This guide helps you understand the need for a dashcam and how to get one that best fits your requirements. You can install it yourself with our guide or use a third-party installer. What about Tesla鈥檚 Dashcam Feature? Front Camera Installation New! Rear Camera Installation New! 2. Accident Recording - If you鈥檙e a good driver and get into an accident, it鈥檚 more likely the other party caused it. Having a video record of the event can help confirm what happened. 3. Parking lot bumps - Another driver bumps or scratches your car while you are away, and fails to leave a note. Having a video may show the event, the perpetrator and their license plate. 4. Third-party events - crashes or problems you鈥檙e not involved in, but would love to have recorded. This might be red-light runners or accidents between other cars in front or behind you. 5. Video log of a trip - Record your travels to show your family, friends or put on YouTube.
There are dozens of dashcams available today, but we鈥檝e narrowed the list to a few popular dashcams that are good fits for the Tesla. There are a lot of budget dashcams. We don鈥檛 recommend them, as they usually suffer from poor build quality and low visual quality. Each dashcam has several additional features, some unique to a specific brand. You鈥檙e unlikely to need or want to use those features in a Tesla, and we didn鈥檛 include them here. All three dashcams can be removed from the attached mount, have loop recording modes, have parking modes that only records when the image changes and shock detection to prevent overwrite of that video segment. They all do a good job at recording video in harsh conditions such as direct sun and nighttime. Note that there are gray market sellers, where BlackVue will not honor the warranty. Buy only from BlackVue or authorized resellers. USA resellers include The Dash Cam Store and HDVD and BlackVue sells direct on Amazon. Vantrue R2 - Dashcam has 1296p 30fps recording (2304x1296P), 170 degrees wide angle, f2.0 lens and a large 2.7鈥?LCD screen.
Suction mount allows easy attachment/removal. 125 without GPS and without SD card. Optional GPS mount available. BlackVue dashcams have been very popular with Tesla owners in the past and I own an older model and the newest 900S. On the 650S the low-resolution rear camera is a disappointment and the newer 750S or 900S is preferred. The 900S moves to 4K recording, which we consider well worth it. It offers a full 1080p rear camera and all the key features. The F800 improves the low-light recording. Thinkware has three very similar products, the F770, the newer F800, and the F800 Pro. The F800 has better low-light recording. The F800 non-pro and pro have really minor differences that may not matter to most Tesla owners. This is the bargain of the bunch while offering different features and higher video quality. In side-by-side tests, many places license plates are readable where in 1080p the plates are not readable.
The UI is lackluster, but at least it has one - others require the use of an app to change settings. I also own this unit. For the price, it is a good value, but the quirks diminish the shine and could be too annoying for some users. Here鈥檚 two samples comparing a 1080p frame with a 1440p frame. These were taken in the same location at the same time in my Tesla. The dashcams were about 5 inches apart. Next, we look at the car on the far right at full resolution. Both are the same portion of the image, only cropped at 344脳343 pixels. No image manipulation was done. The portion from 1080p on the left makes it very hard to even tell what brand of car it is and it appears to be a black car. With the portion from the 1440p image on the right, you get enough detail to clearly make out the license plate, that the car is a grey Toyota Camry. If you know license plates, you can also tell it is a California plate. The 1080p image came from a BlackVue DR500GW-HD, while the Viofo A119 was used for the 1440p image.