Abu Dhabi: Motorists are installing special cameras in their cars in a bid to prove their innocence in case of accidents.
‘Dash cams’ (mostly fixed on dashboards) continuously record movement in and around a car and this footage can be handy when investigating an accident.
“These are amazing gadgets that can help and prove your innocence in hit and run cases,” said XPRESS reader Piyush Kodape while responding to a special report XPRESS carried last week on ‘Hit and Run’ victims in the UAE.
“I installed dash cam DR550GW which can record front and rear views and withstand the summer heat here. In basic mode, one can use the cigar lighter to power the cam and use it during driving,” said Indian user Avinash Keswani.
Maxim Lebedev, 44, who sells these cameras online in the UAE said: “It records all kinds of movement at all times, so it’s useful even in case of theft.”
Lebedev claims to have sold over 1,000 ‘dash cams’ priced between Dh200 and Dh700.
Most of his brand of cameras come with a 2.5-inch TFT LCD screen that can often rotate 180 degrees and a 110 degree wide-angle lens with an 8X digital zoom.
With infrared super night vision as well HD recording capability, these cameras start and record automatically and have a motion-detection function.
“It’s a great idea and am sure it will go down well with the country’s law enforcement officers,” Indian Sudip Ghosh, 39, told XPRESS.
“I hit a car a few years ago just as I was about to make a U-turn from the left lane in front of a signal. The driver, an Arab national, got away because he could convince the police I had hit him from behind even though both of us knew he had cut into my lane from the right-hand track. Unfortunately I didn’t have any evidence to prove that, so I had to accept the blame,” he recalled.
Footage recorded by these cameras is stored on on-board SD memory cards, and the oldest video footage is automatically written over to make space for new videos.
