Every New Car Needs A Dashcam As Standard


What the hell is the auto industry playing at?! It’s time for a change. Don’t make it an option. Don’t make it a feature. Make it mandatory: let’s put factory-fitted dashcams inside every new car on the road.

All week, we’ve been watching dashcam compilation videos from our friends over at Dashcam Owners Australia, and that got us thinking: what if all cars had dashcams?

Late model cars from the likes of Ford, Volvo and others have LIDAR technology to prevent crashes, but no matter how much safety tech is on a car, accidents still happen.

People fall asleep at the wheel. Others get t-boned at intersections. There may not be another car involved at all: you might even just fall into a ditch at speed.

Either way, there’s no reason that every single car rolling off the production line shouldn’t have a dashcam installed.

They could be closed, black boxes that users wouldn’t even need to fiddle with. Mount it inside the same place that the LIDAR equipment goes (recessed in the mount for the rear-view mirror, for those who haven’t seen it), and have it record in the same way a next-generation gaming console does. The fixed dashcam would record the last few minutes of driving footage, and use crash sensor activation as a cue to store the footage as a separate file rather than record hours of boring driving data.

When it comes time for the insurance folks to figure out what went wrong, assessors can be sent the file wirelessly or via a removable microSD card accessible by the service centre or smash repairer to see who was at fault.

And while we’re on the topic of insurance, those with dashcams in their cars ought to get cheaper premiums for making it easier to figure out who was at fault in an accident.

There you go, auto industry: you can have that one for free.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.