Stolen cars, particularly SUVs are either chopped for parts or shipped to third world countries for the black market. I seriously doubt some local warlord in West Africa will be shuttling around his goons in an EV.
Theft is not the reason I want the dashcam/Sentry Mode, it's vandalism.
The Ford offered dash cams are all Thinkware cams. I installed the U1000 with the rear cam addition In my Flex in about an hour. The cable lengths were perfect and I was able to hide the cables easily. They work great and the OBD 2 adapter made the install seamless without splicing into the wiring harness.
When you say OBDII adapter, does that prevent the port from being used? I hope to keep a Bluetooth OBDII adapter always plugged in while driving for data logging on my phone, so that'd bummer if I can't have both that and the Ford dashcam while they develop a built-in solution.
I would assume not - most harnesses like this have one ODB2 port that you plug the factory port into, and then another ODB2 "pass-through" that goes where your existing ODB2 port was.
That is good to know. I've never installed a dashcam before so this is good info. I still hope we hear there's one built in coming in that first OTA Ford's CEO tweeted about.
So, my background is sort of technical - enough to understand what you’re saying. I don’t feel like rooting through all the Apple technical documentation, but here’s what they say in bunny rabbit English:
No, it does not block the OBD2 port. You plug the cars OBD2 in one end and the other end of the adaptor goes where the cars OBD2 port was mounted. I also have a cloud connected dash cam that blocks the OBD2 port so I added a y splitter in the mix and all works great. I can still access the cars computers thru the splitter.
I didn't even know OBD2 splitters existed. well, til. I'm guessing there's a power side and a power-and-data side or something?
I bought one off Amazon. It's a 1-1 wire mapping of the pins in the port so that pin 1 is pin 1 on each end, and so on and so forth.
that's really bizarre. I guess they just assume you're going to have only one powered device and one data device... otherwise I can't see how this could realistically work? I don't really know a lot of how OBDII data signaling works mind you, but it just feels very weird that this kind of thing would "work" for two simultaneous data devices.
Ah. The cams don’t use the ports to communicate with the vehicle. The obd2 ports have a power pin, a ground pin, and a pin that gets power when the car is turned on. The cam uses those pins to get power and determine if the car is on so it can determine when to go into power saving mode. Wikipedia has some good info on how obd works if you want more info.
