Suspect Drivers

Some mix of peer pressure, winter weather, tourists, social media disaster voyeurism, and of course curiosity gave me the consumerist brain worm to get a dash cam.

The time-consuming monotony of picking which one ultimately gave me a couple special considerations. I wanted:

• Front and rear cameras
• Some kind of hard-wire option
• Something pretty cheap

And the story begns…

Enter the Rexing V1P-4k

I added the branded hardwire kit and a big-ish endurance SD card but otherwise everything ‘required’ was provided. It’s all going in an 08 Subaru Tribeca and i did zero research the install. (Extremely out of character for me. Ask anyone.)

I had a trim removal kit (some random amazon purchase for years ago) that came in a little handy, mostly for routing the rear cam.

The car has side impact airbags for all passengers which gave me a little worry, but i left the trim over them mostly in place and just pushed the wire around them where necessary.

The Doing

I threw everything on the driver’s seat and started pulling stuff apart.

I pulled the door gasket, which exposed the outer edge of the ceiling trim. Then with a single interior trim piece, i got access directly into the interior fuse panel. I roughly draped the power cord over the review mirror, and got the cable roughly in place.

My hardwire kit came with bullet connectors on the fuse taps which is kind of nice.

I picked 2 of the smallest available fuses (both 7.5A) to tap for no real reason other than suspicion of the tap quality. Both taps came with 2A fuses for the cam wiring, which I did use. A “Battery Power” fuse gave me always on power (for parking mode recording) and the “Power mirrors” fuse gave me Key On/Off power.

I grounded using an existing screw that held piece of vent routing in place. I tested (with a multimeter) the fuse tap voltage just to make sure i picked good fuses and that nothing started on fire.

I went back to the business end of the cable, mounted the front cam and finalized the length/location for both the power and the rear facing camera cable (powers and transfers video to the main, front unit) and finished routing both to the drivers side. I closed up the trim, reinstalled the door gasket and tested the camera power on/record etc.

It worked! Satisfied, I continued running the rear cam cable. There’s a pretty flexible trim piece all along the ceiling here, so it was very easy to get to the tailgate.

I installed the rear cam on the window, and was almost immediately flumoxed by how to route the cable so it wasn’t just dangling out there but also accommodated the tailgate movement well…

I went a little overboard and removed the a couple trim pieces. I think i only broke 1 connector, but time will tell if it’s a big deal. Anyway, i managed to get the cable routed through the same raceway that the lighting uses.

It was a pretty big pain getting the plug

Then I pulled a whole trim piece off the top of the tailgate and got everything routed and pluged in.

Slammed it back together and there’s almost no cable. Super happy with the the results.

I intentionally mounted the front camera so as much of the unit as possible is obfuscated from the drivers seat.

The Result

All in all, this was a pretty easy task. I didn’t do too much damage and it wouldn’t be much work to remove if need be. Probably 3 hours on the install and another 3 in the buyers research.

I’ve validated the recording functions as expected but haven’t actually pulled and reviewed any of the footage for clarity/quality, but I’m pretty confident it’ll work for the identification of vehicles and all the usual case stuff if it comes to that.

The unit is setup to record in-car audio, which i’m mostly on the fence about but the paranoid person in me really likes the idea of having audio in the event of a contested moving violation or whatever. I doubt we’ll ever even look at the video

Potential offshoots

(All very low likelihood, but in descending order of likelihood regardless)

• I would be interested in a way to overlay vehicle metrics (speed and pedal positions) on the vehicle, so some ODB capture system could be fun. If we did that, it’d make sense to include something with an accelerometer for acceleration, deceleration, and lateral force with 1 sensor.
• We joked about starting a tik tok that just posts dash cam videos of LEOs doing illegal, irresponsible, or otherwise unnecessary things. In our rural place, it’s almost always local police/sheriffs ignoring speed limits and quick flashing lights to avoid having to stop like some plebian serf and would be very boring.
• It would be cool to find a way to download videos automatically
• The child in me who thought i’d make a good international spy thinks i should rig up some emergency method to destroy the videos in the event i’m somehow cogent enough to decide it’s damning, but the adult in me knows that I couldn’t even sort of make that call in the moment (and i’m pretty sure it’d be illegal, but i’m no lawyer.)