Dash cam questions, answered

Cost depends heavily on who does the fitting and how complex the car is, and only one company in the UK publishes a fixed price. Every figure we could source sits in one place, each with who said it and when.

Halfords does not publish a price for its fitting service anywhere we could find, including three attempts to load the booking page directly. The figures customers and third parties report vary widely, and we list every one with its source rather than pick a single number.

The hardwire kit itself is cheap on its own. What a fitter charges to wire it in properly varies by fitter far more than by job, and the sourced figures show the same fitter charging the same for a hardwire fit as for a plug-in one.

It depends on the car, and parking mode specifically needs a fuse that stays live once the ignition is off. We have sourced confirmed fuse positions for a small number of models, and we say plainly when no public record exists for yours.

Only if it has power from somewhere other than the ignition circuit: a hardwire kit wired to a fuse that stays live, or a separate battery pack. Left on the cigarette lighter socket alone, most dash cams lose power the moment the ignition switches off.

It is the camera continuing to watch the car after the ignition is off, using one of three trigger types, and it only works with a power source that survives the ignition being switched off.

Three ways: the cigarette lighter socket, a hardwire kit to the fuse box, or an internal battery or supercapacitor, and only the hardwire route keeps a camera running once the ignition is off. Some cameras use a supercapacitor instead of a lithium battery specifically because of how each copes with heat.

Most dash cams record audio by default alongside video, and most let you switch it off in the settings menu. Whether recording your passengers without telling them is settled law is a separate, unresolved question.

It lasts until loop recording cycles back round to that segment, which depends on your card's capacity, your resolution and your camera's bitrate, not its brand. We show the actual formula and a worked example.

It means the camera writes fixed length segments and deletes the oldest one once the card is full, so it never needs manual storage management. It only breaks down when locked files fill the space set aside for them.

The three real causes are a card full of locked files with no room to loop into, a card that has failed or is the wrong class for the bitrate, or the camera losing power because it only runs off the ignition circuit. Work through them in that order, cheapest check first.

There are three ways: a card reader, the camera's own WiFi and app, or its onboard screen, and a card reader is the most reliable because it depends on nothing but a working file system. Never edit a clip you intend to hand over as evidence.

Yes. The actual rule that governs where you can mount one, regulation 30 of the Construction and Use Regulations 1986, sets no measurement at all, unlike the 40mm figure repeated across the web.

Yes. UK forces run public submission schemes that route footage from members of the public to officers for review, though the deadlines involved get conflated into one figure far more often than they should.

Yes. An official police information service states that footage showing the person filming using a mobile phone, driving aggressively, or committing another offence may result in them being prosecuted too. We could not find a specific named UK court case, so treat it as a documented risk rather than a proven precedent.

Probably not. Named serving and former police officers describe the public submission scheme as built for careless and dangerous driving, mobile phone use and close passes, not for catching speed, and we found no sourced example of anyone prosecuted for speeding from footage they submitted themselves.

Mostly no. Aviva states plainly on its own site that it does not, and the ABI's own wording is 'some insurers', not all of them. Where a discount is real, it tends to come with conditions attached.