A silver car comes the other way on a two lane country road and passes close to the center line, and the driver filming it does not so much as raise an eyebrow. That is the whole joke of a nine second dashcam clip posted on Instagram by @417motion, which opens with the words “Did I overreact?” over the footage.

The caption plays along. “Almost lost my cool,” it reads, tagged #dashcam, #driving and #pov. The camera is a split screen, with the road ahead on top and the driver, a bearded man in glasses and a light blue T shirt, filmed from the dash below.

For the first two seconds he is adjusting his glasses with one hand while the road runs straight between flat fields and power lines. At about the three second mark the silver car appears in the top half of the frame, coming the other way close to the yellow center line, and is gone a moment later. In the bottom half, his expression stays the same. The clip then cuts tighter on his face as he keeps driving, looking straight ahead with the same blank look until it ends.

In the comments, the creator cleared up one thing about the audio: “I added the sound effect,” he wrote. “It’s not part of the song.”

Behind the joke is a kind of crash that road safety officials take seriously. The Federal Highway Administration defines a roadway departure crash as one that “occurs after a vehicle crosses an edge line or a center line, or otherwise leaves the traveled way,” and says an average of 19,158 people died each year from 2016 to 2018 in roadway departures, 51 percent of all U.S. traffic fatalities.

On roads like the one in this clip, one fix is built into the pavement. In its guidance on rumble strips, the FHWA cites research finding that milled center line rumble strips cut fatal and injury head on and opposite direction sideswipe crashes by 38 to 50 percent on rural two lane roads. Those are the grooves that make a tire buzz loudly when a driver drifts across the middle.

If you drive two lane roads like this one regularly, keep your eyes well ahead, especially over rises and around bends where an oncoming car can appear close to the center line with little warning. Stay toward the right side of your lane when you see one drifting, slow down, and know where the shoulder is in case you need it. Do not swerve across the center line yourself to avoid an oncoming car.

A dashcam like the one in this video is useful only if it is set up before you need it. Check that it records both the road and the cabin if you want both views, that the date and time are correct, and that the memory card is not full. If a near miss does turn into a crash, save the clip right away so it is not recorded over, and write down where and when it happened while it is fresh.