The price of dashboard cameras has dropped to the point of an impulse purchase, but they still haven’t become common in the United States among motorists, those in law enforcement aside. They hold promise as a way of improving the allocation of fault in collisions, and especially in curbing varieties of insurance fraud such as the “swoop-and-squat,” but Popular Mechanics surely hasn’t thought matters through when it asserts, “In the real world, it means you win and the other guy loses in a dispute.” At least if the other guy was in the wrong and the camera was pointed in the right direction…
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The NTSB has been seeking the installation of these cameras in the cockpits of airplanes and the control cabins of trains for a long time, but the unions know that they could have an adverse effect on their members, and they have opposed them strenuously.
I would be really easy an inexpensive to install them on new cars, but I think that a lot of people would freak out about it.
I’ve seen car cameras with two fish-eye lenses, one pointing forward, the other backward, that have almost 360 ° coverage. Of course, this means that activity within the passenger compartment is also captured and subject to discovery…
I use the Daily Roads Voyager on my Droid phone. I love the app. It proved I got rear-ended and pushed into the car in front of me last year in Albuquerque.
I do plan on buying a dedicated dash cam, though. Taking phone calls when that thing is running can be problematical. đŸ™‚
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dailyroads.v