Does a dashcam record when the car is switched off?
Not as it comes out of the box. Switch the vehicle off and the camera loses power with it, so there is nothing recording while you are parked. Most people find this out the day after something happened.
The fix is a hardwire kit. It connects the camera to the vehicle’s fuse box rather than the cigarette lighter, so the camera keeps a permanent supply and can tell when the ignition goes off. At that point it switches itself into parking mode and carries on watching.
From there it works on events. A bump in a parking lot, movement in your yard — the camera wakes, records, and saves that clip as a protected file so the loop does not write over it later.
The trade-off is the battery. A camera sitting ready to wake is always drawing a little, and every time it wakes it draws more. Park in a busy spot and people and passing traffic keep setting it off, so a vehicle standing for a long period somewhere busy takes far more out of the battery than the same vehicle in a quiet driveway.
That is what the settings are for. A voltage cut-off stops the camera before the battery drops too low to start the vehicle, and a timer limits how long parking mode runs at all. Both should be set for where the vehicle actually parks rather than left on the factory default.
Not every camera supports this, and not every hardwire kit is the same. It is worth asking before you buy, rather than after.
What is parking mode?
Parking mode is what the camera does once the engine is off. Instead of recording continuously, it watches and only records when something happens. There are three common ways it does this, and the difference matters.
Impact detection. A sensor in the camera picks up a knock or a bump and starts recording. Good for someone reversing into you or opening a door into your vehicle. It does nothing if a person walks around the car without touching it.
Motion detection. The camera watches the frame and records when something moves in it. Catches the person who circles the car before trying a door. It also fills up on passing traffic and shadows if the car is parked on a busy street.
Time-lapse. The camera records continuously at a very low frame rate — a second or two per frame — so a whole day compresses into a short clip. You lose detail, but nothing is missed, and you can see what happened even where nothing triggered a sensor.
Better cameras let you combine them: time-lapse running in the background, with a full-quality clip saved whenever there is an impact.
Ask what happens just before the impact. On some cameras recording starts the moment they are triggered, so you get the bang and nothing leading up to it. On better ones the camera is always holding the last few seconds in memory, so the saved clip starts before the event. That is usually where the number plate is.
How do I keep my dashcam on when the car is off?
Two ways.
A hardwire kit. Three wires into the fuse box: one to a fuse that is always live, one to a fuse that only has power with the ignition, and an earth. The camera then knows the difference between driving and parked, and switches modes by itself. It also tidies the installation — no cable hanging from the mirror down to the lighter socket.
A dedicated battery pack. A separate battery that charges while you drive and runs the camera while parked. More expensive, and it takes up space, but it never touches the car’s starting battery. The usual choice where someone parks for days at a time, or would rather nothing was wired into the car’s electrics at all.
Will a dashcam drain my car battery?
It draws power, so it can — which is why a proper hardwire kit has a voltage regulator.
The kit watches the car’s battery and cuts power to the camera once the voltage drops to a point you set. Set it at 12.2 volts and the moment the battery falls below that, the camera shuts down and stops drawing anything, leaving you enough to start the vehicle.
Where you set that line is a trade-off. Lower gives you more hours of recording and less margin. Higher is the opposite. An older battery reaches the cut-off sooner, so the same setting buys fewer hours than it did when the battery was new.
If the vehicle stands for days at a time, the answer is a separate battery pack rather than a lower cut-off.
How long does parking mode actually last?
This is the part that catches people out, and it is worth understanding before you need it.
Hardwire kits have a timer as well as a voltage cut-off. You set how long the camera should stay in parking mode after the ignition goes off — six hours, say. When those six hours are up the camera powers down completely. Not standby. Off.
Which means an event at hour seven is not recorded. The car was watched all afternoon and then stopped being watched, and there is no clip, because there was no camera running.
So the timer wants to be set for how the vehicle is actually used. A car parked at the office all day needs a different setting from one standing in a driveway over a weekend. Longer settings draw more from the battery, which is where the voltage cut-off becomes the safety net — and why the two settings should be chosen together rather than one at a time.
This is worth setting up with your installer rather than leaving on whatever the factory default was.
One camera, two, or three?
1 Channel — front only. Covers what you drive into and what drives into you. The cheapest option and the one most people start with.
2 Channel — front and back. Adds the camera that matters most in practice, because being hit from behind is the most common claim and the one where the other party is most likely to dispute it.
3 Channel — front, inside and back. The third camera faces inward. Standard for e-hailing, for any vehicle an employee drives, and for anyone carrying passengers who may later describe events differently.
A second or third camera means more cable to route and a longer fitment, which is worth knowing before you choose. Prices are here.
What memory card does a dashcam need, and how long does footage last?
A dashcam records in a loop. When the card is full it writes over the oldest footage, and keeps doing that indefinitely. Anything flagged as an event — an impact, or a clip you lock manually — moves to a protected folder that the loop does not overwrite, until that folder itself fills up.
How far back you can go depends on card size, resolution and how many cameras are running. A single front camera on a large card might hold several days. Three cameras at high resolution might hold under a day. Either way: if something happens, take the card out or save the clip that same day. Footage people needed has been lost simply by carrying on driving for a week.
Use a high-endurance card. Ordinary cards are built for photographs, not for being written to continuously for years, and they fail — usually silently, so the first you know of it is the day you go looking for a clip that was never recorded. Format the card every few months and replace it when the camera starts complaining.
Supercapacitor or battery — does it matter in South Africa?
Yes, more here than in most places.
Cameras are built with one of two internal power sources, used to shut the file down cleanly when power is cut. A small lithium battery is cheaper. A supercapacitor handles heat far better.
A car parked in the sun through a Gauteng summer gets hot enough to swell and ruin a small lithium cell, and a swollen cell is both a dead camera and a thing you do not want on your windscreen. If the car lives outdoors, a supercapacitor model is worth the difference.
Where should a dashcam be mounted?
Behind the rear-view mirror, high on the windscreen, slightly to the passenger side. High enough to sit inside the area the wipers clear, out of the driver’s line of sight, and close enough to the mirror that the cables can be tucked into the headlining and down the A-pillar instead of hanging across the dash.
The rear camera goes high on the rear windscreen, clear of the demister lines where it can be, and clear of any dark tint, which costs you detail at night.