I can imagine if someone sideswipes you or cuts you off and there is an accident, these are useful, but I wonder if I really want that thing on my dash/windshield, running a cord plugged into the 12V, etc. Your thoughts.
Professional install wires it up so it functions like the stereo–no activity until you’re started. Some, however, will record if they detect motion around your parked car. They are mounted high enough at the center of the windshield, and another similarly-placed on the back glass, that you don’t notice it, and the display on some goes dark after a few seconds of driving so you’re not distracted by the movie.
Upside: you have evidence for when the other driver is at fault for a crash, or if you witness a crash–especially satisfying for hit & runs
Downside: in many (all?) states, evidence is discoverable and must be surrendered in the event of litigation, even if it self-incriminating. Failure to do so can result in some manner of censure for destroying evidence, and the jury can receive an instruction to assume the evidence you destroyed was adverse to your position.
Even with that potential drawback, I use them. If I screw up, I’ll own it. If someone else screws up, I expect them to lie about it and try & pin it on me.
Should you buy a dash cam? If (you think) you’re a good driver and you want objective evidence as to what really happened in the event of a crash, then a dash cam may be a smart investment. If you’re a crappy driver and you want maximum leeway to lie about the extent to which a crash was your fault, then a dash cam may be a bad investment.
As to the installation:
Dash cams are pretty small. I put mine at the top of the windshield just to the right of the mirror, so it’s pretty much out of sight from where I’m sitting. My car has 12V accessory power running to the mirror for Homelink buttons; I was able to splice in a compact 12V-to-5V converter to supply the camera. That converter is tiny and tucks in behind the mirror, so no cables dangling down, no other junk in my field of view. If you don’t have power at the mirror, then yes, you’ll need to tuck the power cable into one of the windshield pillars or something. A tip: tuck the cable in on the windshield side of the pillar, not the door side; the latter is where the side-curtain airbags will deploy from in a crash, and you don’t want them blasting a cable toward your face.
Dedicated dash cams are smart enough to turn on when you give them power (i.e. when you start the engine), and gracefully shut down when you shut off the power (i.e. when you stop the engine). They will also operate in “loop” mode, automatically writing over the oldest files on the storage card only when the card is full (a 32GB card will store a few hours of video). In other words, they pretty much operate in the background, no user intervention required.
They can be useful in hit-and-run cases, and in situations where someone is deliberately lying to avoid responsibility. They can also be useful in situations where people are simply wrong about what happened. The latter is what motivated me to get a dash cam in the first place. A pedestrian was crossing against the light and it was sheer luck that I spotted her far ahead of me through dense (stopped) traffic. I had a green arrow for my right turn, but I knew she would cross my path if I didn’t stop for her. Sure enough, she jogged right in front of me as I came to a stop, completely unaware that I was approaching. When I looked up, my arrow had already changed to yellow, and right then changed to red. Had I not spotted her earlier I would have mowed her down, and anyone else observing the scene would have then looked at the light and said that I had the red and was therefore at fault, when in fact that wouldn’t have been the case. A dash cam would have recorded the truth: I had the green arrow, and she was crossing against the light.
AIUI, they first became popular in Russia as a way to avoid becoming a victim of insurance fraud: pedestrians would run in front of cars and jump on the hood or lay on the ground, claiming the driver had hit them. Here’s a few good examples. People will also back into you, and then claim that you rear-ended them. Without a dash cam, it’s your word against theirs. This kind of fraud is less common here in the US, but a $100 dash cam seems like cheap protection against something that could cost you thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.
They can also be a valuable public service to others who don’t have a dash cam. If you witness (but are not involved in) a crash, your dash cam provides objective evidence for those who were involved.
I have one, I like it. Part of the reason I got it is from watching so many dash cam videos on youtube. In many of them, it’s only because of the dashcam that proves the driver’s innocence in an accident. For example, getting brake checked or showing that you had a green light.
As for the wire, that’s no big deal. Get a long, straight (not curled up like a phone) wire and tuck it up above the trim and run it down the A Pillar to the fuse box. Find a fuse that’s only on when the car is on* and use an add-a-fuse kit to wire it in.
If you have any power up in the ceiling, like a sunroof or any accessories, you could tap into it there as well. But running it behind the trim, right to the box is about as easy as it gets.
*Unless you want it powered up when the car is off, many of them are designed to stay on, but only start recording if they notice motion or vibration
I wondered if they can be set to be encrypted and the person who owns the cam may ummm forget the encryption key in the above circumstance.
I can’t say it any better than Machine Elf already posted so I’ll just second him with the exception that I’d get one even if I were a bad driver. I’d rather have to explain that my camera wasn’t plugged in than not have video evidence when I really need it.
I’ve been interested in getting one for a while, primarily just for my own amusement. I drive a lot, not by choice, and I see a lot of dumbassery on the roads just about every day, not to mention quite a lot of blatant illegal driving, and I’d like to be able to have a record of these things I witness.
Recommendations? Brands and models, self-install vs pro, front or rear-view only or both, what should I look to spend for a decent dash cam (and what is too much?).
Yes you do. If you’re worried about wires then you can have one permanently wired in. If you need the 12v socket you can use the OBD port instead.
Do you Uber / Lyft / whatever? If so you’ll want a dashcam that records the interior of the car.
You should record both fore and aft. A couple of years back there was a rash of ‘crash for cash’ claims hereabouts and when front-facing dashcams were used to counter it, they reversed the claim, saying that the car in front brake-tested them, so there’s a need to show that the car behind is following too closely.
I used to use a Koonlung K1S. When that broke I switched to an Aukey DR02.
If you want to fit the thing yourself you will find a set of spudgers very useful.
I have this one on front. It’s got a 145° viewing angle, which means pretty much anything out the front windshield it sees. It comes w/ USB on the end of the power cord. You could ‘temporarily’ install it w/ the wire hanging down or tuck the cord into the headliner & behind the A posts to USB power, or change the end & run it right into the fuse panel. I have mine mounted high on the window, next to the rear view mirror so it’s not obstructing my view. Self-install vs. pro - how good are you at hiding wires in a car?
The issue is that if you are rear-ended or side swiped it obviously won’t pick up anything unless the other car passes you. Somebody takes out your rear bumper at an intersection & turns down the side road & your forward facing dash cam never sees anything. You could get a second camera for mounting rearward on the back window. The problem with these (even the HD ones) is that at night headlights of the car behind you are probably going to blind out any other details so you won’t be able to read the front license plate (if you’re in a state that has those), or maybe even the make/model of the car - those HID lights are bright & many cars have tinted rear windows! Definitely get a HD one for the front, but it’s not as important in the rear; buy a less expensive one. The other issue is that almost all of them are ‘designed’ to be windshield mounted; this means you’ll need to buy an extended length power cable to be able to power it from one of the USB ports/fuse box. No, they’re not expensive, but it’s an extra component you’d like to have on hand before you rip out your headliner & then realize you don’t have the parts to finish the job.
Garmin also makes two dashcams. However, depending upon how you drive, you may not want your speed recorded. 
Even better, Garmin makes the Virb 360°; while not a dedicated dashcam, you could buy a suction cup mount to make it one. Again, if you’re ever one to pick up your phone in the car, or sing (badly) - sound recording is optional on some of them, or pick your nose, you may not want this one. :o I have a Virb 360°; use it for other things, not in the car. If you have an incident where someone is driving aggressively/erratically before hitting you, you’d of course want to have the full view all the way around the car leading up to the collision, but I feel it’s too expensive & gets too much interior for me. The more you spend, the more coverage/features you get. The Z-edge is $100 on Amazon & I bought (but haven’t yet installed) a less expensive model for the rear.
Mine is set to loop. The amount of data until it records over itself is therefore governed by the size of the storage device; typically a micro-SD card. I get about 4 hrs of recording on mine before it overwrites the oldest files. This means if you record an accident in front of you or something else interesting in front of you on the way out of town for the weekend, it may not be there for you to download when you get back home on Sun night. You’d want to download it to the PD at the accident scene in that case. You can set the length of each video that it’s recording; mine is set to 5 mins so there are multiple 5 min videos on my SD card; IOW, the files are too big to email, but not multiple terabytes either; you could easily share it w/ someone by uploading to something like DropBox. Mine has an accelerometer & saves files triggered by that in a different directory. IOW, if you get into a minor accident on your way out of town for the weekend, you’ll still have that file even if you’re doing enough driving to overwrite the rest of the card; you can’t just drive around a lot & then ‘accidentally’ erase it if it shows evidence that you were in the wrong. Of course it needs to be a hard enough hit to trigger the accelerometer, which a parking lot ding might not do. Every ‘incident’ that has been saved by the accelerometer in mine is when the suction cup gives way & the camera falls to the floor. :smack:
I have the Z-edge Z3, which has been discontinued. It’s been good; I will probably add its successor, the Z-Edge Z4, as a rear-facing camera soon.
(You can take the above to mean that I would recommend getting a rear-facing camera along with a front. You can do this as two completely independent cameras, or buy them as one front/rear set that draws from the same power supply.)
The Z3 and Z4 cameras don’t include GPS speed recording. If you spend more you can get that feature, but I suspect it’s more likely to work against you than for you. Crash investigators can certainly estimate your speed from the video, but if you’re going 5 MPH over the limit, that’ll be hard for them to spot; GPS, OTOH, will report your exact speed, and “5 over the limit” looks worse on an accident report than “approximately at the speed limit”.
Self-install, or pro install? It’s up to you. If you’ve got basic wiring skills and own a soldering iron, you can probably do a tidy customized DIY installation like I did. If you’re less handy but still want to save money, you can run the cord along the edge of the windshield and down to the fuse box like Joey P suggests. If you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to electrical work, talk to a car shop, and expect to pay $100-$200 for the installation.
This is when the audio recording may be helpful. If you happen to see the fleeing vehicle, you just need to shout out the license plate and make/model, and the camera will record your voice. Saves the trouble of having to keep all that stuff in memory while you reach for pen and paper.
I love my dash cam. I have one of these in the link below. Sharp, excellent quality, color pictures with sound. Uses GPS to show your speed. Has a parking mode where after the GPS does not indicate movement after a few minutes it will record but not save, in a continuous loop. Then if it detects an event, like someone hitting your car, it will go back 20 seconds before the start of the event and save all the action. So if someone walks up to your car and hits it, you will see the person approaching your car and all the action after. You can take the SD card out and save whatever you want on another device if needed. Mine will take a 256GB SD card. And if that gets full it just keeps writing over the oldest entry. G sensor activates when it detects sudden movement like a rough road or hard cornering that may indicate an accident.
The only problem I have had with leaving it on all the time in parking mode is that the weather tends to keep the camera active all the time instead of sleeping in parking mode. Wind blowing branches, rain, wind rocking the car, it detects all these as an event and comes alive. This causes a power drain on the car battery so I turn it off most of the time I am away from the car. I plan to switch to a deep cycle battery next which should eliminate the drain problem. Most car batteries are for storing the energy to start the car and little else.
There is an example video in the link that shows just how clear and crisp the pictures are. I just put mine up in front of the rear view mirror, next to the radar detector and you really wouldn’t notice it.
Cool! Thanks for the replies.
Another question, possibly stupid: do you remove the camera when you’re not in your car, or do you leave it installed all the time? Ever had any problems with summer heat (or winter cold)?
Leave it alone. Smash-and-grab thieves are looking on your seats/floor for stealable items; most won’t even notice your dash cam, and if they do, they likely won’t consider it an easily fenced item. Besides, if you make your dash cam a pain in the ass for yourself, one of these days you’ll just stop putting it back in.
Several years ago I had a dirt-cheap dash cam, and it didn’t survive the first summer. The clear plastic over the rear display screen expanded/warped bubbled up after the first month. By mid-summer, it was operating intermittently, and by the end of the summer, it had died completely. The Z3 is doing fine after 1.5 years, no issues.
I leave mine in the car all the time, but I live in a very low crime area, We lock the doors to the house out of formality more than anything else. And like I said, you really wouldn’t notice the camera if you were looking for something to quickly smash and grab.
And the temperature range is: Operating temperature: from -20°C to 80°C (-4˚F to 176˚F)
– Storage temperature: from -30°C to 90°C (-22˚F to 194˚F)
So that covers just about everywhere that humans should be driving…
I leave mine in. The only time I take it out is if people (ie mechanics) are going to be working inside the car. It’s mounted so high up on the windshield it’s hardly noticeable, unless you’re looking for it. In fact, it could even deter people since you can set them to run all the time. Once in a while I’ve thought about putting a little “3G” sticker on it so potential thieves might think that it’s constantly uploading to the internet.
I’m using this one which I’m sure is a Chinese knock off of a name brand. Speed, GPS, and audio are all optional from the menu. Video quality is excellent even in low-light or at night. I went with this one because it has integrated wi-fi that let’s me control it and review video from my phone.
I got in in December, and 100+ summer temps haven’t had any effect at all. I haven’t had any real cold weather for testing, but that’s really of less concern than heat.
I watched that video, Machine Elf, then clicked on another one in a sidebar. In Australia (and in England, according to posters), another scam is the fake hit-and-run plus another accomplice in another car, who claims to have seen the whole thing and will then start recording your car and license plate to intimidate some hush money out of you.
I’m starting to think of getting a dashcam video. I’m sure this scam must exist here in the U.S., as well.
The title says she’s mentally ill, and I could believe it watching the video, but who knows.
I’ve seen more than enough idiot drivers and had my share of close calls that I really don’t want to go anywhere without a dash cam. And that’s without any consideration of deliberate frameups and fraud attempts.
Well, I had mine stolen by an opportunist thief when I left the door unlocked for a few minutes while in and out of a store loading some stuff. I do think it’s an attractant - easy to remove, easy to sell for a few bucks.