[paulockenden]

Does anyone here that has Drive Recorder enabled on their car also use a hardwired conventional dashcam, or is Drive Recorder sufficient, despite its obvious limitations?

I'm interested to hear what others have done.

P.

[Merami fan]

I would lose my mind if some idiot damaged my car and I wasn't able to prove it. Even if the damage is minor, it's a matter of principle. Drive recorder is not sufficient, IMO. Notably, it doesn't record while the car is parked and off. You drive a BMW; you can afford a few hundred for a good dash cam setup.

[paulockenden]

I take your point.

It's a shame because in some ways (notably recording from four cameras) Drive Recorder beats a traditional dashcam. But like you say, lack of parking mode is a bummer.

[NYC_340i]

I have a Blackvue DR900S dashcam and I tried the 30 day trial of the drive recorder and here are my thoughts..

Pros of the drive recorder over a hardwired dashcam:

- Ease of setup. Just purchase it online and then enable it in iDrive.
- Clean and OEM setup. No additional wiring to do and nothing stuck to the windshield.
- Haven't seen a dashcam with side monitoring so that's a plus.
- A cool feature to have as not many cars offer this.

Pros of a hardwired dashcam over the drive recorder:

- Higher end models offer 4K resolution and greater refresh rates. Better for capturing license plates in hit and run situations. The quality of the footage with the drive recorder isn't that great.
- Audio recording if you need that which the driver recorder doesn't do.
- Cheaper in the long run vs. paying yearly for a subscription from BMW.
- Parking mode to record when parked. Drive recorder only works with the engine on. Again good for hit and run cases. I have my dashcam set to record for 6 hours after engine off and stop if the battery gets low.
- Longer recording than drive recorder. Depending on resolution and sd card size, I usually get around 4 days worth before it starts overwritting older footage.
- Tons of extra features depending on model (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth file transfer, Cloud viewing and monitoring, speed and red light camera alerts, drivers assistance features, dual channel recording, etc...)
- Personally it only took me an hour or so to wire my dashcam to the fuse box in the passenger foot well. and IMO it's pretty clean. You barely notice that it's there and don't see any wires at all. So for me it's a 1 hour setup and then I forget about it until I need to pull footage or dismantle it when selling the car a few years later.
Overall I'd say the driver recorder is very cool and is better than nothing however if you are really concerned with protection I'd invest in a high quality dashcam.

[Mazman]

Originally Posted by NYC_340i

I have a Blackvue DR900S dashcam and I tried the 30 day trial of the drive recorder and here are my thoughts..

Agreed!

I did put up a video on the Driver recorder!