The three frame picture (top to bottom): outside the car using a wide angle, the Auto-Vox camera picture and the view from inside the 2022 Honda Civic hatchback. As you can see, the view through the hatch is very limited. This camera opens it up greatly. It is mounted inside the top of hatch itself which gives it much better visibility than being mounted outside near the license plate. I have nearly as much visibility from the rear as through the windshield. I find myself using the rear camera very frequently as it also serves as a blind spot monitor of sorts.One issue is that the picture is very wide and zoommed out; cars are much closer than they appear. I've compensated for this by using the defrosting wires as distance indicators. I find myself not using the side mirrors very much due to the wide view the rear camera provides.My system was professionally installed. The hardwire kit connects to the fuse box so there is no clutter in the dashboard. The installer did a really nice job connecting everything without exposing any wires.Misc items:The GPS works wellAuto brightness works wellRecording automatically at startVideos are good qualityVideos of front and rear are stored in separate folders.A few minor gripes:Screen refreshes at 30hz. This isn't bad but if you're used to 60hz or more it seems chunky.SD card must be ejected. I was hoping for wifi or cable accessSD card mounts at the top and is difficult to eject. I would prefer if it was on the bottom near the power button.Overall, a great product. I feel much safer knowing what is going on behind me due to the wide view.

I was pretty happy with my Autovox-X2 dashcam mirror (prior version of the dashcam before the V5) for a little over a year when it was stolen from my car in February. The V5 uses different cable connectors, camera, and GPS antenna from the X2. So that meant I would have to remove the X2 hardware and do a complete installation of a V5 kit. I told Joanne at Autovox about my situation. She sympathized and offered to pay for a new V5 kit if I wrote a review on Amazon. So far there aren’t a lot of reviews of the V5 at Amazon’s US site, but the UK Amazon site has 104 reviews and they are generally very good.POWER SOURCEIf you power the V5 through the cigarette lighter or some other switchable source (i.e. the dashcam only has power while the car is turned on), the V5 package includes everything you’ll need EXCEPT for a micro-SD card. But if you want to record video when the car is turned off, or if you want to turn off the dashcam but still capture 30-seconds of video after the mirror senses a collision (using the Parking Monitor feature), then you must install a hardwire kit that connects directly to a continuous 12-volt source linked to the starter battery (or a separate battery pack). AutoVox recommends a hardwire kit with 11.6v low voltage cutoff that was unavailable at Amazon when I bought my dashcam (due to Covid-19). I tried a different one, but the Parking Monitor function would not activate. When the correct hardwire kit became available at Amazon (BOSCAM Hardwire Kit Mini), Joanne sent me one.IMPROVEMENTS vs THE X2I made a table comparing features of the old X2 and new V5 models that you can see in the attached picture. The rear camera is now 1080p resolution instead of 720p, the internal lithium polymer battery cell has been replaced by a super capacitor (which won’t fail from high temperature like the old battery) and the LCD monitor now has “full lamination”, which reduces the impact of unwanted reflections. If you want to block reflections completely you still need to add your own anti-glare screen (see my solution to this in the attached pictures). The V5 only takes 3-seconds to power down by holding in the power button compared with ~ 5 seconds with the X2. A two-second difference might sound trivial, but it’s a big improvement in my opinion.UNDESIRABLE CHANGESWhile the exposure of recorded images from both front and rear cameras is excellent when viewed on my computer (see photos attached), the image on the LCD from the rear camera is darker than I’d like, especially when wearing sunglasses on a day with bright sunshine. The mirror is also pretty dark.A MINOR PROBLEMDuring bench testing I found that the dashcam was still drawing ~70 milliamps AFTER shutdown. Joanne confirmed this was an issue in the first batch of dashcams shipped to Amazon, and said this was fixed in the second batch of mirrors. She sent me a Batch-2 mirror (at no charge) to replace the original. A 70 milliamp drain is tiny compared to the capacity of the car battery, so it’s not a big deal. The dashcam draws about 0.55-amp when the screen is at full brightness and 0.25-amp when the LCD is turned off. My 64gb SanDisk miniSD card was not recognized by the dashcam until I formatted the card as “FAT32” on my Windows 10 computer using free downloadable software called “EaseUS Partition Master 14.0”.ELIMINATING UNWANTED REFLECTIONSSince the dashcam screen also functions as a mirror, unwanted reflections from the interior of the car are unavoidable when using the LCD. You can tilt the dashcam to minimize them, but there is no tilt angle that avoids all reflections when sunlight is streaming through your car windows. All dashcam/mirrors will have this problem. To eliminate reflections completely, you need to apply an anti-glare screen on top of the LCD. You can cut anti-glare film to fit and apply it to the LCD, but then you cannot use the dashcam screen as a mirror. Instead, I cut a piece of rigid anti-glare plastic and attached it with tape at the top, and magnets on the bottom to hold it in place (see attached pictures). Keep in mind that when there are water droplets on the lens in wet weather the camera image is often useless, so in wet weather it’s best to use the dashcam as a mirror.SPECIAL PROBLEM IN A 2011 TOYOTA PRIUSIn my 2011 Toyota Prius there is a problem with the dashcam when hardwired to a continuous 12v source. Here’s what happens: If the car has been sitting for a short while with the dashcam powered down, opening the driver's door causes the dashcam to power up. Then after starting the car and beginning to drive, the dashcam usually shuts down and needs to be restarted. With the car turned off and the dashcam on, pressing the brake pedal makes the dashcam LCD go dark, flicker, switch back and forth between the rear and front cameras, and sometimes freeze with a locked image. Then it has to be unplugged for ~ 10-seconds to unfreeze.I didn’t see these problems with the X2 in this car. This is probably because the X2 used a lithium battery as an internal power source while the new V5 uses a supercapacitor. The internal power source provides enough power to save the last video recording properly when the dashcam switches off. Otherwise, the file would be corrupted and unreadable. The lithium battery in the X2 was more powerful than the supercapacitor. It could power the entire dashcam, including the LCD. The supercapacitor in the V5 only has enough power to take care of the recording system and does not power the LCD.So it appears that the voltage supplied by the Prius starter battery is briefly falling below the 11.6-volt cutoff of the hardwire kit when the driver side door is opened (which starts up the brake pump) or the brake pedal depressed a couple times while the car is turned off (which also starts the brake pump). This voltage drop causes the hardwire kit to cut power to the dashcam. When this happens, the supercapacitor takes over to save the last recording, but then the power from the battery comes back on, and sometimes this on/off business confuses the dashcam firmware. I measured a small voltage drop with a voltmeter when pressing the brake pedal, but not all the way to 11.6-volts. However, the digital voltmeter is too slow to measure short voltage dips.I tried connecting the V5 to the 12v starter battery in a 1998 Toyota Camry, and the dashcam functioned properly. Only when the Camry battery was drained to ~ 12.0 volts (instead of the usual 12.4-12.7 volts) was it possible to make the dashcam misbehave by flicking the Camry headlights on and off (while the car was turned off). Perhaps Autovox could have BOSCAM (the hardwire kit vendor) redesign the hardwire kit so that it ignores short voltage dips, and only cuts power to the dashcam when the starter battery has truly fallen below 11.6v.OVERALL RATINGI’m giving it 4 out of 5 stars. Service from Joanne is excellent. She replied to every e-mail within one working day, so she gets 5 out of 5 stars.

I purchased the autovox V5 to upgrade my X1 that I love but after three years of everyday use it started to have some issues with the rear camera. Product Support was amazing and helped with updating my X1 firmware but it was time for an upgrade.The camera quality is amazing on the V5 for both the front and back camera. This is really important for me because I mainly use this mirror for its constant on rear camera feature. I have gotten so used to the feature that I don't want to drive without it. I love how you can see the whole road and cars unobstructed behind you while you drive. On the X1 the rear camera would often have glare from the sun or car lights but the V5 does a amazing job minimizing the glare.I installed the V5 exactly the same way I did with the older one. The plugs on the new mirror are different from the X1. They now use a usb c instead of the micro usb. This is a minor inconvenience since I have a micro usb hard wired for the X1 already but it's a easy and inexpensive upgrade that will be worth it for the V5 upgrade. Another cool feature that the V5 has is that you can do a split screen view showing both the front and back cameras. I wouldn't use split screen while driving but it is a cool feature.I highly recommend this mirror camera for its recording ability but as I stated I love the always on rear camera feature while driving. You get a great view of behind you and while it does take a little time to get used to it is worth it. I don't want to drive without it. If anyone is on the fence you should try this camera. I installed it myself and you can too with a little research. The scariest part was tapping into the car rear light power for the auto reverse camera feature but even that wasn't too hard. There are a lot of features I didn't comber but even without those I still say go buy this camera and start driving safer.