Everyone should get a Dashcam

I've put Dashcams in both my car and my wife's car. It's already captured two accidents: one where I was rear-ended and one where someone fell asleep as they were driving a few cars ahead of me on the freeway.

After these two experiences, I will never drive a car without a dashcam again. Case in point - being rear-ended. I was at a red light, it turned green, and as I accelerated I got nailed from behind, pushing me into the intersection. The gent jumped out and started yelling and waving his arms, saying I backed up (!), and I said, "I'm sorry, but I've got a dashcam both front and back." He got really quiet, and then we exchanged information. When I called the insurance company on Monday and told them I had not only Dashcam footage but that the cam recorded date and time, gps coordinates, speed and 1080p video both front and back, including the face and license plate of the other driver...I had a check that Thursday afternoon.

I was driving at night on I5 from Seattle to Portland and noticed a truck two or three (long) car lengths ahead of me start to drift, drift, drift off to the side...and then suddenly jerk hard to the left, cross all lanes of traffic and slam into the median in a shower of sparks and eventually balance on top of the center median. While I wasn't involved in the accident, I pulled over and dropbox'ed the video to the cops right there. The officer on duty said that dashcam footage made things 100% easier.

A cropped and somewhat compressed version of this video is embedded below, and also linked here. Now, it was late at night and I've cropped it, but you can see the car get "sleepy" and slowly float across all lanes to the right, hit the right side, then overcompensate and hit the center. This contradicted the driver's statement that he was hit by another car.

Disclaimer: This is older DR650 footage in the dead of night that's been cropped to remove identifying info. Check out this example Dashcam footage of a DR750 for a better sense of what to expect.

I've put Blackvue Dashcams in both our cars. I put a Blackvue DR750S-2CH with Power Magic in car. A PowerMagic will power the dashcam while the car is parked, and catch anything that happens even if the car is off, and it will shut off if it detects that it's in any way discharging the 12V battery below a set voltage. I like the DR750 because it's 60fps 1080p on the front, and it can optionally buffer the video to memory so it's not beating on the SD card and shortening its life. It also has g-force and impact sensors, so as you get in the car it'll say (literally speak) "an impact was detected while in parking mode."

My wife didn't care about these more advanced features so she got the Blackvue DR650S-2CH. It's last year's model but still does 1080p front and back. There's a main wire that handles power for the main unit (either from a 9V cigarette lighter or the PowerMagic), then there's a long, long wire that you'll fish though the plastic panels of your car that will power and run the back camera.

It only took about two hours for me to install the camera, per car, and installation consisted mostly of hiding wires in the existing plastic panels and pushing the wires out of sight. The final look is very sanitary and requires zero maintenance.

The camera has wifi built-in and there's a free app to download. You connect your phone (whenever necessary) to the camera's wifi and download videos as needed. That's why it was super easy for me to Dropbox the footage without connecting to a PC. That said, there are Blackvue desktop apps that will show you maps with your position and speed and allow you to stitch footage together. You can also stamp date, time, speed, and custom text to the footage so it's embedded in the resulting MP4s.

I've had zero issues with my dashcams, and as I said, I'm sold. It's a no-brainer and frankly, it should be built into every car. I'll be installing a dashcam in whatever car my soon-to-be teenager drives, count on it.

Maybe you won't get into an accident (hopefully!) but you could catch a meteor on your dashcam!

* I use Amazon links to products. When you use them, you're supporting this blog! Thanks!

Sponsor: Get the latest JetBrains Rider for debugging third-party .NET code, Smart Step Into, more debugger improvements, C# Interactive, new project wizard, and formatting code in columns.