Best dash cams 2024: keep covered in the car when it comes to crashes

There are many different flavours of drivers out there, clogging the asphalt arteries of Britain in a bid to get from A to B.

There's, the Sunday Drive, content to pootle along at 20mph under the speed limit while obliviously blocking all others behind them, to the stereotypical BMW driver who thinks he’s in a remake of Mad Max and that indicators are something that happen to other people.

This rich variety of motorist, combined with the fact that roads are so utterly overrun with heavy, metal boxes hurtling down them, an in-car accessory that wasn’t really a ‘thing’ only a few years ago has become an absolute essential when it comes to verifying your version of events if there is a collision.

I write, of course, of the dash cam.

Mini-marvels of car-camera technology that mount with a clear view of the tarmac, most begin to film the minute you start your engine and then record for the duration of the trip, saving footage to an internal memory or, more usually, an SD card. Some are built with rechargeable batteries, many more plug into your vehicle via USB or using what we used to call the ‘cigarette lighter’, and some also have GPS to add even greater detail to incident info.

Now, naturally, like most men my age, I am the best driver in existence. Yet even I see the benefit of an always-on, roving recorder documenting other drivers