Garmin Drive™

There's lots of dashcams on the market but I didn't expect to find Garmin offering anything in this end of the pool. That's not necessarily a criticism but i do believe you get what you pay for. And in this case what I got was Garmin reliability and simplicity at the price of cheaper offerings. The Dash Cam Mini 2 comes nicely boxed with a full set of cables and mounts. I almost sprung for the parking mode cable and am glad I didn't. This unit works well without it and the power drain is minimal, though I do unplug it when the car is in my garage. It's small. It has voice control. The SD holds enough minutes for me to record long minutes of epic roadside beauty. Okay, that's a gimme for Garmin. But the unit is beautifully versatile and largely unobtrusive. It delivers a crisp picture and the image has always been stable for me. The incident detection feature kicked in twice when traffic suddenly came to a halt. And in the one accident that happened in front of me, I was able to edit and send the footage to the aggrieved party quickly. It's a good little camera.

I have 512gb memory cards in my front and rear camera and no audio turned on. Yet every few days I get a message that the camera is slowing down and I need to reformat my memory card on both cameras. They are quality memory cards that follow the recommendations of Garmin as to what type should be used. What is frustrating is that this happens so often even though the vehicle is parked inside a garage most of the time and not driven on long trips. Also when the memory card slows the ability for the app to connect to the cameras for live viewing and stay connected becomes virtually impossible. It makes no sense to me that a company like Garmin who made the decision to delve into the market of dash cams has failed so miserably. Their customer support acts like everyone us stupid and not tech savvy which is even more annoying as I deal with tech stuff all the time and install security cameras frequently at my job and set up many of them at my business as well. When a small company like Wyze Cam can accomplish the basics in their software like having cards loop record over old recordings when the card is full, it’s super annoying to see a company that has been around so much longer not be able to make this a working option. Yes I know it shows in the settings that there are two options and one of them is this however if it doesn’t actually do it when it is selected as the option then is it truly an offered feature. Come on Garmin get it together for the sake of your customers. Unfortunately I could not go with Garmin for my new vehicle. I decided to give the Rove R3 a shot and see if they were able to provide a quality product with working features.

My camera starts right up every time I get in my car. I have a recent video where someone was not watching what she was doing in a parking lot and drove right out in front of me. I was able to slam on the breaks and miss hitting her. She could barely see over the steering wheel and looked at me like “what’s your problem” and kept making her turn in front of me. It scares me as I could have T boned this lady and really hurt her. Since hitting a motorcycle at night just over a year ago, I have become hyper aware of everything around me. It was at night and I turned in front of a motorcycle I never saw. A black crotch rocket, driver admits to speeding. Driver all in black from helmet down and could not have had any headlights or reflectors as I saw nothing. Thank God the driver has literally no serious injuries except of course road rash, a chipped tooth, and a broken thumb. He was driving suspended. So glad to now have a dashcam. The whole thing would have turned out differently if I had video. I never saw him. If I did, why would I turn?!