You may have seen a dash cam video floating around on the internet. In the video, a German man driving almost gets into a collision with another car. He then shouts, “Okay Garmin!” “Video Speichern.” So, what is Garmin and why is it paired with a picture of Iron Man?

First off, who or what is Garmin? Garmin is a technology company who mainly sell GPS devices such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, and other outdoors and fitness equipment. But, they also manufacture dashcams, and that’s what we’re focusing on. The dashcam records incidents that take place in or around the car, but Garmin’s has a special voice activation feature. If you say “okay Garmin, save video” (in your language) it will record the previous seconds and save it to the cloud. This is to use in case of a lawsuit or charge against the driver so they have video evidence of what happened. 

There are a multitude of videos from the Garmin dashcam in various different languages. French, English, Dutch, etc. But the Garmin dashcam memes were popularized by one clip of a German man driving down a city road, when a man crosses the street and the German man very nearly hits him. He then yells “Okay Garmin! Video speichern!” and the dashcam makes a noise to indicate that the video has been saved.

When the clip was popularized online, people overlaid an image of the inside of Robert Downey Junior’s Iron Man suit. He presents a smug smirk on his face behind a screen with holographic icons around his face. The comparison people on the internet are making is that shouting “Okay Garmin” is similar to Iron Man calling on Jarvis to do a task.

All this and more on The ACC Chronicle: Chronicle-y Online!