Dashcams

[Anonymous]

My Facebook feed (neighborhood groups, moms groups, friends) is FILLED with people who were victims of hit and run incidents, collisions, etc.
Good people of DCUM: Get. A. Dashcam.

I recently witnessed a hit and run in a shopping center parking lot and gave the footage to the victim. I hope someone would do the same for me.

Dashcams are cheap. Don’t put it off.

[Anonymous]

One of our cars just got t-boned. Dashcam would have proved to the insurance company what the other driver was doing that allowed this to happen. Otherwise it's just word against word. They actually recommend installing one. Wish I'd known about this.

[Anonymous]

what's the best one in which you don't have to pay crazy amount of fees in using the cloud services?

[Anonymous]

My Tesla's camera captured a lady's running red light hitting our car at an intersection. There was no witnesses. Cops gave her a ticket after watching the clip.

Couple years ago, an SUV made a right turn on red and hit our car on the far left lane. He was apologizing but then made a claim with his insurance that I ran the red light going straight. I gave his insurance my dash cam clip, and they paid for the damage.
Get one. It's cheap ($100 + $20 micro SD).

[Anonymous]

How do you install them? I'm not sure I would be able to thus I don't have one.

[Anonymous]

what brands to get?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:what's the best one in which you don't have to pay crazy amount of fees in using the cloud services?

Just get one that records in a loop to a micro SD card. You don’t need it clouded, that’s a waste of money and electricity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:what brands to get?

I have 3 different VanTrue dash cams in our cars, and they’ve all been fantastic. Highly recommend VanTrue

[Anonymous]

It looks like BlackVue has some good ones--any recs on what is basically necessary in these? So many options i have no idea.

Thanks to the OP--I needed a push to get one of these.

[Anonymous]

You'll want one with a front camera and a back camera that writes to a high-performance microSD card (probably 128GB or higher). Install is actually pretty easy, as they use an adhesive to attach to the front and back windows and then you run a wire between the two and from the front one to a power outlet. In most cars, it is pretty easy to tuck the wire where the "ceiling" piece of the car meets the sides.

The big question is whether you just want the dashcams for driving or if you want them for surveillance all the time. If you want the latter, you have to hook the camera up so that it draws from the car's battery. You can do that yourself, but it might be better installed by a professional.

I have a Viofo, which is quite basic but it has worked so far on both of our cars.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, this is helpful. What kind of professional installs the parked-surveillance feature? I've seen something about wiring to a fuse box. A car repair person I guess?