The Best Dash Cams for Trucks

Dash cam use among professional drivers, truck drivers particularly, is growing rapidly. Here’s why.

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You have only to look at the HGV DashCam Footage section on YouTube to see the utterly lunatic behaviour of some drivers, as caught by truck drivers’ dashboard cameras.

This explains why so many truck drivers have decided to get a dash cam. However, many drivers are not sure what they need to look for when they’re buying one. Read on for a guide to the best dash cam features.

Decide What You Want it For

Dash cams can be straight-ahead cameras, or can include rear, parking and side view functionality. A good online store will have a selection of these. Dual-channel dash cams film the road behind as well as the road ahead. Do you need to store weeks’ worth of film, or just the pictures from each trip? And do you need Wi-Fi?

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Get the Picture Quality You Need

The better cameras are capable of 30 frames per second (FPS). This gives great detail – remember, you may want to be able to recover a driver’s licence plate from the video, even though it was raining at the time of the incident. Make sure night time pictures are of the same quality by checking the night vision capability of the camera. Even day shift drivers are driving in the dark during the winter and need a truck camera system with night vision..

1080 pixels is the number that denotes a fully high definition camera and recording device, available from retailers such as http://www.backwatch.co.uk/products/category/cameras/. This gives an image that has a height of 1080 pixels and a width of 1920 pixels. You can get higher definition cameras than this but they cost more, and a 1080 pixels model will do the job.

A wide-angle (165 degrees or so) lens and camera view is important, especially on motorways where an incident can start two or three lanes away and then develop.

Robust

It goes without saying that in the haulage environment, dash cams need to be able to stand up to dirt, dust and grease because trucks are often picking up loads difficult conditions. For similar reasons, the suction onto the dashboard needs to be exceptionally secure. Some of the smaller cams can be stuck directly to the windscreen.