Welcome to the forum Wesslen Construction.
Yeah some Vehicles will suspend some circuits for some reason, so newer cars can in some cases be somewhat of a challenge to hardwire cameras into.
A few years ago i put a simple camera into my friends car, using a multi port USB charger for power, so that i had to hardwire into the Mercedes fuse.
The problem however was, no fuse in that damn car ever seemed to want to come off, well at least not before we closed all doors, and gave it a little time.
And his car is a older one, at least a decade old.
But in the end we got it working, just took 4-5 X longer than i would have expected.
To use regular record when running, you dont really need a hard wire kit, in that case you can just get a female 12 V socket and wire its + 12 V side into a ACC fuse and then ground, and then use the provided plug power source, mind you you probably have to tape the 2 sockets together under the dash CUZ otherwise they can wiggle apart.
That do not happen very often on the in dash / console 12 V plug plug, but they are also often places so they point upwards.
Og course most brands also have a hard wire kit for their different models, and you can also use that and just not turn on parkin guard features in the camera itself, but then its just a extra cost, you get 0 out off, and of course you have your in dash socket free for other stuff, and not really any wire dangling.
In Denmark you can not have anything dangling from the mirror or whatever, you have to route around the windscreen properly, and of course not install your camera right smack in the middle of the windscreen, most prefer some stealth so in my car i have a shade area at the top in front of the roof mounter mirror, this is excellent CUZ i can mount on that and only have the bottom part with the lens peek out below the dots, so very stealthy.
The GPS in cameras, in general they do 2 things, A they help with the time keeping, essential as files are named after time / date of creation, if you have a GPS enabled camera you just set your correct time zone and then it should set the correct time on its own, just 1 thing like phones and computers dashcam GPS do not automatic account for daylight savings, so me a Dane i am +1 hour now ( actual ) but in summer i have to change to +2 hours to have the correct time displayed.
And B you can also embed / watermark the car speed and some times coordinates too into the video.
The latter will not fly in any court of law as its a cheap un-calibrated devise, but the time in the video it take you to bass by pole " A " and sign " B " they can go measure the exact distance in between, that using math will give you the exact speed, and one it will be damn hard to wiggle out off.
Only if your camera record at a random changing frame rate will you be able to question that math, and that dont really happen.
The camera can not transmit anything unless it is one of the fancy and often very highest end Cloud enabled cameras, CUZ those you can put a SIM card into, and so they can be accessed remote, at least while driving but some can also be accessed while they are in parking guard mode.
If it came to that, well i would just use a regular GPS tracker, maybe one of those Apple dot thingies that leech on nearby phone and wifi to send location reports, though i do think you can detect if such a Apple thing is present, but that is also the case with a regular GPS tracker as its a GOS and a phone module, so with a GSM sweeper you could also detect something like that if need be.
But thats a whole other ballgame you dont seem to need so lets forget about those.
If dashcams behave flaky in operation it can be a insufficient power source, or the wired connection to a rear camera if it is a 2 channel model.
But if your systems always give you 2 minites of recording on the dot, well that to me indicate something else, if it was power or other things that time should be irregular.
If you guys are using some generic hard wire kit, that could be the problem, but
Parking guard is generally a " extra feature " you are never forced to use it, you can always just forget about it / not turn it on, though some systems if you let the car sit idling but otherwise have no movement in / on it, after a couple of minutes some will go into parking guard, though if that's not ON i dont think it will.
It is a thing left over form the ancient ways of doing parking guard where we only had 2 wires and the +12 V one had to be one that was always on, and then the G-sensor decided in the car was parked or moving, by no activity in a few minutes.
Today most hard wire kits are 3 wires where the +12 V ACC wire only act like a trigger to tell the camera what mode to go to / from
