Feb. 27, 2018—Dashboard cameras, known for dramatic police videos and shots of meteors streaking across the sky, have gone mainstream as more people document their experiences on the road, reported USA Today.
Now there are three times as many online searches for terms like dash cam as there are for autonomous driving, according to new data from Google.
It’s “a huge consumer-led trend,” Google’s 2018 Automotive Trends Report noted.
A dash cam is a small video camera mounted on a car’s dashboard or windshield to record what’s happened in front of the vehicle, and sometimes, what’s also happened behind it.
More people are using dash cams to show who was at fault in a traffic crash, and for time-lapse videos of storms and road trips.
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth 10 thousand,” said Steve Koenig, senior director of research for the Consumer Technology Association.
Dash cams record in a continuous loop, meaning that after a while, they’re going to record over the previous documented scenes unless they're saved by the user. The larger the storage capacity, the more hours can be preserved.
Some dash cams have a collision-avoidance sensor that trips an audible alarm if you’re too close to the vehicle ahead of you in traffic. And some have a sensor that trips an alarm if you drift outside of your lane.
