32GB - You cannot be serious !

[Mikey 44 2]

Hi

 

I would be interested in hearing anyone’s experiences of the Advanced Car Eye 2.0 front and rear BMW camera accessory.  I hope someone in BMW reads this and takes note.  Having used the Nextbase HD DUO successfully in two previous vehicles I found that it was necessary to increase the microSD storage capacity in order to have video recordings that went back at least three weeks.  Why ?  Well, I got caught on camera in a part of the country I had never been before and unknowingly turned onto a town ring road with a 30 mph speed limit.  Too late…  Flash flash and that was a letter from the constabulary on my door step three weeks later.  It was then that I realised I needed to be able to check video recordings up to a month old so I bought two 128GB microSD cards and rotated them every three weeks.   Nextbase told me these would work and they did.

So now I have got two new BMWs and put them in to have the Advanced Car Eye cameras fitted.  It has been a nightmare trying to get information from my local UK dealers and BMW UK.  At one point a service engineer said that BMW are good at providing tech info on main equipment but poor on tech info for accessories.  You can say that again !  The standard camera comes with one 32GB microSD card and is designed to delete old files when the card is full.  Perhaps BMW think that the card should never need to be removed and if so they need to get real.  Video recordings can be more useful for what happened several weeks ago than what happened today or yesterday but with this system you are unlikely to have any recordings from a few weeks back especially if you use the car daily.

I have now had to go against BMW official advice and have started to use 128GB cards in these two camera systems.  So far they are working well but I don’t know what will happen if they  record to the point where they are full.  I have estimated from rough testing that if I swap them over every three weeks I should avoid getting to the ‘full’ stage where the cards might or might not start to overwrite early files.  I may well push my luck and move up to 256GB microSD cards if the system continues to work well.  But BMW you really need to re-think the 32GB maximum approved card size.

Good Driving !

Mikey44

[Bimmer Owners Club 38]

Hi MIkey44

I think this has been an issue with many DashCam manufacturers and it is only a matter of time before SD cards are outdated and other memory storage media is replacing it.

 

[SilverJohn 6]

I'm sure there must be dash-cams that store in the Cloud. I would be amazed if there aren't.

Can't help with specific makes / models, sorry.