Can Having A Dash Cam Help You Become A Better Driver?
Why You Should Consider Getting One
In 2019, there were over 22,000 moving traffic violations in Ottawa, alone. Were you one of the drivers who got pulled over by the police?
Were you one of the drivers who received a warning or ticket due to bad driving? Trying to improve your driving skills isn’t always easy. After all, how you drive becomes a sort of muscle memory, and certain habits you develop can be hard to break.
Can installing a driving dash cam make you a better driver? How do car camera dash cams work and where can you find the best dash cams in Canada? We’re here to tell you!
Read on to learn more about how dash cam installation can improve your driving.
What Makes a Good Driver?
A good driver is someone whose attention doesn’t waver from the road. When you stay focused on what you’re doing and how other drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists are behaving around you, you react to sudden changes in a timely manner.
A good driver doesn’t let themselves get distracted by things like cell phones, radios, and conversations. Sure, you can play the radio or chat with your passengers, but you know when to pause the background noise. A good driver always follows driving laws and doesn’t make decisions from a place of frustration or impatience.
At the end of the day, good driving is about caring about yourself and others every time you get behind the wheel.
What Are Some of the Worst Driving Habits?
In 2020, there were over 10,000 reported collisions in Ottawa. However, there are more signs that you’ve got bad driving habits than getting into accidents.
Some of the worst driving habits in the modern day include texting while driving, driving while under the influence, and driving aggressively. Even seemingly minor choices, like making an illegal right on red or blowing through a stop sign, can lead to serious consequences.
When you have bad driving habits, you increase your chances of causing an accident that could result in property damage, injuries, and worse.
How Can a Dash Cam Improve Your Driving Skills?
Installing a dash cam is a choice that more drivers are making this year. Installing a dash cam can help you to improve your driving skills. Let’s take a look at how this can work.
Identifying Bad Driving Habits
When you install a dash cam in your car, you can review the footage that you’ve recorded. This can help you to catch any bad habits you have, like running stop signs or stopping too abruptly or too close behind other cars.
As we mentioned earlier, drivers often operate on muscle memory, and footage of your driving can reveal to you the behaviours that you’re no longer registering while you drive.
ADAS Alerts
The best car camera dash cams these days have Advanced Driver Alert Systems. These systems alert you to potentially dangerous manoeuvres, like drifting into the lane next to you or getting too close to another driver. That means that even in the moment, a dash cam can prevent you from making mistakes that could cause an accident or make other drivers reactive.
Encouraging Safer Driving Habits
When you know that your driving is being recorded, you might find that you become a safer and more attentive driver. That feeling of being monitored can encourage you to take more precautions and pay closer attention to the road. Some consider this the surveillance effect, which often has a positive impact on driving.
Is Installing a Driving Dash Cam Worth it?
Bad driving can lead to some serious and expensive consequences. Tickets often come with fines and those fines have a tendency to grow in size when you have multiple offences on your driving record. Causing an accident can lead to serious expenses in the form of property damage liabilities, medical liabilities, and more.
Dash cam installation is a small price to pay to improve your driving. Plus, there are other benefits that come with dash cam installation that you won’t want to miss out on. In short, the answer is yes, installing a dash cam is worth it.
Other Benefits Of Having a Dash Cam
Dash cams do more than help you become a better driver. They can also provide the evidence you need when someone else’s behaviour causes an accident or traffic incident.
For example, if you get into an accident because of another driver’s negligence, you may need to file a claim against their insurance company to recover damages. During that process, you will need to prove that the accident was the other driver’s fault. Dash cam footage can provide undeniable proof that another driver was driving in an unsafe way.
Your dash cam footage can also help other drivers in similar situations. If you happen to witness an accident and catch it on camera, you can offer your recordings to help them file a claim.
Are There Cons of Installing a Dash Cam?
Are there any reasons that you may not like having a dash cam? Some people worry that dash cams are an invasion of privacy, especially if they’re recording audio of the conversations your passengers are having. Others worry that dash cams are more of a distraction than a help.
The good news is that there are ways to navigate these problems. For starters, you can turn off the audio on most dash cams so that you’re not capturing audio. Dash cams have small internal screens and most people find that in use, they’re no more distracting than other built-in screens in modern cars.
Install A Dash Cam At Our Place!
A driving dash cam can have a positive impact on your driving. If you’re looking for a way to improve your skills and break old habits, consider dash cam installation.
Where can you get the best dash cam installation services in Ottawa?
AudioMotive can help! Contact us to get a quote today!