Is parking mode worth the wiring, or is it just a slow way to kill your battery?

Question

Car lives on the street overnight and got scraped twice last year, both times with nobody leaving a note, which is the entire reason I am here. I have a cheap…

seasonalpalette · Accepted Answer

Parking mode is worth it and the battery fear is solvable. A proper hardwire kit has a low voltage cutoff you set yourself — when the car's battery drops to your chosen threshold, the kit cuts power to the camera rather than to your starter motor. Set it conservatively, especially on a car that only does short trips,…

boom_pole_bex · Answer

Impact triggered rather than motion triggered is the setting that made mine usable. Motion mode filled a card overnight with people walking past and then overwrote the one event I cared about. Impact mode sits idle until the G sensor fires, uses far less power, and catches exactly the scrape scenario you described.

switchback_sid · Answer

Set expectations on what parking footage actually gets you. Buffered motion detection on a street parked car gives you a lot of clips of pedestrians and a low resolution plate at night if you are lucky. It absolutely helped me once and gave me nothing useful the other three times. Worth doing, not a guarantee.

layover_lucy · Answer

Heat and cold are the reason to care about what is inside the camera. Units with a supercapacitor instead of a lithium cell handle temperature extremes much better, which matters a lot when the thing lives on a windscreen through a summer and a winter. Almost every camera marketed for parking mode uses a…

deadline_dee · Answer

Terse: hardwire with a voltage cutoff, impact triggered parking mode, high endurance card, and check the card monthly. The last one is what everybody skips and it is why so many people have a camera that recorded nothing.

Is parking mode worth the wiring, or is it just a slow way to kill your battery? Dash Cams

9 answers