Front and rear dashcam, and the footage stays ours
The VIOFO A329 records front and rear, and the multimedia upgrade adds a third camera on the road behind. Here's what we fitted, and where the footage lives.
Most cars leave the factory with no memory of the road at all. If someone reverses into you in a car park and drives off, it’s your word and nothing else. So the first thing we fitted to the Astra was a set of eyes.
Watching the road, front and back
The camera behind the mirror is a VIOFO A329. It records the road ahead in the detail you’d expect, but the part that matters day to day is the second lens facing out the back window. Front and rear on one system, running whenever the car is.
The rear view is the one that earns its keep. Most knocks happen from behind — the slow shunt at a junction, the reverse in a tight space — and that’s exactly the angle a single forward camera never sees. Two cameras means the footage tells the whole story, not half of it.
A third angle on what’s behind
The Astra’s multimedia system was upgraded at the same time, and it brought a reverse camera with it. Its obvious job is the reversing view on the screen when you’re backing into a space. Once you’re moving, though, it doubles as another set of eyes on the road behind — a third angle on the exact part of the car a single forward dashcam never sees.
All three cameras record while the car is running and stop when the ignition is off; none of them sit watching an empty car park overnight. That’s the quiet advantage of building this up yourself rather than taking whatever the showroom offered: a camera fitted for one purpose earns its keep at a second one for free.
Where the footage lives
Plenty of newer dashcams now nudge you toward an app and a cloud plan. The clips go up to the maker’s servers, you pay a few pounds a month to keep them, and the day you stop paying they’re gone. It’s the same pattern the rest of the internet has settled into: your data, held somewhere you can’t see, on terms that can change.
Ours works the other way round. The footage records to a memory card in the car — a SanDisk 512GB microSD, big enough to hold days of driving before it loops back over the oldest clips — and nothing leaves the car unless we decide to move it. A hardwire kit wires the camera into the car’s own supply, so it powers up with the ignition on its own — no cable trailing from the dash, and nothing to plug in each time you set off.
That’s the same thinking that runs through the whole network. The Astra’s journeys are logged to our own location app rather than a carmaker’s cloud, for the same reason its footage stays on a card we hold: it’s our data, and we’d rather keep it that way. If the wider case for that interests you, we wrote about where your data actually lives elsewhere on the site.
What we fitted
- VIOFO A329 — the front-and-rear dashcam
- HK4 hardwire kit — wires it into the car’s supply so it powers up with the ignition, no trailing cable
- SanDisk 512GB microSD — the card the footage records to
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
The cameras are only one part of what the multimedia upgrade brought to the car. The system behind them does a good deal more, which we get into in the piece on the multimedia upgrade.
Share