What have you done to your car today?

Soldato
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Ask yourself why places like Austria have banned them.
People in countries like Austria and Germany are VERY careful when it comes to their privacy, partly for obvious reasons. In the UK we seem to be happy to give up all of that without a single care, which is especially worrying when you look at the direction the country is going.

You only have to look at Twitter and see some of the Police accounts tweeting proudly how someone sent in a video of someone in the wrong lane and they got a successful conviction. 20 years ago people would have been shocked by something like that happening. Things like CCTV, speed cameras and mobile phones have also helped numb our brains and make people think it is all normal to film each other.
 
Soldato
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Ask yourself why places like Austria have banned them.

As above - German and Austria privacy laws are very very strict compared to ours and what we are accustomed to. For instance, in Berlin no CCTV cameras are allowed to be streamed live. In Bavaria/Saxony no cameras are allowed in railway stations or on public transport. Germany and Austria have a real distrust of CCTV - a far cry away from the general British attitude on it. Quite why you think this is some vindication of your point of view is not obvious to me?

Fox can't help but mistake the minority of dashcam users for the majority - I can only imagine that in his mind, every dash cam user tries to cause accidents whilst gleefully yelling out of the window "I'VE GOT YOU ON CAMERA MATE!". He uses language like "surveillance" to make it sound underhanded, covert and unethical. The only person it's "surveilling" is yourself or your passengers. I can't understand why he constantly bangs this drum trying to convince people it's bad thing - if he doesn't want to pay £50 for one, great, then don't, and he doesn't have it in his car. It's hardly like people are paying £2000 for one of these.

If we lived in a world where people were honest, or even most people were honest, there would be no need for dashcams. I have mine in the car in case of an insurance claim and the other person tries to misrepresent what happened, or just outright lie which means the claim would go 50/50 or I would potentially be found at fault. Never underestimate how much people will lie to shirk responsibility for things. Dashcams also push down insurance premiums for people as insurance companies can base their risk more on the driver they're insuring and to settle claims quicker and cheaper. I bought my camera 5 years ago for £38(+£10 for the installation kit). Now, in that same period I have spent over £16000 on fuel for my car.

I've lost track of the number of people who have been in a collision, that sounds like it'd be straight forward, but the other party makes up some absolute rubbish to try and push responsibility off themselves. Indeed, I *myself* have been in a situation about 2 years ago where a driver crashed and tried to blame myself for ramming her (?!), when in actual fact she didn't look in her mirror before moving into lane 2 of a dual carriageway and panicked when she saw me there and over corrected and span off the road - unfortunatley this was on my second car (Mini Cooper) in which I didn't have a dashcam because I didn't use it much. The saving grace was that she didn't actually make contact with me - proving she was lying and the story she told her solicitor differed from the one she told the insurance company meaning it was dropped. Had she moved another foot over and hit my car though, it would have been a different story and I could have been convicted of careless driving and been found at fault for the insurance.

My sister was involved in a collision where someone went through a red light and failed to give way and went head on into her car. The other driver immediately claimed my sister had jumped a red light and ran into him, and it was only for the grace that there was about 5 witnesses who confirmed that *he* jumped the red light, that he ended up being convicted of careless driving and insurance settled.

I remember a member on here posted that when they were sat waiting at a roundabout and a woman behind had rear ended him. She was immediately apologetic, until she got home and suddenly changed her tune and alleged that he had rolled back into her! No witnesses, no dashcam. The only saving grace in that situation was that I think the member had an automatic car that had hill control and also had a couple of text messages from the woman before she had a chance to talk to her husband!

Perhaps Fox is just fortunate enough to have never been on the other end of another driver outright lying? Unfortunately, many others have, which is why the market has surged and now over 7 million motorists use them - and this is expected to continue increasing at a very quick rate.
 
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Soldato
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The reason that i am utterly against these things has been covered by Mr Fox, but to add to his comments i would also add that i just do not see or feel the need to operate a piece of equipment within your car, for eternity, which in all likelihood may never provide for any financial gain in your entire driving career.

Even in the event of a claim, i just dont understand peoples' need to go above and beyond to mitigate the resultant damages, your insurance covers your entire liability regardless. In reality claims require a little paperwork regardless of outcome, and will likely result in one way or another costing you a small amount, but we are talking an event which is likely at most a few times in your entire life.

I would certainly argue that installing a string of webcams over the years, to every vehicle you own, the cost of doing so, researching the latest model, the (slight) risk of theft of the camera itself, etc etc, is excessively laborious compared with simply not doing so, and accepting (primarily your insurers cost) the minute risk of a claim going against you.

I don't really have a dog in this fight enough to argue with you - like I said, I don't bother with one. I can understand you not wanting to use one, but I don't understand the vehement objection nowadays.

About my only real objection to them is the people that install them seemingly with the sole purpose of using them to generate footage they can share on social media. That's more of a people problem than a dash cam problem though.
 
Soldato
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I have a dashcam, and I feel more at ease because of it. Parking incidents when I'm not in the car, idiots trying to make fraudulent insurance claims by reversing into you.

Not sure I get Fox's hatred for them, better to have and not need than need and not have, especially for $70.
 
Caporegime
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In acme's chair.
Did the spark plugs on the Celsior, not too bad of a job to be honest. Couple of fiddly bits. The old ones were supremely knackered... Rusty, fouled up, etc. They were NGK R Platinums. Replaced with Denso IK20 Iridiums...

Someone told me that replacing knackered plugs on these engines can pick you up 5+MPG, I didn't believe it, but they were right... Fuel economy is massively improved... Possibly by as much as 9MPG. Which is like, 40%. :p :p
 
Soldato
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I have a dashcam, and I feel more at ease because of it. Parking incidents when I'm not in the car, idiots trying to make fraudulent insurance claims by reversing into you.

Not sure I get Fox's hatred for them, better to have and not need than need and not have, especially for $70.
It's not just Fox who hates them, quite a few people here do, myself included for the reasons above.
 
Soldato
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I don't think video surveillance of the general public is something that private citizens should be rushing to operate themselves. The constant stream of YouTube videos of people rushing at roundabouts to exploit other drivers honest mistakes for camera is a really not a great place for us to be, is it?

There was a thread in GD recently where the majority of people actually seemed to be in favour of recording and reporting others. A sad state of affairs really.
 

Jez

Jez

Caporegime
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There was a thread in GD recently where the majority of people actually seemed to be in favour of recording and reporting others. A sad state of affairs really.
I read the same thread, disheartening to think that this is how people think :(

While technology pays my salary, and is a huge facilitator in a lot of ways, there are some aspects such as this which i really wish had never been invented.
 
Soldato
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Like any advancement in technology, or the introduction of new technology, a minority will abuse it and that will lead to skewed views in the majority. That being said, I would find it very hard to argue with someone using a dashcam in the manner described by Phemo or Gaygle, in which it is there purely for the sake of insurance purposes if required, and is not touched otherwise. On the cost front, dashcams with perfectly suitable recording quality can be picked up for sub £50 and take less than an hour to install, so there is hardly any issue there.

On the other side of the coin, recent attempts to use dashcam footage as a means of prosecution have really led to them being arguably more of a risk than anything else, with people seemingly desperate to inflate a situation for the sake of getting footage or 'justice'. This is a real shame.
 
Soldato
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Why are dashcams not built in now ? (apart from tesla), or, available as an option
[I didn't think the thread showed people getting them prediminately to goad and report others ... but given a number of the examples posted question whether they will capture useful evidence in many situations eg. people cutting in... which maybe why they are not built in]
 
Soldato
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BMW offer it as an option now, if it has surround view you can get 360 degree coverage.
Nope. That's not like a dashcam at all - I have it on my X3 M40i. It's a 3D view which you can activate when the car is parked and takes a minute or two for all the cameras to render a 360 degree image. The cameras also appear separately on the iDrive screen when Park Assist Plus is activated and you are close to something. Nothing is recorded.
 
Soldato
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Nope. That's not like a dashcam at all - I have it on my X3 M40i. It's a 3D view which you can activate when the car is parked and takes a minute or two for all the cameras to render a 360 degree image. The cameras also appear separately on the iDrive screen when Park Assist Plus is activated and you are close to something. Nothing is recorded.

Sounds like a different system on yours it’s called BMW Drive Recorder and uses all the cameras also records GPS data and auto activated during a crash.
 
Soldato
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Sounds like a different system on yours it’s called BMW Drive Recorder and uses all the cameras also records GPS data and auto activated during a crash.
Interesting, seems to be the same thing, but can store 40 seconds of footage, recording manually started or automatically in the event of a bad crash. Still very different to a normal dashcam though.
 
Tea Drinker
Don
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Wife took her 3 year old mini cooper sd for a service at mini today. The front pads kwik fit fitted last year are incorrectly fitted, have worn to basically zero and cooked the discs :eek:

Mini couldn't change them as they haven't got any discs and don't know when they will, she had to sign a waiver to take the car.

I'll be at kwik fits door first thing limbering up. It took them 4 visits to fit them as they snapped a sensor and the replacement was the wrong one.

Idiot's
 
Soldato
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Wife took her 3 year old mini cooper sd for a service at mini today. The front pads kwik fit fitted last year are incorrectly fitted, have worn to basically zero and cooked the discs :eek:

Mini couldn't change them as they haven't got any discs and don't know when they will, she had to sign a waiver to take the car.

I'll be at kwik fits door first thing limbering up. It took them 4 visits to fit them as they snapped a sensor and the replacement was the wrong one.

Idiot's

Whos decision was it to take to kwikfit for work? Only thing they can do is tyres and MOT lol.
 
Associate
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Wife took her 3 year old mini cooper sd for a service at mini today. The front pads kwik fit fitted last year are incorrectly fitted, have worn to basically zero and cooked the discs :eek:

Mini couldn't change them as they haven't got any discs and don't know when they will, she had to sign a waiver to take the car.

I'll be at kwik fits door first thing limbering up. It took them 4 visits to fit them as they snapped a sensor and the replacement was the wrong one.

Idiot's
I’m shocked people still use quick fit, I’ve only ever heard horror story’s from them places. I mean the name alone doesn’t sound very promising ha
If you’ve still got the receipt I’m sure you can get them to cough up something
 
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