Here's a product that everybody needs, and not enough people are talking about.
It's a dash cam. And Ventrue sponsored this ShortCircuit
of the unboxing of their P2, which is the second in the pilot series of dash cams.
And the cool thing about it is that this is the world's first dash cam system
with a thermal camera. And you might be like, brother,
why do you need a thermal camera nighttime? And Ventrue told us that the reason they were inspired
to make this product was actually there was a really bad crash in China in 2023
where thick fog very unfortunately claimed the lives of 19 people and injured 20 others.
And one of the big advantage of this system is that it's not just recording the things
that have happened. It actually has a little entertainment unit
that can give you advanced forewarning to help keep you safe on the fly.
First, let's finish unboxing all this stuff. We have our 12 volts adapter.
We have our very long C to C number one.
We have our slightly less long C to C two.
And then we have a C to proprietary connector that we'll plug into our third camera.
That's because this is a quad camera system. There's our thermal camera that's gonna sit on the hood.
We have our front camera that's in the front of our cabin
that's facing out, but then also driver side in.
And then we have our rear camera. So this has kind of got you covered all around your car.
Let's see what else we got. Okay, we have a little cable management Bidu Hickeys.
I think that's the technical term. We have other Velcro style cable management.
We have what is a panel lifter for your car.
We're gonna talk a little bit more about the installation when we get there. The next thing we have, and this is kind of
the heart of the system is this 6.25 inch touchscreen display.
They call it their HUD display. This just like feels like a giant phone.
This is so weird, especially like an iPhone 8 with the freaking return button.
And most of the processing that's happening with all the units is happening in the screen.
So that means that if you actually have to replace a camera, you only have to replace that camera and cable,
which is about $150. You don't have to replace the whole system all at once.
So I think that's a smart consideration for making this a pretty decent value package.
Oh, the back actually comes off and that's really cool.
Venture is actually releasing the 3D printing schematics. So you could either print theirs
or you could customize and make something that will work better for your vehicle.
So we have on the back our little mount. We have a lot of cooling.
We don't know a ton about the processing, but it is a dual core high performance chip.
We also have an oxport. We have a type C, which is our power in.
On the top, we have our primary physical button,
as well as our micro SD slot. That's good for up to a terabyte of storage.
I mean, the whole point of a dash cam is to be able to have a good coverage of any accidents that have happened.
And especially if someone dings your car
and you need to be able to go back through your footage. It's nice to be able to have that one terabyte.
On the other side, we have our thermal cameras and then our front cabin and rear port.
One thing that's really cool about this unit is that it's not just designed to control the cameras.
You can actually connect it to your entertainment system. It has Bluetooth.
It's a huge upgrade, especially if you have an older car. You can do texts via chat.
So while you're driving, you can communicate safely, which is huge.
Avoid those really expensive distracted driving tickets. Don't text and drive people, be smart.
Another thing to mention is that it's not just Bluetooth connectivity. It actually has Wi-Fi 6 so you can get faster
and more seamless connection to your phone device that you're offloading these videos to.
Next up, we have this little buy
is actually our thermal camera and this is the weatherproof housing for it.
So this will actually amount to your hood. This goes forward and this sees in the dark of night,
maybe just like a vampire. One thing of note is that this has to be
on the outside of your vehicle because thermal imaging doesn't really work through glass.
And so it has to be on the outside. You can mount it to your roof. You can mount it to your hood.
And important to note, because this is gonna be on the outside of your car, the camera is IP67 rated,
which means that it's fully waterproof. And then you also have weatherproof housing.
What else we got? We have our front and cabin camera.
We have our Type-C out. We have our two cameras. We have our one facing forward
so we can capture the accents. And we have the one facing the cabin. This might be something that you want,
especially if you're like an Uber driver, you can record for your safety. Or in a lawsuit, someone's claiming you were on your phone
or you didn't have your seatbelt on. You can prove them right and defend yourself in the court of law.
Lastly, we have our backup camera, which looks a fair bit like the front and cabin ones,
but is smaller with one single camera. And it faces the rear and it captures your butt.
That's everything that's in the box. I say that as if there wasn't a fricking
buttload of things in the box. We're outside, if you haven't noticed.
We're gonna install this in a real goodness to gracious car. So let's start with our HUD.
There's four mounting holes. So you could potentially screw it to something.
This is someone's real car, I don't wanna do that. So we're just gonna VHB the stuff here.
We are not gonna worry about cable management because this is just a temporary install.
That's actually nice that I can take this off the stand
so I can more easily plug things in. And then we got power.
Step one, complete. Next, we're gonna install our front and cabin camera.
We're gonna get it high. So it's kinda hidden by the visor thingy, my boober.
It's called a rear view mirror for those who don't know. Top side tapes, the Graves invention.
Step aside, bread. Next is the part of this installation process
that has probably been the reason I haven't actually installed the dash cam,
which is running all the wires. Next up, rear camera.
Same process, VHB pointed backwards, baby.
And then, of note, the rear camera actually plugs into the front camera.
The idea being that you only have to run a wire through the top.
And finally, we have our thermal camera. And then that leaves our oxport empty,
which is designed so that we can connect our phone
to the Bluetooth of this device and then ox out from this to the car,
depending on the kind of car you have. We can change the refresh rate to 50 or 60 Hertz.
We can change our speed unit. I'm not a crazy person, so I'm gonna do kilometers.
Five gigahertz or 2.4 gigahertz. We're gonna stick to five. Whoa, all right.
We have our front camera, our thermal camera, our rear camera that is upside down.
I'm hoping we can flip that. Okay, we can manage to flip it back.
We're gonna have to tilt it down a little bit because I don't really need to see the clouds
when I'm filing an insurance claim, although it is quite peaceful.
And then we have our cabin one, is actually doing a really good job catching everything.
I put it really close to the mirror, so we were worried we wouldn't see enough
of what's happening in the cabin, but this looks great. I think it's time for us to take this out
for a little drive and see how we do. The thing I'm really curious about
is how good the latency on the thermal camera is,
because this is what I'd actually want to use if I was driving on dark streets at night to see animals.
So one thing that's cool is that this can act as an sort of AR heads up and identify people
on your screen with like a little square so that it's a little bit easier to spot them
even in the dark. If you're going for runs at night though, wear reflective assets, pretty important to stay alive.
You know what I'm saying? So the thing to note is that the thermal camera is not really meant for day use.
It actually has a protection feature that it'll turn off the sensor if it's too bright
or if it senses three seconds of bright lights coming at it so it doesn't damage that sensor.
But it's working for us. We live in an overcast eternal purgatory.
One thing that's important is not to get distracted by looking at yourself.
I mean, with one button press, you can turn it off. You don't have to worry about it.
And in my case, I probably would keep it off because I do find myself constantly looking at the screen.
And I wouldn't be using the entertaining features, although you might want to.
So let's take a look at those. We connected our phone via CarPlay. It took almost no time at all, really fast actually.
The way that this car is set up, we are not going to connect to the entertainment system.
You do need to connect via aux cable is a great option,
but you still do have other CarPlay features like Siri.
Hey Siri, direct me to the Linus Media Group offices.
Easy peasy, baby. We want to make sure that our footage was actually recording.
So we're going to check, oh yeah, it's there. And one thing that's cool is that it's actually sorted
from like normal videos. So just the continuous camera. We have a vent video.
So if it knows that something happened, it'll be saved there. And then we have stuff from parking,
which we don't have, because we haven't been running a little parking, and photos.
So it's kind of nice that it's organized a little bit for you. I think now it's time to hand the keys back to Brad.
Let him drive around for the weekend and convene on Monday
and take a look at our footage. We're back, it's Monday. Brad had the camera over the weekend,
so we're going to review some footage. I'm going to need some help. We're going to play a fun game of how bad of a driver is Brad.
I didn't want to play this, he wanted to play this.
Life had different ideas. I have to play this. To fill everyone in, I moved out here
and crashed my car immediately. And so we are now learning if I was in a bad situation
or if I'm a bad driver. Did you have a dash cam at the time? No.
Did you wish you had a dash cam at the time? Maybe. Yeah.
It depends on if you were at full turn. Yeah, yeah. I was trying my best, all right?
Sometimes things just go wrong for people. So first footage, or first clip I guess we should say
is this was me not being let out of a merge lane.
I felt like this guy was being a huge asshole. David's going to determine if he was an asshole
or if I am a poor driver. This is way more fun than I thought. I thought we were just going to open up a folder
with all the footage and kind of scrub through. Actually, on that note, before we get into this,
what we should mention is we accidentally forgot to turn the car off when we installed it.
So it ran from about 12.30 in the afternoon to about 6.45 7-ish when I got home.
And that was, I think, over 50 gigs of footage.
Obviously we had that running for an extremely long period of time, but that's just kind of an estimate
on how much footage you're getting. Because there's four cameras in here. And one of the features of this camera
is that you actually don't need to record all the time. It'll sense when there's events
and give you 10 seconds of pre-recorded footage. So it is always recording, but it's not saving
to the drive, so. Yeah, we can actually pull that open
and you can see normal and event in the folder.
And photos, if we took any photos. I would just take selfies all day. Yeah.
All right, so here is. Oh, this looks good.
It's really clear. Yeah, it was pretty good learning. Although I will say on this drive,
I didn't have a B-roll cam set up, so we don't have any footage of it.
But this is the type of drive where the sun is kind of directly at us.
The infrared camera would turn off sometimes. In a sense.
But all other drives all over the weekend coming to work today, everything was no problem.
All right, so here he is, just coming over.
And I'm just, you know, I'm just trying to drive. This lane, I guess what we saw in the earlier clip was that it ends.
Like there is no way for me to stay in this lane. I have to come out. Oh, that license plate's really clear.
Yeah. Nice job, Andrew. I see you there.
He finally backs out. Look at how much space I had there. And then he's like right on my ass.
What is this guy doing? So legally, I think he is right.
I think you're supposed to yield when you're emerging. Damn.
This is not my one of those girls. But I feel like as a social contract on the road,
the smart move for him is not to box you out.
Like that's a basic school, like driving school thing of like,
hey, you see someone coming into that merge lane? Give them room or get ahead of them.
Don't do this. This is just bad driving. It's not necessarily illegal, but this guy, thumbs down.
Yeah, I'll take that. So this is kind of like what you see when you're driving.
You see these like four things. I've got like an iPhone attached to the roof here.
So like when we pull this footage off, you don't get these green boxes,
but this is what you see when you're on the road. It's like there's somebody, personally,
I think it would be nice if it was like a little bit of a wider angle. It makes sense that it's not the widest.
And they kind of make up for it for depth sensing. There's 500 foot thermal detection range
and then a 200 foot AI detection range. And so it goes pretty far, which is useful.
And for the price that this comes in it, I'm actually pretty impressed at how clear
the thermal camera footage is. All right, here's another one where it's like,
am I a bad driver or was it a bad situation?
Before David says anything watching this back, I will say the wide angle makes it look
like there's more space. Maybe this is where I want less of a wide angle. So when you're merging, or when you're changing lanes,
it's your responsibility to yield to the traffic that's already there.
So any, if she doesn't leave you in our room
where you have to slow down, that is on her. Yeah. So you did okay on this one.
All right. This rear camera is surprisingly sharp. Like it's really easy to see things than all the details.
Here's one where at night you can see the license plate's pretty good. Oh, that's super clear.
This has convinced me that I think it's time for me to get a dash cam. Okay, so here is a front rear clip driving
through Gastown. So there should be lots of people, lots of things.
Maybe a little too bright, never do. It actually does pretty okay on the contrast.
Like the fact that there's so much light and dark and that everything is still visible is pretty impressive.
Boom, do you clock those guys? Oh yeah, those are right. Credit or vision, there they are.
Oh, and I shouldn't forget, if you're worried about hitting animals in the dark at night, worry no more.
Ventrue, that thermal camera will identify the animal and help you avoid hitting that deer.
They send over B roll of what it looks like. All right, I'll leave you guys to it.
Found out a lot about myself here. I am going to sit quietly and think about
things that I've done. Just like I'm gonna be thinking about
the value of this product. The Ventrue Pilot 2 starts at $500 right now on pre-order.
That gets you the full camera system and a micro SD. You can order more, get slightly bigger discounts.
But that's it for ShortCircuit. That's our unboxing. If you want more dash cam content,
why don't you check out the time that LTT compared a bunch of dash cams all at once.
It's a very different vibe, but it's a good one.