Infrequently driven vehicle

[ffredshirt]

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to double check my thought process here. Currently, I probably put about 2000-5000 miles on my vehicle a year because I live in a large city and predominantly commute by motorcycle.
Initially I was eyeing the Viofo A139 PRO especially hoping for black friday to yield some lower prices.

But I went down a rabbit hole of parking monitoring. I totally understand that we do not have Tesla and its huge bank of batteries. So virtually all dash cams have basically a 1 day max for parking monitoring. You can add an external battery to get it to 2-4 days? In both scenarios its likely to not help me. For example my car is in my shared parking garage and hasnt moved for 5 days. Parking monitoring would be dead by now.

I then stumbled upon the Thinkware U1000 - which has radar and the very very low power energy saving mode. That still likely wouldnt help me right? If my car gets driven once a week.

I think that the whole parking monitoring feature is actually just clouding my opinion and really I should just get the A139 PRO and not worry too much about parking monitoring.

What does everyone else think?

 

[Nigel]

I believe the U1000 with radar will cover you for a couple of weeks, but I never see anyone saying they like that system, partly because the radar only looks forward, and also doesn't pre-buffer anything, so unless you actually have a problem in your garage that requires that length of monitoring then I wouldn't recommend it. And it might be much better to get some CCTV installed.

If you do have a problem while parked, you are not going to get the blame, because you were not there, so the parking guard is not to protect you. It will only protect your insurer by allowing them to chase the culprit, although they normally wouldn't bother anyway, especially if it would require employing lawyers.

If you are worried about supermarket car parks, the A139 Pro does have a parking guard timer, so it will record the first eg 3 hours, then turn off to protect your battery.

 

[ffredshirt]

Yeah I am reading not too great reviews for the U1000 - and the couple weeks thing actually is WITHOUT radar... with Radar you go down to 4 days. The thing that can monitor for weeks is basically quick start up to start recording 1s after impact.

I really think the parking monitoring will wind up being something I shouldnt put much emphasis on. Its trickery. It would be better to have the STARVIS 2 and then have a few hours of monitoring while im out of my own apartment garage... its unfortunate but yes - if i truly cared... a wired wyze or something would fit the bill for the garage.

 

[Nigel]

and the couple weeks thing actually is WITHOUT radar... with Radar you go down to 4 days.

I thought the whole purpose of using the radar was to extend the parking coverage into weeks, maybe they have changed it for some reason, such as complaints about lack of pre-buffered recording. The radar sensors have very low power consumption, so it should be possible to last weeks as long as you don't mind a slight delay for wake up between detection of movement and start of recording.

Personally, I only use parking monitoring while in supermarket car parks, but everyone has different circumstances, so you need to make the decision yourself. We see very few videos of incidents while parked, and very few of those are useful in terms of protecting the owner. It is driving that is the important time.

 

[thomas-dash]

I installed a 100AH LiFePO4 battery in my trunk which lasted me about 10 days without recharging it. The only problem with this is your storage card becomes the new bottleneck and you have to check on your car before your dash cam starts overwriting footage.

I was driving maybe 7 - 10 hours every other week which was enough for me to recharge the battery, but with only driving the car once a week you would probably be better off buying two batteries, charging one in the house, and swapping them out once the one in your car got low if you were going to do something similar.