6 Things I've Learned From Becoming A Dashcam User

1. Installation is straightforward, but fiddly

The camera we have on test is a Vicovation Marcus 5 (£249.99). It’s a dual camera setup, so there are two cables you need to think about hiding away: one which goes from the cigarette lighter power adaptor to the main, forward-facing camera, and a second which goes from the main camera to the rear-facing camera. The cable for the front camera is easy enough to sort; in our Octavia long-term test car, I ran the cable under the sun visor, door seal and floor mat.

The rear one is more fiddly, simply due to the distance it has to go - particularly in our rather long Skoda estate. The manual suggests pulling up bits of trim to fit the cable under roof lining. However, since I didn’t fancy pulling apart a car that’s not mine, I settled for slipping it under the door seals, with it popping back out over the tops of the B and C pillars.

This then left a big bundle of excess cable in the boot I didn’t know what to do with, which got in the way of the luggage cover. Oh, and when a customs official was rummaging around in there on Darren’s European road trip, they managed to pull the cable out entirely. Not ideal.

2. Remembering to mount the camera takes discipline

One of the big issues of operating a dashcam is a simple one: remembering to mount the damn thing. If I’m leaving the car parked anywhere for any length of time, I don’t want to have the camera proudly on display, lest some miscreant comes along and smashes a window to grab it. It’s possible to take the camera out of the mounting, but leaving that suckered to the screen is still a bit of an advert for thieves.

With that in mind, the camera often lives hidden in the glovebox or in the house, and it’s very easy to forget to mount it on shorter trips across town, and even when remembering, it’s tempting to be lazy and leave it off. You really have to force yourself into a routine; after all, surveys often find that the majority of accidents happen very close to home.

3. You spot more than you might think on the roads

While the main idea behind these things is to record accidents, there are plenty of other things you’ll spot on the road that you might want share with others. It’s surprising how much you do see and simply forget about, but as it’s all recorded, you can go back and view/screenshot to your heart’s content. Someone behaving like a tool behind the wheel perhaps, or maybe just a cool car you’d like a snap of for Twitter/Instagram or similar when there’s no passenger around to take it.

For instance, after having the camera fitted to our previous Octavia hatch test car for only a couple of days, I spotted a smashed up, gold-wrapped Maserati Granturismo on the back of a recovery vehicle. Only I forgot to take the file off the flash memory before it disappeared, which is why I’ve used the more humble spot of this Focus ST to illustrate my point instead. Why did it disappear? That leads me on to point four…

4. You don't need to empty the card

As you’re supposed to leave a dashcam going constantly, the micro SD card on board will get filled up very quickly. On our Vico-Marcus, a 32GB card is good for anything from 250 minutes of recording if it’s set to 1296p at 60 frames per second, up to 765 minutes if you’re on 720p at 30fps. Once the card’s full, the camera continues to record and overwrite old files. If there’s something you want to save, it’s just a case of hitting the ‘Emergency Record’ button to protect the file from being overwritten.

5. If you record an accident, police can seize the footage

This will vary from country to country, but in the UK at least, if your dashcam records an accident in which someone is injured, either the footage or the whole camera could be seized as evidence under Section 19 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act. It’s also worth bearing in mind, then, that if you were driving like a bit of an idiot (not something we condone!) and have an at-fault crash, the local plod could theoretically take your own footage and use it to convict you.

6. Until you have an accident, it might feel a bit useless

If you buy on one of these, you’re probably not going to feel like you’ve had your money’s worth until there’s an accident and you can use the footage to either swing the insurance claim in your favour, or prove foul play. Until then, it’ll probably just feel like a bit of an expensive burden.

However, it really is a good idea to have something like this as a ‘just in case’ measure. In 2014 UK insurer Aviva reported that there had been a 22 per cent rise in ‘cash for crash’ claims, many of which involve cutting in front of an innocent driver and braking, causing an accident. Then there are those that won’t admit fault in an accident, and - depending on which country you live in - you have police corruption to think about. And who knows, it you’re really lucky, you might spot a meteor falling from the sky…