News

Can you make “The Turn” without crashing? Car enthusiasts are watching the results on YouTube Shorts.

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.

Subscribe to get the latest creator news

Subscribe

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.

Share
Published by
Sam Gutelle

Recent Posts

Jordan Matter, Michelle Khare, and Samir Chaudry are strategic advisors at a new creator education startup

As our industry becomes ever more populated by experts, and in the absence of collaborative…

17 hours ago

YouTube says Premium subscribers are “podcast super-users.” So it’s giving them more exclusive listening features.

With the amount of attention audio content is getting lately, we might as well rebrand…

18 hours ago

Have you heard? PewDiePie drops vlogs, Spy Ninjas spends $25 million, and Jason Kelce gets a YouTube show

Each week, we handpick a selection of stories to give you a snapshot of trends,…

19 hours ago

Netflix and Spotify just paid $100 million to take Jay Shetty’s podcast off YouTube

Netflix has visited the farm once again. The streamer and Spotify have together poached Jay…

2 days ago

What’s on the menu for the Sidemen? A cooking competition split between YouTube and Prime Video.

The creator supergroup that revived Supermarket Sweep on YouTube is ordering up another culinary competition.…

2 days ago

Meta officially offers perks for paying subscribers across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp

Meta is establishing paid subscription tiers across its network of social media platforms. A trio…

2 days ago