[oh_sigh]

Not true. You can have a dash cam, but it has to be the kind that continuously overwrites its own data and only records when it detects an accident. You can also record based on your intent - if your intent is to, say, capture a scenic drive ,then you can do that. If your intent is to just capture the license plates of 1000s of other cars that pass you, you can't do that.

These laws were changed in ~2018 in Austria.

[bosie]

How can a dashcam possibly detect an accident? Wouldn't that basically start recording after the fact and hence be mostly worthless?

[romwell]

The dashcam will record into a, say, 5-minute buffer until the accelerometer registers a high value, at which point it starts writing into a new file (so the buffer becomes a permanent record of the 5 minutes prior to the incident).

That's one way to implement it, one can come up with many others.

[Scoundreller]

Dunno how well this will work if you need to claim that the pedestrian or cyclist just darted in front of you. But then again, maybe you don't want that kind of thing recorded.

[waisbrot]

Yes, if you hit a pedestrian and didn't brake, dash-cam footage of that would not be helpful to your court case.

[gtirloni]

Actually, the lack of a permanent recording (barring technical issues easily identified by forensics) would be very helpful... to the person you hit.

[zaarn]

There is almost always a button for manually triggering a recording.

[Scoundreller]

Is that legal in Austria?

[zaarn]

Shouldn't be any more illegal than recording something with your cellphone (when not in the car) that you are interested with. I'm not quite certain about the legal code in australia but private recordings should generally be exempt from a lot of things.

[oh_sigh]

Accelerometers. How it works is there is something like a 5 minute, constantly overwriting video file. Once the accelerometers detects an abrupt deceleration, it determines an accident occurred and marks the previous 5 minute segment of video as read-only.

[detaro]

No, they are allowed to have a buffer of last X minutes.