By Paul Greeley

817-578-6324, Paul@NewsBlues.com

You see them all over the road in your daily travels—bad drivers making dubious decisions behind the wheel that nearly cause accidents.

You wish your car had a dash camera so you could record the stupid moves some drivers make.

In Charlotte, drivers who do have a dash camera are sharing their videos with WBTV, Gray’s CBS affiliate, for an on-going digital series, “Driving Charlotte Crazy”.

Everyone thinks they’re a good driver and can feel superior watching the dumb mistakes some drivers make.

And it’s OK to laugh at them because “Driving Charlotte Crazy” has few crashes, and no one gets hurt.

Jason Stevens, WBTV’s news director says he got the idea for the series when he was driving to work and someone cut him off.

“The light bulb turns on,” he says. “That guy just cut me off. What if I had that on camera? We could do something with that. It would be a good idea if we could frame a franchise around people just driving irresponsibly around Charlotte.”

Back in March, to give the franchise a jump start, Stevens had some of the station’s photographers with GoPros attached to their vehicles “drive around and just record drivers doing really silly things. Now it’s just viewer driven, sometimes to the point where we have too much footage.”

The job of soliciting viewers dash cam video for the franchise fell to Shay Mendes, WBTV’s creative services director.

“We have a whole campaign going on that asks people to submit their dash cam video,” Mendes says.

And given “Driving Charlotte Crazy” is mostly a digital franchise, Mendes promotes downloading the station’s app so people can watch the episodes.

Stevens says the station teases the episodes in the evening and morning newscasts to encourage people to download the app.

Nia Harden, WBTV’S morning news traffic reporter, fronts the segments.

He says the station can use “Driving Charlotte Crazy” for stories about safe driving.

“It fits within the brand and serves different functions in different ways,” he says.

WBTV has produced seven segments of “Driving Charlotte Crazy” so far.

The Best Local TV Promos as Nominated by GEMA, Formerly Promax

The Best Local TV Promos as Nominated by GEMA, Formerly Promax