I have Viafo front and back with and SD card. Phenomenal.
I would recommend that rather than pulling into a cigarette lighter or fuse, you see if you can plug it into your rearview mirror. I did this and all my dreams came true.
There is a very small learning curve.
My nephew was just in a wreck. A guy turned left across a break in traffic and my nephew t-boned him, there was nothing he could do: the guy cut in front of him without looking. When the cops showed up the other guy reported that my nephew failed to yield or some such nonsense. My nephew’s dash cam proved the other guy was at fault.
So yeah, I’m now looking for one too. A very timely thread.
If it’s difficult to push a USB cord through a gap, you may be able to gently tug on trim pieces (without actually removing them) to briefly widen the gap. When I was installing my first dash cam 8 years ago, I made a trim tool by bending a small hook along the edge of a 2" wide piece of sheet metal, just enough hook to grab the edge of a trim piece I was trying to yank on. There are trim tool kits you can buy for this purpose that come in all sorts of shapes so you can choose whatever works best in any given situation:
Most will overwrite the oldest clip once the card fills up so you don’t need to anything. Just check it every so often to make sure it’s still doing that as some can be set to only record until the card fills up, meaning once it’s full you’re no longer recording anything new.
It can depend upon your car. With most cars having powered rearview mirrors these days you may be able to tap into that so there is no need to run a cable more than a couple of inches.
I have set up two different ones. A Thinkware in my truck and a Garmin in my wife’s car. Mine has front and rear, while hers is front only. Both have been going strong for a couple of years.
One key feature for me was the availability of an OBD-II adapter to power the camera. Both of these have that available as a $50 add on. Basically, it’s a plug that goes into the diagnostic port your mechanic uses, and it powers your camera and automatically detects car-on/off and switches modes for you.
Get a car trim removal kit cheap on Amazon–just a bunch of plastic spatulas and wedges. Use that to help sneak the wire under the trim from the mounting point down to the OBD-II port. It takes about fifteen minutes to sort this out, and it looks so polished when it’s done right. You don’t always need to actually remove trim, just lift it a little with a plastic prybar while using a plastic pokey thing to persuade the wire to go under the edge.
Don’t buy cheap microSD cards. These cards are in hot or cold conditions, being overwritten daily, or weekly at best. The whole point of a dash cam is to provide evidence of an incident after the fact, and you don’t want to find out that your cheap card failed. Use one of the ones designed for heavy service, made for dash cams and the like.
Don’t expect to be able to read license plates. The wide angle lenses make it so you really have to be square on and close to read them. Because of this, always remember to read the plate number out loud so the dash cam can record you saying it…presuming that you enabled audio recording. After reviewing my videos, it became clear to me that mine won’t really help with a hit and run–too hard to get a plate in those conditions–but it’s still going to document the event for police and insurance.
Test your videos! Have fun with this–if you saw some particularly boneheaded move on the highway today, go home and download the video; saw a cool car? download the video. This will make sure you are actually recording, and will orient you with the process for downloading.
If you need to, make a written cheat sheet on a card telling you exactly how to download a video from the camera onto your phone. It’s still a fiddly process, and you don’t want to be in time of need and not be able to get the video.
Don’t give a cop your camera or card! If it disappears, even through no fault of the officer, you have lost your evidence.
I worked a case one time where my client was driving a McLaren sports car about 100 mph down the road. A woman in an SUV was making a left turn when he t-boned her. Her car flew into a light pole and exploded into a fireball. She survived, and was not burned, but had cognitive issues afterwards. My client was not injured, but faced criminal charges.
The entire incident was captured on a dash camera.
It had audio, too…you can hear the driver talking to his passenger, then stop mid sentence to call out “holy shit!”
So, yeah, you might get something interesting.
A two-edged sword for sure.
Do 2025 models of cars come with dash cameras pre-installed? If not now, when?
Here’s an article from a few months ago that discusses factory-installed dashcams:
This is a gamechanger for me, I never thought of that. And Dongar sells an adapter for my car so I think this may be the solution I was looking for.
New cars are mandated to have rearview cameras as a safety feature, so that you see that child / object you’re about to run over as you’re backing up. Many cars have more than just one, to assist with parking or in a poorly designed vehicle (I’m looking at you, raised pick’em up twuck) to assist with visibility. Recording what you can see is a different matter, & while easy enough, adds complexity (flash memory that will be overwritten tens of thousands of times over the course of years in all conditions from cold of winter to summer heatwaves & needs to do that reliably) & cost to the price of the vehicle. Further, recording what you see is going more towards the liability side of things than the safety side of the equation.
Teslas do have some recording capability; however, better recording uses energy/battery percentage, & as I learned from another poster here, doesn’t even save all that much, only the last hour’s worth.
Viofo A119 is still like the Honda Civic of cameras, not the fanciest but it works and affordable. There are tons of knockoffs too. Just get an SD card meant for constant recording. They also have rearview models if you drive UberLyft. I didn’t mess with my trim as I have an auto-adjusting rearview mirror with garage door capabilites, so the camera plugs right into the pins in the back of the mirror.
You’d think these car designers would cater to the techno-illiterates, who seem to constitute 99% of the population. 100% in the case of my household. Just gimme a system that captures video automatically from the git-go, and if storage is a problem, tell me (or sell me) a SIM card to be replaced every x number of hours, and I’ll do it.
If you want, you can buy a dash cam from Best Buy and have their people install it for you. There are also local, independent stores that will do the same thing. Often these are the car stereo shops.
Their website has this service listed at $79.99.
Which sounds like a bargain in vexation avoided.
For inserting into your dashcam, an SD (secure digital) card is generally though to be preferable to a SIM (subscriber identity module) card, as the former has rewritable memory while the latter typically doesn’t.