Life with a dashcam: Sadly, we saw no meteorites

Playing chase car to a McLaren 650S was the most exciting thing captured by the Vantrue Dashcam R1 Pro in our time with it. Edited by Jennifer Hahn.

Widespread in Russia, dashcams are also starting to proliferate on US streets. Frequently you’ll read about them on Ars in the context of police brutality at traffic stops, and who could forget the footage from Chelyabinsk of a meteorite impact in 2013 that taught us our estimates of asteroid damage were inadequate? So after Vantrue was kind enough to offer one of its R1 Pro dashcams for an extended trial, we jumped at the chance to see what life with a dashcam was really like.

It’s quite boring, as it turns out. We installed the camera into a Saab 9-2X that spends much of its time on the roads in Washington DC, including a 20-mile commute three times a week. We figured this gave us pretty good odds of at least recording something interesting over the course of about two months. It’s well known throughout the region that you need to watch out for Maryland drivers, and traffic in the DC metro area, and particularly the Beltway (I-495, a freeway that circles the city), is among the worst in the nation.

The R1 Pro itself is intuitive to set up and use and relatively inexpensive at $120. It records at 1080P, 30 fps in two aspect ratios: 21:9 and 16:9, saving everything to a microSD card. A G sensor in the camera automatically saves clips that include an impact event; in practice this meant quite a few short clips of the camera being attached to its mount, a couple of it falling off the mount, and then a few minutes of stop-start traffic. Other footage is wiped as the R1 Pro records on a loop.

After reviewing all this footage, the most exciting thing on the memory card came from the day we used the 9-2X as a chase car for our McLaren 650S review. There was not a single police stop, no asteroids threatening to end civilization, nor anything involving almost-certainly drunk Russian drivers. (This is probably a good problem to have considering the alternatives.)

Our video cache ultimately makes it hard to draw many conclusions about the personal utility of such devices. We could see potential for those of you who spend your days driving for work, though. Of course, dashcam apps for smartphones are also available, but not everyone wants to fill their phone with footage of traffic, nor dedicate it to the role of panopticon when in the car. So to answer the question of whether we’d recommend one, it’s hard to find a reason to do so unless you need dashcam footage. Thankfully our experience of the US has largely been less lawless than Russia, but we are aware it’s a big country. We’d love to hear your experiences of using dashcams in the comments, and if you’ve got any footage you want to share, the more the merrier.