Viofo A229 plus failed its one job
3–4 months ago, I bought the two-channel Viofo A229 Plus with the OBD kit, specifically so I could use parking mode.
Up until now, it has worked great. I’ve checked every couple of weeks to make sure parking mode was still recording properly, and it always was.
This morning, I went out to my car and noticed that the driver’s side door had been damaged by someone opening their door into mine.
My first thought was: “Well, at least I’ll have video of it.”
I didn’t.
I opened the Viofo app - which, in my opinion, is already quite far behind what I’d expect from a modern app, and discovered that the camera had not recorded any parking footage for roughly four days.
Nothing.
The last parking recording had suddenly stopped at around 2 AM four days earlier.
Normal driving footage had still been recorded perfectly fine during those days.
That was obviously extremely frustrating, because 90% of the reason I bought this camera was parking mode. I live in an area where people have a habit of opening their doors into other cars and then leaving. It had already happened to me once, and that was actually the main reason I bought the camera in the first place.
After going through all the footage today, it is pretty clear that something is not functioning normally.
The timeline looks something like this:
No parking recordings at all for around four days.
Then today it suddenly recorded approximately 30 minutes of parking footage and stopped.
Later, it recorded no parking footage at all.
Later again, it recorded roughly two hours of parking footage and then stopped.
That makes me somewhat doubtful that this is simply the car battery reaching the low-voltage cutoff, because the behaviour is so inconsistent. After having recorded nothing for four days, it suddenly manages 30 minutes, then nothing, then two hours.
The camera has also started behaving strangely when I start and stop the car.
When starting the car, it may turn Wi-Fi on and off several times and repeatedly announce things like:
“Recording two channels”
“Wi-Fi disconnected”
“Wi-Fi connected”
“Recording two channels”
Something similar happens when turning the car off.
For example, earlier today I switched the car off and waited for the camera to enter parking mode. It announced:
“Parking recording started”
Then immediately afterwards:
“Wi-Fi disconnected”
And then:
“Recording two channels”
This strange Wi-Fi/voice behaviour only started today, after I updated the firmware.
However, the important part is that the unreliable parking recordings started approximately four days BEFORE I installed that firmware update, so the update cannot explain the original problem.
What should I do from here?
At this point I’m extremely disappointed. The exact situation I bought the camera to protect myself against happened, and when I actually needed the footage, parking mode had silently stopped working.
So now I’m left with a damaged car door, no way of identifying who did it, a camera whose parking mode currently seems to work only intermittently, and a pretty bitter feeling about the whole purchase.
