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Aftermarket Dashcam
- Thread starter chumanji9
- Start date
EVRider-FL
Active Member
talkingevs
GO AVS! 2022 CHAMPS!
Why would you use aftermarket? The included Tesla one is great and all around your car
CarlThompson
Member
The included Tesla one is great for something you get essentially for free but has major drawbacks compared to aftermarket. It's low resolution, uses a ton of power and has no sound. With a higher resolution aftermarket you're much more likely to be able to read other cars' license plates and you can leave it on all the time without worrying about it draining your miles.
talkingevs
GO AVS! 2022 CHAMPS!
Yea but its still using the battery to power it unless you use a battery-operated one.... ours doesn't take that many miles off our car when using it
CarlThompson
Member
True, but an aftermarket uses far, FAR less power compared to sentry mode. Around 5W vs. around 250W.
If you mean while you're actually driving the car then you're right. But I was thinking about when the car is parked and not being driven which is how a car spends the vast majority of its time. I've always thought it would be nice to always have sentry mode on even when in my own driveway but I don't because it drains around 25 miles per day. An aftermarket dashcam would only drain at most maybe 1 mile.
Well, until Tesla puts a timestamp, GPS locale, and speed info overlaid on the video, it's still beta.
I have a dual cam Vava dashcam I moved from my old car. Cost $80 at Amazon. Works, and is cheap. When I saw threads on dash cams, BlackVue is by far the most popular.
I have a dual cam Vava dashcam I moved from my old car. Cost $80 at Amazon. Works, and is cheap. When I saw threads on dash cams, BlackVue is by far the most popular.
android04
Active Member
I have a BlackVue DR750S-2CH dual camera setup on my Model 3 that I installed in early 2018, before Tesla added the software TeslaCam and Sentry Mode. My setup is nice and I decided to leave the BlackVue cams in my car. I figured it was nicer to have 2 sets of recordings front and back for redundancy, and the front camera has a wider field of view and captures the front of the Model 3 (the front cam that Tesla uses has a narrower field of view and doesn't capture the front of the car). I hooked up my BlackVue cams to power behind the map lights and they record 24/7, and have all these years. The only reason I use TeslaCam is that it records nice views of the side of my car, and the rear view is a little better from right above the license plate than the BlackVue's view at the rear window. Tesla's built-in viewer for the recordings is easier to use than the BlackVue app on my phone as well (not to mention the ability now to remote view the cameras). But like mentioned above, the BlackVue cameras use a lot less energy than Tesla's cameras because they are dedicated recording equipment meant for low power usage. Tesla's implementation is software and requires that all the car's computers be powered up.
The perfect system for me would have Tesla using the wide FOV camera in the front instead of the medium one, and would have a separate low-power module to record from them.
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
Yep, biggest problem with the factory dashcam. Makes sentry useless for those of us that park for long periods of time.
The reason I asked about the aftermarket dashcam is that TeslaCam only records your last drive or if you honk, or hit the button or it detect something happen to you. For example, my wife told me she run over something few days ago and it hit the bottom of the car. When i looked the teslacam footage, nothing was recorded. I guess whatever she ran over didn't trigger it. That is why I thought having something with continuous recording would be better.
RayK
Active Member
I have a ROAV C1 dashcam in my car. Transferred it from my previous car into the Tesla very soon after getting it. Had it for almost 4 1/2 years. It's powered by one of the USB ports in the console, with the cable running inside the gap of the glovebox door and up the passenger side A pillar. There is also a battery inside which can power the camera after the loss of external power. I generally remove it from the adhesive mount when the car is parked at home, mostly because I don't want to unnecessarily expose the camera to extreme heat (reports of the battery expanding).
It's a basic unit; single camera, 2.4" screen, no GPS, 1080P resolution, 30fps, has built-in WiFi (which I don't use), microSD slot supporting up to 128GB I believe, records audio (can be muted by a simple push). Got a good deal on it off of Amazon at the time; there's probably better units for the price now. All I can say is that is has worked great for me over the years. I posted a sample clip a couple of years ago which can be found here:
teslamotorsclub.com
This is the webpage for the dashcam:
goroav.com
It's a basic unit; single camera, 2.4" screen, no GPS, 1080P resolution, 30fps, has built-in WiFi (which I don't use), microSD slot supporting up to 128GB I believe, records audio (can be muted by a simple push). Got a good deal on it off of Amazon at the time; there's probably better units for the price now. All I can say is that is has worked great for me over the years. I posted a sample clip a couple of years ago which can be found here:
How pixalated is your dash cam footage?
Had an incident today that was recorded with my dash cam while driving, but even with the car dead stopped in front of me in daylight on a sunny day, the shot isn’t clear enough to see the license plate clearly. Is this the case with everyone’s dash cam, or could it possibly be the USB drive...
teslamotorsclub.com
This is the webpage for the dashcam:
Roav DashCam C1
Capture Every Detail Advanced Sony Exmor CMOS sensor enables recording of 30fps. Wide Dynamic Range auto-adjusts for light conditions to deliver perfectly exposed Full HD 1080p footage. Easy Video Access Built-in WiFi lets you wirelessly manage your recordings. No cables, laptops, or...
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
There is a 1 hour loop recording, and the honk transfers that to a different folder to save it. If you use a file recovery program like Recuva, it can pretty much recover everything in your drive (presuming you have a sufficiently large drive), though you have to sift through a lot of videos to find your exact one.
RayK
Active Member
Only the last hour is stored in the RecentClips folder. Doesn't matter how big your storage medium is; the older recordings are overwritten.
RayK
Active Member
So here's a comparison between the Tesla's dashcam and my ROAV C1 mounted just to the left of the windshield camera. I posted the first image below in the thread here about not being able to voice dial 911. The comparison is both for image quality and the length of time you can go back:
Tesla (screengrab of original 1280 x 960 video clip):
ROAV C1 (screengrab of original 1920 x 1080 video clip):
The timestamp on the ROAV image is a bit over an hour fast but it shows that my 64GB microSD card in the ROAV dashcam went back at least 5 days. In fact, the earliest recordings are from the afternoon of the 12th. There's 4 hours stored, in 10 minute clips. Then my whole 8 hour drive from Oregon on the 13th, in addition to some recordings since then here around town.
There's currently about 13GB of saved recordings (will not be overwritten) on the microSD card, leaving about 46GB for day-to-day operations. Every now and then I go through the saved recordings, copy the interesting/important ones to my computer and delete them off the card. As there are files from 2019, I guess it's time for a clean-up.
Tesla (screengrab of original 1280 x 960 video clip):
ROAV C1 (screengrab of original 1920 x 1080 video clip):
The timestamp on the ROAV image is a bit over an hour fast but it shows that my 64GB microSD card in the ROAV dashcam went back at least 5 days. In fact, the earliest recordings are from the afternoon of the 12th. There's 4 hours stored, in 10 minute clips. Then my whole 8 hour drive from Oregon on the 13th, in addition to some recordings since then here around town.
There's currently about 13GB of saved recordings (will not be overwritten) on the microSD card, leaving about 46GB for day-to-day operations. Every now and then I go through the saved recordings, copy the interesting/important ones to my computer and delete them off the card. As there are files from 2019, I guess it's time for a clean-up.
stopcrazypp
Well-Known Member
The old videos are "erased"/deleted, but a file recovery program like Recuva can recover the erased files, given they are just standard mp4 files which have a file signature that makes it easy to recover. Note the file names will be gone, so you will need a tool like MediaInfo to look at the metadata of the file to determine what time was from.
The files will still be found relatively in order (just with a loop at some point) so you can use this to your advantage in choosing which files to recover (instead of recovering all of them, which takes up a lot of space, presuming you are recovering to a different drive, which is what you should be doing to avoid overwriting what you might be looking for). Basically what I did was recover every couple hundred files, use MediaInfo to see what date/time that file was recorded on, then narrow things down. Every file is only 59 seconds and there are 4 cameras, so there are lots of files.
I have used this process on my own 128GB microSD card and it works perfect. All the footage equal to the full size of the card was able to be found in a search (there were over 3000 deleted mp4s that were recoverable), although I didn't recover all of it, only used the search method above to recover the specific time period I was looking for.
I really hate seeing responses like "no, don't waste your money" and "why would you bother when you have Sentry Mode", so I'll add a bulleted list as to why Sentry mode is awful. I've owned a Model Y for a little under a month now and I'm looking for a third party solution something fierce.
- First and foremost, the power consumption. It's 250w. If you live in California, like over 40% of new Tesla owners, running Sentry mode 24/7 over the course of a year will consume 2,190 kilowatt hours. Putting aside the price of that much energy... emissions-wise, in the state of California, pulling that from the grid adds the equivalent CO2 of burning about 100 gallons of gasoline, or what a Prius will consume over the course of six months. That's with the car in your parking lot.
- Second, of course, is the power consumption. 1 mile an hour doesn't sound like a lot until you realize it's 168 miles a week. For people who have any desire to leave the state, this means that your security system will either kill your battery in a little over a week and a half, or it will not be on. Any security system that cannot run for a couple weeks while your car is unattended might as well not exist as a security system.
- Third, of course, is the power consumption. An aftermarket camera will consume some 5-10w for a 2-4 channel system. That means that, in a world where your Tesla could go into a "dashcam mode", only keep the 12v fed, and turn off all other systems, you'd consume, over the course of three weeks, what Sentry Mode would consume in a day. (21 days x 10w x 24 hours) < (250w x 24 hours).
- Last, and most assuredly not least, is control. Sentry mode will save events, an about an hour buffer of video, and there are no settings to cord any more than that. A dash cam will record whatever will fit onto its memory card, and a good one will back up any motion events. Look up articles and forum threads about lost Sentry Mode events, they're not small in number.
SomeJoe7777
Marginally-Known Member
Just like many other items in the Tesla, the dashcam is a weak attempt at something that other companies have perfected for many years and execute way better.
I've had BlackVue aftermarket dashcams in every Tesla I've owned. They exceed what Tesla's dashcam software and Sentry mode can do in every possible way.
Dashcam/Sentry in the Tesla is on the same list with the Auto Wipers, the Auto Climate Control, Voice Commands, and the Auto High Beams. Weak, pathetic attempts at functionality that other manufacturers have had for years and execute way better.
- Much less power consumption -- can record for days while parked as opposed to Sentry mode which will drain your battery quickly.
- Wider field of view
- Way better picture quality, resolution, and frame rate.
- Way longer history of recorded videos (over a day even at highest resolution)
- View and save videos with the included apps, some dashcams also allow saving to the cloud with an LTE SIM card.
- On-screen speed and GPS location.
- Options for interior camera recordings (great for parked cars that might get broken into, or Uber/Lyft drivers that need to keep an eye on passengers)
I've had BlackVue aftermarket dashcams in every Tesla I've owned. They exceed what Tesla's dashcam software and Sentry mode can do in every possible way.
Dashcam/Sentry in the Tesla is on the same list with the Auto Wipers, the Auto Climate Control, Voice Commands, and the Auto High Beams. Weak, pathetic attempts at functionality that other manufacturers have had for years and execute way better.
