You’ve probably encountered them, people, on their mobile phone while driving. Easy to identify, often you see them looking vacantly into what appears to be the driver’s footwell. Predictably they suddenly swerve, head still bowed, with on one hand on the steering wheel, the other hand clutching their smartphone drifting in and out of the lane, feverishly texting whether to have HP Sauce or Tomato Ketchup on their chip-butties. Men or women, driving-while-browsing affects both genders. Usually, it’s mostly men, you know the ones who wear Snapbacks and knock-off designer sunglasses, in a beaten-up Stanced-out Nissan Micra that has no MOT and no insurance and a stash of weed hidden in a secret compartment behind the glove box. How do we rid the road networks of these people? 

Finally, there may be a way to seek and defeat the Snapback driving-while-browsing, weed intoxicated nemesis by videoing their driving habits with the latest Dash Cam tech. Garmin UK may well have the answer and I decided to find out after accepting an invitation to test out their new Dash Cam 55, Thankfully the road was one way only, around the Thruxton Race Circuit. Before maxing the circuit a bit of skid-pan experience. At my disposal was a Toyota GT86, a Mini. Later that day would be the track experience in a Porsche Boxster and towards the end of the day a Renault Formula something single seater. The icing on the cake. Sounds like a lot of fun using high-performance cars to test out a dashcam but there is a purpose in doing so. Testing such technology at speeds that it will never encounter on a day to day basis ensures the underlying technology is capable of handling any normal day-to-day situation with ease. And yes it was a lot of fun. The Porsche was equipped with the Garmin Dash Cam, which is available in three derivatives the Dash Cam 45, 55, and 65W. The specs are quite similar between the three, however Dash Cam 45 and 65W offers a lower resolution camera (1080p), compared to the 55 which has a higher quality 3.7-megapixel camera able to dish it out at 1440p. So the 55 is the one we will concentrate on. Garmin, if you may not know are makers of GPS tech, known primarily for making external Sat-Navs devices, or so I thought. Now they have branched out into wearable technology and also… Dashcams. The new Garmin Dash Cam 55, is typical of Garmin innovation, neatly designed, lightweight but solidly made, small and compact but feature rich with technology. Indeed the profile of the Dash Cam 55 is so compact that you barely notice its there. In many ways, that’s a disadvantage because the Dash Cam 55 also has an internal mic able to record sound, and it’s also voice activated. For someone like me that can be an issue, I may have said things that I didn’t regret. Because it has built-in voice command you can instruct the Dashcam 55 to stop audio recording, something I also forgot on the day… I will never learn. But that’s not all, the Dash Cam 55 also has built-in GPS features such as incident detection, forward collision, and lane departure warning, expensive optional extras on most 2018 spec cars often adding a few hundred extra ££s in the process. But if your car is, say, between 5 or maybe 10 years old you can effectively upgrade to this latest technology at a relatively minimal cost. The Dash Cam 55 retails for £149. The 3.7-megapixel camera is able to capture and record high-resolution video footage at 1440p, which is technically just over 2k it also covers 1080p or 720p resolutions. And it works just as well in low light conditions. A removable micro SD card acts as the internal storage, and remember the voice command? well, you can instruct the Dash Cam 55 to start or stop recording video or take a picture by using a series of pre-defined voice commands. The built-in Wi-Fi feature allows recorded video footage to be wirelessly synced to an external device. Garmin has developed an app so you can beam footage directly to your smartphone or tablet. Video footage is pin-sharp clear, image stabilization is excellent and a framerate of 30fps offers smooth playback. With any device there will be pros and cons in terms of usability and operability be it hardware or software, it comes with the territory. One glaring pro is the high-resolution camera, highly important if you want to identify that Snapback wearing, weeded induced male in his Stanced-out beaten-up Nissan Micra with no insurance or MOT. And one of the cons is, maybe-probably, the price, it’s a little on the expensive side… or is it. Bear in mind that you are getting a compact, feature-rich little GPS enabled, Wi-Fi loaded digital video recorder, that could reduce your car insurance by around £80 from a device full of safety sensors that would otherwise cost a few hundred ££s more in a new car. So it is fair to say the Garmin Dash Cam 55 a bit of a bargain. That’s right its a Garmin bargain… (should have worked in marketing).