I would absolutely recommend getting a dashcam which is independent of the Tesla dashcam because of some of the following reasons:
1. A dashcam should be recording all the time.
- The Tesla dashcam saves the information ONLY when you press the horn or click the Sentry button, so you might forget doing so.
- It would be great if the Tesla dashcam automatically save recording in case you hit something or press hard on the brake pedal.
2. The quality of the Tesla recording is not enough to capture license plate number compared with a High resolution dascam.
3. Don't expect getting a constant recording simultaneously of all the 4 cameras at the same time.
When comparing my dashcam recording and Tesla recording, it seems that the Tesla dashcam,
because there are now 4 cameras, shows only small amounts of separate recordings
with maybe an interval of one second, so it can be difficult to really understand what really occurred.
For example I was reviewing a recording of a car entering into a freeway from a side roadway.
I was on the right-most lane, and this car went very close to my rear bumper from right to left.
Then this car went to the left-most left lane and ran away very fast.
I didn’t get hit, but this was a little bit scary situation.
I can try to post the video, or extract some pics, but I can tell you that the Tesla dashcam recording saved only
some short snapshots. So if I had been hit by this car, the impact time might have not been saved.
Making difficult to show who would have been at fault.
By opposition, my dashcam provides two separates front and rear continuous recordings of one minute
and each recording overlap the previous and the following one, so you cannot miss any information.
4. A dashcam can records speed, gives acceleration-deceleration information, and voice recording, which can be useful to review.
5. Tesla now provides remote access of the 4 cameras when parked, this is a great feature except that my phone App cannot be connected?
My dashcam can be connected to the cloud using a WiFi hotspot, and this was working flawlessly compared to my Tesla phone App,
6. Keeping running Sentry for a long time can drain your propulsion battery.
A dashcam by opposition could use a small separate battery when the car is sleeping.
7. Very often I prefer not to have Sentry running at night, because Sentry flashing cannot be suppressed and you cannot adjust sensitivity.
With my dashcam, I can adjust the sensitivity of event detection, and select or suppress some areas when there is for example a florescent light nearby.
8. Very often, I cannot retrieve a Tesla recording of an event that I was expecting to have saved? I noticed similar comments on other TMC threads.
