the same Jan trooper is seen stepping out of his cruiser and immediately slipping on black ice, his boots sliding out from under him as if he has stepped onto polished glass, a reminder that if a person can barely stand, a two ton SUV has even less grip. Another Jan post from the same icy highway incident shows the patrol officer again losing his footing while traffic skids by within inches, a moment that the clip’s description notes came within inches of tragedy and that is highlighted in one Jan reel and again in a second version that emphasizes how the officer narrowly avoided being hit within inches, as described in the linked clip.
Other drivers are catching similar scares from their own dashboards. One Dec video, tagged with the coordinates “lat lat:38.128510 128510 long,” shows a sedan sliding toward a stopped car before the driver manages to steer away at the last second, a moment the caption calls one that “could have ended badly” and urges viewers to Watch how close it comes. A second upload of the same near miss repeats the “lat lat:38.128510 128510 long” detail and again invites viewers to Watch the sedan narrowly avoid a crash, underlining how a few feet of grip or a slightly different steering input can decide whether a driver walks away or ends up calling a tow truck.
Multiple crashes, online reactions, and what drivers can actually do
One short clip that has circulated widely shows a line of vehicles hitting the exact same frozen strip, each one spinning or sliding into the next, a sequence introduced with the phrase “Caught on camera” and backed up by a second version that again notes the same Dashcam sequence. In that incident, the narration points out that, according to the According report from the Ohio State Highway, the SUV driver involved walked away with only minor injuries, a lucky outcome given how many cars pile into the same spot. Meteorologists later tied a similar string of wrecks to a sudden lake effect snowburst that created whiteout conditions and hid slick patches, a detail highlighted in one reel that credits Meteorologists and in a second version that openly notes the clip is AI generated and “for your entertainment,” a disclaimer spelled out in the View description.
More from Wilder Media Group: