A gaggle of gadget-related blogs are reporting that Japanese electronics stores are selling a clip-on camera for automotive sun visors. The camera's G-force detector starts the camera recording at the onset of sudden deceleration (e.g. braking to avoid smashing into someone's car or actually smashing into someone's car). The system provides up to 15 seconds of pre-accident and five seconds of post-accident footage. The camera is housed within a heavy-duty magnesium alloy casing, in the hopes that it will survive all but the worst of accidents. The clip-on cam can also record on demand, should you want to show your friends your [pre-crash?] shenanigans. At $412, a visorcam is a high price to pay to prove your innocence (depending)– but cheap compared to a lawsuit.
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By the time you’ve crashed into something and triggered the record function it is probably too late to determine fault.
It might be useful if you brake hard to avoid an animal on the road and cause an accident behind you, or brake for a left-turner who is pulling right in front. (Although in my area a left-turner is pretty much automatically at fault anyway).
I suppose it could also be useful for reconstructing a crash when the vehicles involved wind up spun all over the road. I’ve passed accident scenes where it is almost impossible to tell what happened.
Does the heavy duty magnesium alloy casing facilitate easy removal from your skull as well?
Don’t do it. The thing is as likely to convict you as it is to exonerate you. If you are going to get into trouble, the best evidence is your unchangeable and self-serving memory. Video, documents, e-mail, all that junk is just going to get you into trouble.
Dean,
From what I can tell it works like the black boxes in most modern cars – as soon as a certain g-force limit is reached (hard braking, loss of control [spin], etc) it starts recording.
But what Robert said, avoid it like the plague if you can. You can guarantee someone is going to get sued based on their footage.
I would like the police to have every piece of information possible available to them so I never get blamed for something that isn’t my fault. This might help with some accidents, but not enough for me to buy it at that price. That said, it likely would have been of some assistance to the investigation of my head-on collision. Fortunately, I didn’t have ABS so I left some serious skid marks showing exactly where my car was when the idiot hit me!
Interesting but ultimately way too scary. While it could be helpful in an accident in which you are the victim, if you make a mistake and there is some argument that you were at fault, why would you want this thing recording your screwup? I would definitely *not* want a video record if all the fingers are pointing at me, makes it much harder to defend myself. Those who think this is a great idea because it will record other people’s screwups are a bit overconfident — we all make mistakes. Why risk sealing your own conviction (or insurance payout) with this device?
Limo companies have installed similar but somewhat more sophisticated systems. One brand is DriveCam. Retail Q1 price is about $2000.
It continually records, but it saves the data based on G-force events. It’s better to know what happened in the period before and after the brakes are used or the vehicle is hit than just the aftermath.
“By the time you’ve crashed into something and triggered the record function it is probably too late to determine fault.”
It is always recording data, so information is in memory before the accident, and it just stops dropping old data upon the occurrence of the g-force event. From the article linked in the originating story:
“It saves 15 seconds of footage in its buffer from right before the crash occurred, and an additional 5 seconds after impact.”