THIS is great. Proof is in the video, not necessarily the specs.
It’s not even that the battery will be disconnected, it’s that if the car won’t start, the dash cam won’t have power (depending on how it’s wired and why it won’t start).
In the immediate aftermath of an accident that bad, it’ll probably be easier and faster to just remove it (the dashcam or the SD card) and stick it in your pocket rather than standing there on the side of the road trying to figure out how to connect your phone to it.
Oh. God. LOL- that’d be amusing and misguided ALL at once.
Yes. Hospitals before cell phones.
I didn’t mean it to be quite so serious. I meant more along the lines of you’re going to be dealing with the other driver, talking to the police, you’ll probably have a bunch of phone calls to make etc.
I have a Papago GoSafe 530, with a replacement larger capacity memory card that holds several days worth of video. It works well, although I’ve never needed it for any serious incident. I’ve pulled a couple of videos to show my wife what the insane idiot in front was doing.
After a serious accident happened right in front of me I decided that it would be very useful to have video evidence in case it ever happened again, to me or someone else..
-Edited that quote-
You raise a good point. Mine just arrived- the Viofo A119 Mini2. My way to power it is through the cigarette lighter port low middle in the storage tray in our 2010 Prius. Do I need to get into the habit of pushing Power and Record every time I get into the car and start it? Or, will it power up and start to record automatically when I start the car?
This should be on Page 13 of the manual.
Power On / Off
When you start the engine, the camera will turn on and begin recording automatically.When you turn off the engine or unplug the charging cable from the power adapter, the camera will stop
recording and turn off.Long press button to power on or off the camera
However, IMO, that’s a terrible way to word it. Instead of “When you start the engine…” it should say something more like “When the Viofo A119 Mini2 receives power…”
IOW, it’s saying that it automatically turns on and starts recording when it receives power. It won’t necessarily receive or lose power when the engine is turned on or off. That depends on how it’s being powered. If you’re using this with the cigarette lighter, you’ll have to see if the lighter is still powered up when the engine is off. If it’s not, you can leave it plugged in all the time. If it is, you’ll need to unplug it and plug it back in each time.
EXCELLENT tip ! Today is a blizzard, tomorrow I try to install and use. Thanks for that !! I do believe that the cigarette lighte/ USB 2-port adapter loses power when the car is turned off.
IME as “cigarette lighters” have morphed into “12V accessory power plugs”, they also changed from being powered with the car completely switched off, to being powered on only when the car is.
Meanwhile with the advent of push-button start/stop on ICE cars, it’s far from obvious how, and may be impossible, to leave the car electrically alive with the engine not running. When you first open the doors it “wakes up”, but will time out and shut down in a couple / few minutes if you don’t start the engine.
You have an interior fuse box, usually by your left foot in driver on the left cars. Some of those fuses are tied to the engine, some are always on. You would need to look up the fuse diagram for your model and/or test the fuses if you want an always on camera. If you’re not a daily driver you’d want to make sure you’re not creating a situation where the car battery gets drained but there are fuse tap cords which can monitor this and shut off now.