Dashcams Come To America

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The dashboard camera, a popular technology found in many Russian cars, has come to the United States. Bill Gremminger, founder of the online dashcam shop dashcamusa.com, sees the cameras as a way to protect the reputation of professional and amateur drivers alike.

A dashcam is mounted to the dashboard or the windshield and records continuously during a drive. The memory automatically loops over older footage every 24 hours, though the cameras can use memory cards that save more information. When an event such as a crash or road-rage incident occurs, the drive presses a button that saves the footage. Such footage is used in Europe to reduce insurance rates and help prevent fraud.

"When you're driving, you have lots of different people watching you," Gremminger told CBS News. "You want to protect your record, at least as a professional driver. It's a perfect equalizer. They're total recall, is what they are."

Gremminger's company sells a dash came for $119.95 and a memory card for an additional $20.

Dashcams are predominately used in Russia and other eastern European countries where eyewitness testimony carries little weight in court and insurance fraud schemes, like the video below in which a woman fakes being hit by a car, is rampant.

Footage from early American adopters of the technology is beginning to grab the public's attention, like this video of extreme road rage in California that went viral.