The Dent Dutch Is Refusing to Fix

Dutch called me from a parking lot in March, standing next to his truck, describing a dent he hadn’t put there.

Twenty minutes inside a hardware store. Somebody backed into his tailgate and drove off. No note on the windshield, no witness, nothing.

Nineteen hundred dollars of bodywork. His deductible was a thousand of it.

That one was just bad luck. The second one was worse.

In June a fellow rolled a stop sign and clipped him, then told his own insurance company that Dutch had run it. Two drivers, two stories, nobody else around.

They split the fault down the middle. Dutch ate half of a wreck he didn’t cause.

He bought a camera the following week. I spent a good while after that working out whether he bought the right one.

Let’s get the sales pitch out of the way first.

Your insurance company won’t give you a discount for having one. Not one major carrier does. The reason they give is fair enough. Discounts get handed out for features that have been shown to cut claims costs, and nobody’s shown that for cameras yet.

What footage does do is get accepted. In insurance disputes and in court, dash cam video is routinely treated as evidence.

And it cuts both ways. If you were rolling that stop sign, or doing 52 in a 35, that’s on the tape too.

Now, the thing everybody buys one for. The AAA Foundation put out a study this past March on hit-and-run crashes, and it isn’t pretty. Fatal hit-and-runs have been climbing since 2010 and hit an all-time high of 2,972 deaths in 2022. That’s seven percent of everybody who died on American roads that year. Another 200,000-plus people in vehicles were hurt in hit-and-runs in 2023.

I’ll be straight about that number, though. More than 70% of the people killed in those crashes were on foot or on a bicycle. That’s a different problem than yours.

Your likely case is Dutch’s case. A dent in a parking lot and a man who says it wasn’t him.

There’s exactly one thing I’d check before anything else, and almost nobody talks about it.

What’s inside it for power. A supercapacitor, or a lithium battery.

Here’s why it matters. Researchers at Arizona State and UC San Diego parked cars out in Tempe on days up in the hundreds and measured what happened inside. After one hour in the sun, cabin air averaged 116 degrees. The dashboard averaged 157.

Now think about where a dash cam lives. Stuck to the windshield, in the sun, all day, every day.

Lithium dash cam batteries are generally spec’d to about 113 degrees. Supercapacitor units run to roughly 176.

That’s the whole argument. A battery camera in a hot climate swells, quits holding a charge, and dies, usually inside a summer or two. A capacitor doesn’t care.

If the listing doesn’t say supercapacitor, assume it’s a battery and keep walking.

Parking mode is what would’ve caught the man who hit Dutch’s tailgate. It’s also the feature people buy and then never actually have.

Because parking mode needs power when the engine’s off. Plug the camera into the cigarette lighter, and it dies with the ignition in most vehicles. You need a hardwire kit or an OBD power cable, and that’s a separate twenty or twenty-five dollar part.

Two things to insist on once you’ve got it wired.

Low voltage cutoff. The cable watches your battery and shuts the camera down before it drains enough to leave you stranded in your own driveway. Don’t wire one in without it.

And buffered recording, which some outfits call pre-roll.

A camera that starts recording when it feels an impact has already missed the impact.

A buffered one is always holding onto the last stretch of video, so you get the fifteen seconds before the hit. Viofo builds a fifteen-second pre-roll into theirs. That’s the part that shows a license plate.

Three of them, at three prices. All capacitor.

▸ Viofo A119 Mini 2, about $149. Front only, 2K, with a Sony Starvis 2 sensor. This is the one you buy if you just want the thing handled and never want to think about it again.
▸ Viofo A229 Plus, $249 to $289. Front and rear, both 2K, and you can add an interior camera later. This is the one I’d put in my own truck. The rear channel matters more than people expect, because getting rear-ended is the most common way this happens to a man.
▸ Thinkware U3000 Pro, $499 to $579. Expensive, and worth it for one specific fellow — the one who parks on the street. It uses radar to sense something coming and starts recording before contact instead of after.

Skip anything at sixty dollars with a brand name you’ve never heard. The sensor is poor in low light, which is exactly when you’ll need it, and it’s a battery.

Dutch went with the middle one and had a shop do the wiring. Here’s his ticket.

Buy the high-endurance card and not the cheap one out of the checkout rack. A dash cam writes over that card every single day, and an ordinary card gives up in a few months without telling you.

Against a thousand-dollar deductible, the whole rig pays for itself the first time somebody’s story doesn’t match the video.

Neither of these will occur to you, and both are easy to sidestep.

Where you stick it. Most states have something on the books about obstructing the driver’s view, and a camera on the glass can run afoul of it. Only a handful carve out a legal windshield zone, Arizona and California and Utah among them, and Minnesota allows it behind the mirror. Tucked up tight behind your rearview mirror, or down low on the dash, keeps you clear in most places. Look up your own state before you mount it.

The microphone. Around a dozen states require everybody in a recorded conversation to agree to it. California, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington are on that list. The simple fix is to shut the audio off in the settings. You wanted the video anyway.

Three weeks ago somebody pulled out of a gas station in front of him, then told the insurance company Dutch had been flying.

Dutch sent them ninety seconds of video.

Claim closed in four days. No fault, no deductible, nobody’s word against anybody’s.

He told me the best part isn’t the money. It’s that he didn’t have to convince a single person of anything.

He’s still got that dent in the tailgate from March. Says he’s leaving it right there.

Calls it the receipt for what not having a camera costs.

— Walter