Tong Family

We just love the TeslaCam feature on our car. You plug in a high-reliability miniSD card into the USB hub and. you get continuous loop recording, you get recording on honk so this is just great. In fact, you should probably have a Dash Cam for all your cars, so the big question is what to get. Many of these things have lots of functions, but the critical one is recording the front view of your car and making sure that “bad” events get recorded. None of these have surround performance, but the front is really the most important.

So what to get? Well there are many review sites like PC Magazine and Tech Radar, but the consensus seems to be that you can pay $100-$400 for these and the bigger ones have a screen, they give you all kinds of things, I’m not sure you really need all this stuff for most of the uses:

1. Garmin Dash Cam 66W or 67W. This is $245 and has a big screen but the main feature is all kinds of driver assistance, but it doesn’t have great low-light images important for nighttime accidents. But if you want to “upgrade” your old car while taking photos it’s not a bad choice. It basically uses a USB cable and you plug it into your 12V, hopefully, there is an easy way to loop the wires on your car. It’s a tiny 1.6×2.2×1.4″ with a 2-inch display and captures 1440p at 30fps with a 180 fisheye view. But the big bonuses are forward collision, lane departure, and go when the light comes on. Personally ,I’m not sure it is worth $260 for these other features if the night time view isn’t great.
2. Nextbase 522GW. This is also $260 at Amazon and it has good low light performance which is key, what you are paying for is parking mode and Alexa mode, both things that our budget cars don’t really need.
3. Garmin Dash Cam Mini 2. This is a tiny little thing that costs $130 at Amazon with just one mission, record accidents. The nice thing here is that it is tiny and it doesn’t have a screen. It uses a smartphone application to set it up. And it has a G sensor for accidents and you can push a button to remember a crash. You just stick an SD card in it, I recommend a long-life 256GB one if you don’t ever want to think more about it that is Class 10. You want a big card so it doesn’t write over the data and wear the card out. The main drawback is no GPS, but this shouldn’t matter if you have your phone with you.