Vehicle cameras are older than most people assume, and the reason for fitting them has barely changed.

1907 to 1939: recording the road

In 1907 the filmmaker William Harbeck mounted a hand-cranked camera on a Vancouver streetcar and filmed the city going past. Nobody called it a dash cam, and the equipment needed its own seat, but the idea was there.

In 1926 Fire Chief John Kenlon of New York fixed a camera to the bonnet of his car and filmed the run to a fire.

In 1939 Officer R.H. Galbraith of the California Highway Patrol put a camera on his dashboard to record traffic offences. That is the first version of the argument still being made today: a recording settles what a report only asserts.

1968 to 1988: evidence

The Connecticut State Police began testing dashboard cameras in 1968 to record tailgating and weaving. The point was no longer the novelty of the footage. It was that an officer’s account now had something behind it.

By 1988 an Ohio pursuit was recorded at speeds over 120 mph. Footage had become the record of what happened rather than a curiosity.

Where it got to

In fact, by 2021 the global market for vehicle CCTV was worth over $3 billion.

What fleets actually buy it for is narrower than the feature lists suggest:

  • Defending a claim where the other side’s account is the only account
  • Refusing an induced-collision claim
  • Seeing down the nearside of a vehicle that was never designed to be seen down
  • Coaching from something that happened rather than something reported

What changed recently

Not the cameras. Storage, connectivity, and being able to pull a specific clip without visiting the vehicle.

Detection came with it: phone use, fatigue, distraction, flagged as they happen. Useful, and not the whole job. A detection tells you to look. Footage tells you what happened, and only one of those settles an argument.

The part that stayed the same

The value has always been the same thing, which is being able to show what happened when somebody says otherwise. Everything since 1907 is an improvement in how quickly you can get to it.