YouTube Shorts viewers, like those who are stuck in traffic, seem to be obsessed with car crashes. One of the channels at the center of that trend is The Turn, which has made waves in the car community by showing drivers trying (and, in most cases, failing) to negotiate a specific hairpin curve.
The origins of The Turn are shrouded in mystery. According to an official description, the channel “was about skydiving, but people love crashes.” To give the people what they want, the creator behind The Turn collected camera footage from a sharp curve on an unnamed road. Most of the crashes occur at low speeds, but there are a plethora of collisions chronicled on The Turn, ranging from snowy slip n’ slides to truck spinouts to crashes that occur while other crashes are being investigated.
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Some readers may find The Turn to be in poor taste, but Jalopnik argues that the channel’s dose of schadenfreude allows viewers to feel better about their own driving abilities. Of course, there’s no way to determine whether any particular driver would be able to be able to successfully navigate The Turn themselves; the undisclosed location seems to be perpetually snowy.
The ethics of The Turn notwithstanding, its impact within YouTube’s car community cannot be denied. 18 Shorts clips featuring the namesake turn have been uploaded, and they’ve combined to reel in more than 66 million views. That’s an impressive total for an amateur channel, but in the crash-obsessed Shorts community, The Turn’s viewership is just a drop in the bucket. Simulated crashes that use physics engines like BeamNG have brought billions of views to channels like BeamNG Life.
I won’t deny that I spent some time venturing through The Turn’s YouTube Shorts catalog, but I also hope that the channel’s success leads to some changes at the site in question. Clearly, the yellow chevron signs aren’t doing enough; maybe if drivers are informed that they are being recorded, they’ll take The Turn at the super-slow speed it requires.
