Looking for dashcam options specifically for parking surveillance

It's painful and agonizing to come out fresh in the morning to drive your car and see scratch(es).

BHPian staraphd recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

This thread is specifically for dashcam about Parking Mode or Parking Surveillance functionality

In my society, parking is on the ground floor. People/children/delivery personnel/domestic help/housekeeping etc. often walk through the space between two cars. Due to this, they make scratches on the car's sides, front or back. Mostly due to carelessness as it's not their car in question.

Examples include:

• While carrying something, not holding the object carefully, so it hits the car's body
• Carelessly moving hands while walking, causing their wearables like watches, bangles, and finger rings to hit or scratch the car body
• Children sometimes ride their bikes between the cars
• Children sometimes play in the parking area
• Pets, especially dogs scratch cars
• Car washers/garbage collectors carrying their buckets carelessly between the cars

It's painful and agonizing to come out fresh in the morning to drive your car and see scratch(es). This has happened a couple of times on my car including scratches made by a pet dog. In current times, no one accepts their fault without any evidence. If there is no evidence, then it never happened. For the dog scratches, I know fairly well whose dog was it as is the only pet dog I have observed playing regularly in that area. I confronted the owner, but he flatly refused any involvement just because there was no evidence. Society doesn't want to install CCTVs in the parking lots and has its reasons.

The only solution is installing a dashcam with Parking Mode or Parking Surveillance.

There are a couple of important points to keep in mind if the intention of Parking Mode or Parking Surveillance is to gather concrete evidence

• It should have a sensitive motion sensor to detect moving objects from a distance. Why from a distance we will come to that later
• It should not be on a continuous recording mode or time-lapse recording mode while parked. This will drain the battery as well as fill the memory card with redundant footage.
• It should support large capacity memory cards as a typical parking could last for more than 12 hours and with multiple people moving around, it will capture a large amount of footage and the critical footage that you may need as evidence might get overwritten.
• It should have good quality night vision recording as cars are mostly parked from evening to the next morning
• Good to have the feature of a notification system on your mobile device on any impact on the car
• Audio recording support during Parking Mode
• A most important requirement is the pre-event motion detection buffer recording support and that too with a decent time limit. This is where the motion detection from a distance mentioned in the first bullet point comes into the picture. What this means is the dashcam should start recording T-15 seconds before the event and continue to record for T+15 seconds, thus capturing the entire event. There is no point in capturing after the event. In this case, it's difficult to know if they were responsible for the event. Moreover, most of the time people would be facing the camera before the event and their back facing after the event. So pre-event buffer recording is important in this respect too.

Some of these required features are explained very nicely in this video

Dashcams sold here are all Chinese imports and do not have the pre-event motion detection buffer recording feature. The ones that are sold advertising parking mode, only record post-event. One of the renowned players in this area is NEXDIGITRON (70MAI and DDPAI). I went to their head office to verify first-hand if they have any product with this capability and if they can give me a demo. Surprisingly it was a two-room establishment in a shopping complex with one room having two employees testing dashcams and the other room with a receptionist-cum-whatsapp-customer-support and a manager. I had gone there hoping for a technical conversation with someone. However, the manager turned out to be a typical reseller of goods without much technical know-how. He flatly refused to give any demo and suggested looking at YouTube videos posted by 70MAI and DDPAI reviewers. I said, there are so many dashcams lying around for testing, why couldn't he give a demo to a prospective customer? He again flatly refused without giving a reason.

So, if there is anyone who owns a dashcam with the above-mentioned features, please let me know the make and model and the Parking Mode reviews.

Here's what GTO had to say on the matter:

BMW sells exactly this for their cars as an official accessory - link to detailed review. Am sure you will easily find other products from reputable brands.

Here's what BHPian arnav17 had to say on the matter:

Have the Nexodigitron A3 installed on both our cars. We purchased the hardwiring kit but have not found the right person yet to set it up as a few garages we went to had no idea about the matter. Will try it myself in the next week as the whole process is mentioned.

This seems to cover all your needs, it shoots in timelapse when in park mode and activates normal recording on motion detection. We are currently using it through a 12V charging socket, but no issues, works fine. Will update once the hardwiring kit is installed

Here's what BHPian dileepcm had to say on the matter:

If you are parking at a fixed spot, have you considered having a CC(TV) camera? Probably that would provide a higher consistency in monitoring and recording events than a motion sensor-triggered camera that sits inside the car with not-so-great viewing angles from top to bottom.

Besides, there could be several hit/miss use cases + risks of running out of battery/memory etc.

Check out BHPian comments for more insights and information.