Have two here that someone else bought for me that don’t have the resolution to read a license plate at anything further than their bumper already smashed into yours. Not many do and even fewer at night.
Neither has rear camera support which is the money shot anyway. You hit someone else’s car the front MIGHT save your butt if they merged into you, but otherwise you’d better have a practiced procedure for yanking the thing down, hitting the erase function, and throwing it in the center console or glovebox. Hahahaha. All while just being smashed with an airbag doing 100 MPH into your face and in my case, breaking my nose with my glasses. Gonna be a blood trail to the glove box most likely. LOL.
Anyway... they both have plenty long and strong and small power cabling to snake it down crevasses or properly inside the upholstery... most panels are blowout airbag panels these days and shoving wires in the cracks is stupid beyond belief. Find a proper installer shop if there’s no seeming way from the power to the camera. Seriously. Messing up your air bags for video is a really dumb way to earn a Darwin Award. LOL.
Batteries as someone mentioned also work but who the hell has time to charge yet another device? Or wants a lithium battery baking in the sun near the rear view? Only large capacitors there for me, thanks. SuoerCap or nothing. No batteries in black cases in sunlight.
And of course for me it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. The entire top of the windshield and all the way down ON to the dash may NOT have reflective or opaque items there in an Eyesight equipped Subaru. Their cameras get priority over mine now. Ha.
Too bad they don’t just give me a way to dump their camera and sensor data to myself. Probably have some real with the devil to provide it along with engine and other data to law enforcement and insurance in a fatality, but I can’t get it on the SD card and copy it to the home computer yet. Ha.
You’re really looking at multiple hundreds of dollars for any camera that’s above a novelty level for this. Nice ones also have motion sensors for crash detection (if the passenger airbag didn’t throw them into your face) and even someone wiggling the car trying to steal stuff when it’s unattended.
But they still have dumb limitations that built in ones wouldn’t have because the design wouldn’t be so compromised. Built in ones could do like home ones and upload video to the “cloud” or better, use a protocol that allows you to upload straight to your own server over an always on cellular connection. And would also know that an always on cell connection. Isn’t always on.
Yes. Someone buying me a couple of Chinese cheapies got me to overthinking this and watching at least 30 reviews of “highly rated” ones. LOL.
