People suck...

Repoman · #26 03-12-2010, 02:41 AM

That sucks man. In my repo trucks I have this camera system called Drivecam, mostly so that my tow trucks don't get abused but it has helped out in other ways too. The camera sits next to the rearview mirror and has two lenses front and back and both are panoramic so that you can see everything in front and everything in back and a good part of the sides too. The cameras are allways rolling, even while the truck is off but they only save the footage for review when a physical event happens to the vehicle. They go back to save 15 seconds before the event and 15 seconds after the event so you can see the whole event take place. The particular things that set it off are any kind of shock to the vehicle or any kind of sharp change of direction or speed (any collision or poor driving) or you can manually set if off by pressing a button for personal safety reasons. I just plug my USB from laptop into the camera and download any events that took place since the last download and watch them.

It has saved me lots of money on a few accidents with no eye witnesses (he said/she said) where I am the big lying company and the other participant is the poor truth telling citizen victim. Well after downloading the footage, I became the truth telling victim and the poor lying citizens insurance is paying to repair my truck. I've never had someone hit my tow trucks in a parking lot . . . probably because they're tow trucks but the camera would pick it up if that happened. That would have worked great for you in that instance. Imagine their faces when the cops knock on their door and question about the incident. The fun part would be hearing all the lies before they learn you have them on camera.

I even get discounts on my commercial insurance for having them. While I don't have any in my private vehicles, I'm thinking about installing them especially in my kid's vehicle so I can tell if he is driving properly or if I need to take his keys away from him.