Ring already has countless products to help you keep tabs on your home, and with the $250 Ring Car Cam, Ring is making it easy to watch over your car, no matter where you are.
The Ring Car Cam uses your car’s ODB-II port for power, even when your car is parked and turned off, along with an LTE connection to enable activity alerts, live streaming video and upload of recorded clips.
Unlike most dash cams that mount to your windshield, the Ring Car Cam is attached to an arm that extends up from your dash, with the base of the arm wedged between your windshield and dash.
There’s a blue ring light on the top of the camera that lets you know when it’s recording, along with a privacy cover for the inside camera that physically blocks the camera from recording anything inside your car.
Ring Car Cam has a front- and rear-facing camera to capture what’s happening in front of your car, as well as inside it, both when you’re driving and when parked. When you’re parked, the camera will monitor for motion and start recording when something, such as a break-in, happens. You’ll then receive alerts via the Ring app, just like you would with the company’s home security cameras.
Ring Car Cam can respond to voice commands. More specifically, you can use the command “Alexa, record” and the Car Cam will begin recording inside and outside of the car — a feature that could be handy if you get in an accident and you want to capture everything that happens immediately afterward.
Ring also announced a Ring Protect plan to cover the LTE connectivity portion of Ring Car Cam. The cost for Ring Protect Go is $6 per month, or $60 a year. You can opt to use Ring Car Cam without the Protect Go subscription, but you’ll lose out on real-time alerts, Live View and two-way audio when your car is away from your home’s Wi-Fi network. Without the Protect Go plan, clips will be saved to the camera and uploaded to Ring when it’s connected to Wi-Fi.
Ring Car Cam will be available in February for $200 during a limited-time pre-order promotion. After that, the price will return to its normal cost of $250. We look forward to seeing how it stacks up to other dash cams we’ve tested, so stay tuned for more.
