Front and rear dash cam — is the rear camera the part you actually end up using? Dash Cams

The install is where the money goes. Running the rear cable along the headliner, down the pillar and through the tailgate boot is fiddly on a hatchback because the rubber conduit between body and tailgate is tight and the cable has to survive thousands of open-close cycles. Pay a shop or budget an afternoon and a trim tool set. Cables that are pinched in the conduit fail in about a year and it always looks like a camera fault.

Rear is the camera I have used in anger and the front is the one I have never needed. Two things decide whether it is worth having: the sensor, because most bundled rear cameras are a step or two below the front unit, and the placement. On a hatch the heated element lines will sit across the image if you mount it flat against the glass, so mount it between the lines or slightly below them and check the footage at night before you commit to the adhesive.

What you actually need for your scenario is not resolution, it is the G-sensor log and the speed data. In both of my rear-end claims the useful part was the file showing my vehicle stationary with the impact timestamp, which any two-channel camera records. Plate readability at night is a bonus and is genuinely hard to get from a rear camera through tinted glass.

Card choice matters more than people expect on two-channel setups because you are writing two streams continuously. Buy a high-endurance card rated for continuous surveillance recording, size it for at least a couple of hours of loop at your chosen bitrate, and reformat it in the camera every month or two. Consumer cards die quietly and the camera often will not tell you.

Terse: yes, the rear one earns its place if you get hit from behind, which you have twice. Spend the money on the install quality rather than on the headline resolution.

Mild pushback on the standard advice: consider an interior-facing camera instead of a rear-facing one if you never carry passengers and your incidents are all impacts rather than disputes about the other driver. In my case the rear camera through a rain-covered rear screen was close to useless nine months of the year, and I would have been better served by a single high-quality front unit and a better card.