Ring brought a new camera to Las Vegas this year for CES 2023, but it’s not something you can use on your front door, or anywhere else inside your home. Instead, the Amazon brand’s latest device is a dashcam called the Ring Car Cam, and its dual-facing cameras promise to keep an eye on your car’s interior and the road.
Available for preorder starting Thursday and expected to ship in February, the Ring Car Cam will cost $250 at retail or $200 for a limited time during the preorder phase. It mattered More expensive than many dashcams already on the marketBut the built-in connectivity and additional Ring features may justify the cost, especially for those who have already purchased Ring products and are comfortable using the Ring app to monitor their home security.
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In Ring’s eyes, expanding into vehicle safety was a natural next step for the brand and one that matched consumer demand.
“As we continue to deliver new security solutions, we’re constantly listening to feedback about what customers want,” explained Ring’s Chief Technology Officer Josh Roth. “Our founder’s email is in the box of every piece of equipment we send out, and the car protection products he’s asked about the most.”
To that end, Ring Car Cam promises to monitor things in and around your car around the clock by plugging into your car’s OBD-II port and turning off the vehicle’s battery. The dual camera design allows for motion-alert clips to be captured inside and outside the car. The camera stores those clips locally, then connects to your home’s Wi-Fi network whenever you’re parked nearby to upload the footage and send the necessary alerts, with an end-to-end encryption option to keep that footage private. From there, you can review the footage directly from the Ring app.
LTE connectivity is another option, but you’ll need to spend $6 a month on a Ring Protect Go subscription to enable it. Once subscribed, your car cam will be connected on the road, enabling you to view a live feed and receive real-time alerts whenever your car is away from home. Thanks to the car cam’s built-in speaker and microphone, you can also use your phone to talk to the occupants of the vehicle.
That microphone lets you activate the camera with a quick voice command. If you’re in a fender bender or a traffic stop and you want to record what’s going on, say “Alexa, record,” and the camera will collect a few minutes of footage. You can also disable that microphone, along with the interior-facing camera, by sliding a physical privacy shutter across the lens, which is welcome for a product from Ring that was revealed last year as copyrighted. To share user footage with law enforcement Without user consent in emergency situations.
“Customer privacy, security and control are fundamental to Ring, and we designed Car Cam to empower customers to protect their personal information and videos and respect the privacy of others,” Ring’s announcement reads. “While parked, the camera only starts recording when smart sensors detect an event or you start Live View, and there’s an LED light to clearly indicate when the microphone and inward-facing camera are on and recording.”
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