Dashcams. Who uses them?

I can understand both arguments for and against tbh.

I would feel that I would no doubt unknowingly incrimiate myself somehow.

But in the extreme circumstances (which are statistically unlikely) they would ceertianly help.

The bottom line really is that hopefully you will never need to use it's footage as nothing bad will happen to you.

I think a lot of people buy them as a cool gadget for their car which I can understand.
 
Golf1.6 said:
if you get one it has to be a top notch one that is wired correctly through the roof lining so that it is constantly charged when the engine is running.

Also it needs to start recording when you start the car and also be smart enough to know which clips to archive.

I was thinking of getting one but I wouldn't be arsed to charge/press start record on each and every journey and knowing my luck the one time I forget I'll have a collision.

The requirements made it too expensive for me.
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They all can be hardwired easily and auto turn on/off with the ignition, that's what makes it a dashcam. Auto archiving (presumably based on acceleration/shock data) is generally useless and will archive every clip of you hitting a pothole.
 
On a more serious note, my brother has had two people hit him so far and because they both drove off nothing came of it. Despite having the license plates and a massive scrape in one collision the police did squat due to lack of evidence. A video of the incident would remedy that.
 
I have front and rear ones, cost £160 plus £30 of cables and fittings to get them installed out of the way and about 2 hours of my time to fit them, so far I have 3 videos of people being numpty's on the road and several hundred hours of totally uneventful driving, hopefully they will never be needed but they are there just in case they are.

So far i have seen a BMW 4x4 mount the pavement drive for 600yds all 4 wheels on the pavement occupying the entire space of pavement then turn down a side road.

A audi drive straight through a totally red set of lights nearly wiping out the car infront of me

oh and caught a rear shunt on another car (gave my details to the driver if they needed the footage)

so they do help out and provide amusement at the same time :)

oh and +1 for the mobius dashcam, have two of them and they rock both day and night and easy to hardwire also you can change the lens/battery on them easily
 
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A work colleague came into work last week to say his car had been written off. A foreign HGV moved from left to middle lane, hitting him and sending him spinning into the hard shoulder. He was too busy crashing to get a good enough description to chase the HGV which just kept driving.

He's now left with a claim on his insurance and no way to recover his losses.

If he'd had a dashcam it could have been a completely different story.

To say something never happens, or is unlikely to happen, is often not enough of a reason to do/not to something, e.g. get a dashcam. I know the odds are I will never need the footage - but better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

PS I don't have one, but want one. :D
 
BadMojo said:
A work colleague came into work last week to say his car had been written off. A foreign HGV moved from left to middle lane, hitting him and sending him spinning into the hard shoulder. He was too busy crashing to get a good enough description to chase the HGV which just kept driving.

He's now left with a claim on his insurance and no way to recover his losses.

If he'd had a dashcam it could have been a completely different story.

To say something never happens, or is unlikely to happen, is often not enough of a reason to do/not to something, e.g. get a dashcam. I know the odds are I will never need the footage - but better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it.

PS I don't have one, but want one. :D
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How did that happen?

Also, how would a dash cam help (assuming he was travelling slower than the HGV and the HGV approached from behind?). You'd think other motorists could help or even the odd traffic cameras dotted about.
 
Tom_ed1987 said:
They all can be hardwired easily and auto turn on/off with the ignition, that's what makes it a dashcam. Auto archiving (presumably based on acceleration/shock data) is generally useless and will archive every clip of you hitting a pothole.
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cattlegrids are another "accident" that triggers the auto save :p I don't have one currently but use an app on my phone and wedge it between the dash and screen. more so just to capture the drive and views if it's a nice day and share it with my dutch friend :) but yeah... every pot hole and cattle grid is an accident apparently :P I've tried to adjust the sensitivity but yet to find the sweet spot.


that sucks about your mate badmojo :( could the police not look at footage from motorway cctvs? thought they probably already thought of it and might have been on a camera-less stretch? :( and as for how the camera could have helped... well if he had a rear one it would show the lorry, but even with a front one, if he span it might have caught something on the vehicle to identify the company at fault. :)
 
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I've been thinking about getting one of these (and a rear), but is it even possible, without an incident occurring, to send footage to any relevant authority? I don't do a huge amount of driving by any stretch, about 15k a year, but most of that is motorway and I see so much dangerous driving that I wish you could just forward it on for someone to take any appropriate action or issue a warning. Is that even possible or will the police literally not give a ****? Genuine question, I have no idea.

Also how do they work with regards to footage? Is it deleted automatically every day or something?
 
I asked this on twitter to Glos police and Glos road safety a couple of months back.
they gave me email address I should send it to and told to create incident no for it by ringing 101 so they can tally the vid to incident No.
 
Russinating said:
I've been thinking about getting one of these (and a rear), but is it even possible, without an incident occurring, to send footage to any relevant authority? I don't do a huge amount of driving by any stretch, about 15k a year, but most of that is motorway and I see so much dangerous driving that I wish you could just forward it on for someone to take any appropriate action or issue a warning. Is that even possible or will the police literally not give a ****? Genuine question, I have no idea.
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I wondered this as well. I'm not sure what to think about it - on one hand I've seen plenty of outright dangerous driving that are just accidents waiting to happen and I'd love to see that sort of driving dealt with but where do you draw the line? If everyone had these cameras, could one day someone send in footage of you safely overtaking them at, say, 90mph when they were doing 70mph and the police follow it up with a NIP or something? Hopefully it won't get that silly...
 
Russinating said:
I've been thinking about getting one of these (and a rear), but is it even possible, without an incident occurring, to send footage to any relevant authority? I don't do a huge amount of driving by any stretch, about 15k a year, but most of that is motorway and I see so much dangerous driving that I wish you could just forward it on for someone to take any appropriate action or issue a warning. Is that even possible or will the police literally not give a ****? Genuine question, I have no idea.

Also how do they work with regards to footage? Is it deleted automatically every day or something?
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as megakid said, there are some channels you can send it to but how much effort they put into this department... who knows :p

just do like everyone else and just make youtube compilations with funny annotations :p

and as for the footage question, guessing you mean on the actual cameras? I think the usual procedure is that the camera will keep recording until it is about to run out of memory (how ever big the SD card is) and then it will deleted the oldest video stored to free up some space. it will keep repeating this cycle of filling up the newly freed space and then delete the next oldest video as it starts to run out of room again.

unless of course then are "marked" as important/incident/archived, then these videos will remain on the SD card and be ignored when the camera looks for videos to delete to free up space, until you remove the "marked" status on them or delete them yourself.

this way you'll still have some previous footage that you can go back to for what ever reason, how long it stays just depends on the quality of the video and how frequently you are recording :)
 
Thanks for the replies guys. The most common things are tail gating and middle lane hoggers on the motorway, and then the few absolute idiots who are the type to slam on their brakes in front of you because they wanted to do 120 and you slowed them down for 5 seconds doing 70.

If that's how most of the cameras operate then great, hated the idea of having to manually delete or format.
 
Russinating said:
I've been thinking about getting one of these (and a rear), but is it even possible, without an incident occurring, to send footage to any relevant authority? I don't do a huge amount of driving by any stretch, about 15k a year, but most of that is motorway and I see so much dangerous driving that I wish you could just forward it on for someone to take any appropriate action or issue a warning. Is that even possible or will the police literally not give a ****? Genuine question, I have no idea.
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Russinating said:
Thanks for the replies guys. The most common things are tail gating and middle lane hoggers on the motorway,.
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I think it's a huge waste of your time.



Get a dashcam fitted in the hope that it catches useful footage in the event that you're involved in an accident, or you are a witness to one, not because you want to be some sort of vigilante motoring snitch. :p


Russinating said:
and then the few absolute idiots who are the type to slam on their brakes in front of you because they wanted to do 120 and you slowed them down for 5 seconds doing 70.

.
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Never had this happen to me :confused:
 
My dad had a dash cam for a while, but it was only a very cheap one and the quality wasn't the best to be perfectly honest. It was good fun watching it back tho.
 
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