Anyone who has spent much time around motorsports knows how quickly the story of an incident can change once everyone starts talking about it. Two people can watch the same thing happen and remember it differently. A few details get lost, others get mixed up, and before long, everyone is working from their own version of what happened.
It is not much different on public roads. More drivers are starting to keep some kind of record of their time behind the wheel, whether it is for insurance purposes, peace of mind, or simply because they would rather have the footage and never need it than need it and not have it. Around 69 million US drivers regularly record their trips, according to a June 2025 survey by AutoInsurance.com. Recording a drive is no longer something limited to professional drivers or car enthusiasts. There are now several fairly simple ways to do it.
A Dashcam Mounted on the Windshield
For most drivers, a windshield-mounted dashcam is the easiest place to start. Once it is installed and set up properly, there is very little to think about. It records the road ahead while you get on with driving.
The automotive dashcam market was valued at USD 4.03 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD 7.11 billion by 2034. That growth says quite a bit about how common these cameras have become. Most current models record continuously and overwrite older footage when the storage fills up. If the camera detects a hard impact or sudden movement, it can usually lock that section of the recording so it is not accidentally erased.
That can make a big difference after a collision, especially when the accounts of the people involved do not line up.
One thing worth paying attention to when choosing a dashcam is low-light performance. A camera can look impressive on a product page during the day and still produce poor footage at night. Dawn, dusk, rain, and poorly lit roads are exactly the situations where you may end up needing the recording, so a good sensor can be more useful than simply chasing the highest resolution.
Wearable Camera Eyewear for the Driver’s Perspective
A windshield-mounted dashcam gives you a view of the road, but it cannot tell you what the driver was looking at. It does not capture the glance toward a side mirror, what was happening inside the cabin, or what caught the driver’s attention just before something happened. Wearable camera eyewear changes that perspective by moving the camera with the driver’s head instead of keeping it fixed to the vehicle. Ray-Ban camera glasses keep the camera at eye level, allowing the footage to move with the driver’s field of view rather than staying fixed on one part of the road. That can be particularly useful on a motorcycle, during a track day, or anywhere a conventional dashcam is difficult to position.
The important difference is that the footage follows the driver’s field of view. If someone turns their head toward a vehicle approaching from the side, checks a mirror, or looks toward something happening inside the vehicle, the recording moves with them. A fixed camera simply cannot provide that same perspective.
Of course, this type of recording also comes with privacy considerations. Anyone using a wearable camera in public should be aware of the people and surroundings being recorded and of any rules that apply to recording in a particular setting.
A Rear-Facing Camera
A front camera leaves out one fairly important part of the road: everything behind you.
Anyone who has ever been rear-ended knows why that matters. A rear-facing camera can show the vehicle approaching from behind, how closely it was following, whether it changed lanes suddenly, and what happened in the seconds immediately before a collision.
You do not necessarily need a completely separate system for this. Many dashcams now come with front and rear cameras that record at the same time. That setup is particularly useful because both recordings share the same timeline. If you are trying to work out exactly what happened during an incident, being able to switch between the front and rear views is much easier than trying to line up footage from two unrelated cameras afterward.
A rear camera can also capture things that never turn into an accident. Someone driving aggressively behind you, for example, may never make contact with your vehicle, but having the behavior recorded can still provide a useful record of the journey.
Your Vehicle’s Built-In Event Data Recorder
There is another source of information sitting in many vehicles that drivers rarely think about. An Event Data Recorder, or EDR, can store information about what the vehicle was doing around the time of a collision.
EDRs are often described as the automotive equivalent of a black box. Depending on the vehicle, the data can include things such as speed, throttle position, braking, steering, and seatbelt use.
According to NHTSA’s official Event Data Recorder regulation under 49 CFR Part 563, a December 2024 rule update extended the pre-crash recording period from five seconds to 20 seconds and increased the sampling rate. That potentially gives investigators a much longer window into what the vehicle was doing before an impact.
An EDR is obviously not a substitute for a camera. There is no video to watch afterward. What it provides is a different kind of evidence, one based on the vehicle’s own recorded data.
Access to that information can depend on the circumstances of the incident and applicable laws, but it is useful for drivers to know that this data may exist before they ever have a reason to look for it.
A Dedicated Motorsports Action Camera
For people who spend weekends at track days, autocross events, or other driving competitions, a regular dashcam may not be enough. A dedicated action camera gives you much more freedom over where the footage comes from.
A camera can be mounted to a helmet, roll cage, or another part of the car, depending on the setup and the rules of the venue. Some drivers use more than one camera so they can see the same run from different angles. Magnetic mounts, suction mounts, and smaller low-profile housings have also made these setups easier to put together without turning the car into a rolling camera rig.
Multiple angles can be especially useful when something happens on track. One camera might show the car ahead, while another catches the approach from behind or the position of the vehicle from outside. If an incident needs to be reviewed, having those different views can make the sequence much easier to understand.
There is also a more everyday reason to record track sessions. Watching yourself drive from the outside can reveal things that are almost impossible to notice while you are concentrating on the next corner. Braking too early, taking a different line than you thought, making unnecessary steering corrections, or carrying the wrong amount of speed can all become obvious once you watch the footage back. Even when nothing goes wrong, those recordings can be useful when comparing one session with another.
Cloud-Connected Dashcams With Real-Time Backup
A memory card is convenient, but it is also a fairly obvious weak point. It can stop working, become damaged, get lost, or fill up without the driver realizing that an older recording has already been overwritten.
Cloud-connected dashcams approach the problem differently. Instead of keeping the only copy of the footage on the camera, they can upload recordings to remote storage while the vehicle is being driven. If something happens to the physical camera afterward, there is still another copy of the footage.
This approach has become particularly relevant to people who spend a lot of time on the road. According to AutoInsurance.com’s June 2025 national dashcam survey, gig workers had the highest rate of dashcam adoption at 53%, followed by urban residents at 40%.
For a private driver, the main downside is usually the subscription cost. If you only drive occasionally, paying every month for cloud storage may not make much sense. Someone who spends several hours a day on the road, however, may see more value in having an automatic backup that does not depend on remembering to remove and save a memory card.
Conclusion
There is no single setup that makes sense for every driver. Someone commuting to work every day may be perfectly happy with a basic dashcam, while a track-day driver may want several cameras and a completely different setup.
A front-facing camera gives you the basic view of the road. A rear camera fills in what is happening behind the vehicle. Wearable camera eyewear can record from the driver’s perspective, while the vehicle’s EDR may preserve information about speed, braking, and other inputs around a collision. For motorsports, an action camera can provide useful outside angles, and a cloud-connected system can give important footage somewhere else to live if the camera or memory card is damaged.
Most people will never need every one of these options. The point is simply to have some kind of record if the day comes when your memory and someone else’s version of events do not quite match. In that situation, a few minutes of footage can tell you far more than either person trying to remember exactly what happened.
