It's not the data rate. It's the constant amount of data changing the state of the memory that physically wears out the memory. I found this out when I researched why SSDs don't last forever. The life is determined by TBW ( total bytes written ), not how long it is running. (
Is it Time to Stop Worrying about Flash Wear Out? )
It's absolutely about the data rate, since total amount written is simply the data rate over time- and time is what we're discussing for longevity of the recording device.
The math for this has been posted numerous times already.
1 full write cycle requires 128GB of data to be written on a 128GB key.
The car only writes 5.4GB per hour when "awake" so let's say your car is awake 10 hours every day (which probably is about right for work days for most people, and probably a high estimate on weekends, but let's pretend that's EVERY day).
That means you're going to take 2.37 days to use ONE write cycle.
Even cheap/crap flash memory is rated for at least 1000 cycles (many are rated 3-5k cycles, the very highest end ~10k)
1000 cycles at 2.37 days per cycle is 2370 days.
Or 6.5 years.
With the crappiest type of flash key you can get.
Make that a crap 256GB key and you're talking 13 years to hit the minimum write spec.
In contrast some 4k dashcams are writing data from ONE camera at 2-3 times the rate Tesla is writing it from THREE cameras... so for folks running multiple 4k dashcams they will burn through those write cycles many times faster- and thus it's far more worth worrying about "endurance" cards for that application.
This one, not so much.