Speaker 1: Now the ring car cam was initially announced way back in 2020 as part of Ring's security initiative for cars three years later. And finally, the fruits of that labor are the ring car camera right here on our dashboard of Lincoln CNET car's long-term e V six test vehicle. We're gonna take a look at the camera and see if it's worth the weight. Now the ring car camera is pretty small for [00:00:30] dash cam only around 1.6 inches square. When you're looking at it, bang on, of course, it's permanently affixed to its mounting arm, so it's around eight inches from tip to tip. Now that arm is designed to wedge into the space between your dashboard and the windshield and then affix to the glass with a very strong adhesive pad.
Speaker 1: Now installation is pretty simple, but I'd recommend you go through the complete process in the ring app of pairing the car cam to your account before [00:01:00] you install it in your car because you're gonna have to scan a QR code that's on the device and that won't be accessible once it's stuck to your windshield. And once it's up there, it's up there. That adhesive is really strong. Once mounted, you've got a little bit of up and down adjustability and you're gonna be able to connect it to your car via a u SB type C to an O B D two adapter. O B D is the onboard diagnostics port that pretty much every car built after the year 1996 has usually somewhere under the dashboard and the camera's gonna [00:01:30] be able to draw power from that even when the car's parked and turned off, so you don't have to take up one of your u SB ports or your 12 volt outlet. Now the car camera features two HD cameras, one facing outta the front of the vehicle with a 120 degree field of view and one pointing into the cabin with 153 degree F O V. The interior camera features infrared lights for a little bit of night vision as well as a privacy cover that you can flip up if you don't want the people that you've given access to your rain camera system to monitor [00:02:00] you while you drive right,
Speaker 1: Video quality is fine. The 10 80 p footage isn't gonna win any cinematography awards and there are noticeable compression artifacts here both inside and out, particularly at night. It's tough to tell if that's the camera's fault or if it's the h e VC two H dot 2 64 impact conversion that happens in the cloud before you can download the clip to blame. Fact is you're stretching those pixels over a very wide F O V, so it's only [00:02:30] gonna be so detailed. Quality is good enough to make out license plate numbers from about a car's length and broad daylight. Nighttime quality suffers a bit more, but the footage is at least usable if you're on roads or highways that are reasonably illuminated. In addition to the cameras, there's also an internal microphone that you can use for limited voice commands, which we'll get back to in a second, as well as an internal speaker that you can use for two-way communication.
Speaker 1: [00:03:00] Now the camera is designed to draw as little power as possible. When the car is parked, it'll actually set itself into a low power mode and only wake up if it detects motion inside of the vehicle, at which point it'll send you a notification, start recording, and then after a while it'll turn itself off and go back into that low power mode. And if you leave your car sitting for an extended period of time, it'll actually detect if your car's battery gets too low and turn itself all the way off so that you don't completely drain your battery and can still start the car [00:03:30] when you get back. Now the car camera features a built-in 4G LTE connection that allows its connected features, but it can also connect to your home wifi when you're parked into your driveway. To power that 4G LTE connection, you need a subscription to the Ring Protect Go Service that's gonna cost you around $6 a month or $60 per year, and that's on top of any Ring Home security program that you've got going on already. This is a completely separate subscription. Once the service is active, you'll [00:04:00] be able to get notifications from the car camera if something's happening at your car, as well as remotely monitor over video
Speaker 1: Users. Interact with the Ring Car camera via the same ring app that you probably already use for your Ring video doorbell. If you've got one of those in the app, you can select the camera and then you can scroll through a feed of the different events that you've been notified of with video previews. Those preview streams are at five 40 P, but you can also manually [00:04:30] download a recording at 10 80 p. Now all of that video is gonna be stored on the ring internal storage, and then streamed to the app via the cloud. Of course, that only saves around 180 days worth of video, so if you wanna keep a video for longer than that for legal reasons or whatever, you're gonna wanna make sure that you manually download it. Now with the LTE connection, you can also live monitor what's going on inside and around the vehicle in the app, and not just video. [00:05:00] You can do two-way voice communication with the internal microphone and speaker useful if you want to say, remind your spouse to pick up something on the way home from the grocery store, or if you want to yell at the person who's breaking into your car and call a mean names.
Speaker 1: Now that privacy cover that I mentioned earlier doesn't just cover up the interior camera. It actually disables it, turns it off completely, as well as turns off the microphone inside [00:05:30] of the car footage that's stored on the camera for a later retrieval. Also doesn't have sound.
Speaker 1: Now I mentioned that the cart camera can automatically notify you if there's motion inside of the vehicle, but optionally, you can also get notifications for motion outside of the vehicle or if someone starts driving the car. Users can also manually trigger a recording with voice command using the Ring Alexa skill. Simply say, Alexa record and the ring car camera will come alive [00:06:00] and automatically start recording up to around 20 minutes of video. From that point, it'll also stream that information to the cloud where it can be saved for safekeeping. Now, ring calls this feature the traffic stop mode and markets it as a way to protect the driver in the event of being pulled over by law enforcement, which is kind of a bummer that that feature even has to exist, but this is the world we live in now, a couple of things that I noticed when installing the car cam in our E V six here. A lot of modern vehicles are going for steeply, raked windshields [00:06:30] and long dashboards as a result for aerodynamic reasons. And that means that when you mount your camera at the base of the glass, it's gonna be way up there near the front of the vehicle and that makes reaching that privacy cover difficult while driving. So maybe don't mess with it unless you're parked tall. Screens that stick up from the dashboard are gonna exacerbate this
Speaker 1: Steep leach Windshields also could pose a problem in aiming the ring camera. Ours is tilted about as far down as [00:07:00] it can go because of the way we had to stick it in this vehicle, and that means that in the video feed you could see a little bit of the mounting arm at the bottom of the field of view. Another thing to be aware of is that there's no way to locally pull footage from the camera that I'm aware of. There's no micro Wests D card slot like conventional dash cams and the USB port is only there for power, so you'll need to maintain that $60 a year subscription if you want the car cam to send notifications or footage when it's away from your driveway or home wifi. [00:07:30] The download limitations are my biggest pain point here. You have to manually download the clips out of the app.
Speaker 1: You can only download one at a time, and I was limited to 20 seconds per clip. What if your incident was longer than that? Each request to download takes around two minutes to upload from the camera, convert in the cloud, and then be ready to download. It took me about an hour just to get the sample footage for this video off of the camera. Granted ring probably doesn't expect the average user to download dozens of clips in one go, but I'm hoping that Ring sees [00:08:00] this and eventually allows longer downloads and finds a way to streamline transferring multiple videos. The whole process right now feels a bit user unfriendly and purposely convoluted, which it kind of is because it's designed to keep you locked in the rings ecosystem. The Ring car camera is available now for order on Amazon or ring.com for $250. Now there aren't that many other connected dash cams to compare the Ring car cam too, but of the earliest, it's looking like one of the better [00:08:30] options. Garmin announced its dash cam live coming later this year, but that's $400 and it only features one camera that points forward 1440 p though, so the quality should be a little better. There's also the owl cam, one of the first connected dash cams that we reviewed here at CNET way back in 2018. It also features dual cameras, but its monthly service fee is around twice what ring's asking
Speaker 1: Now if the idea of paying a monthly service fee to keep your [00:09:00] dash cam working is too bitter a pill to swallow, I feel ya. Head on over to CNET Cars where we've got a list of all the best dash cams you can buy today. Some are connected, some are not. Some have better video quality than this. Some less expensive, some have multiple cameras. Why not three, four cameras go nuts? You can find that over on cars.cnet.com.
