One of the longest-standing frustrations of Tesla’s Dashcam feature is the arbitrary one-hour limit on rolling dashcam footage. Regardless of the USB drive plugged into your vehicle, whether it’s a 128GB flash drive or a 2TB SSD, the vehicle only retains the last 60 minutes of driving before overwriting it.
That means if you forget to save footage within the hour, it’ll get overwritten with new footage. What’s worse is that the vehicle records any time it’s awake, meaning that even after you park, the vehicle is still recording and overwriting data.
That is finally changing, according to the release notes for an upcoming software update in China. Tesla’s Dashcam feature will now support dynamic recording durations.
How Dynamic Recording Works
Instead of a hard cap of one hour, your vehicle will now look at the total storage capacity of your connected USB drive and scale the Recent Clips buffer accordingly.
The updated logic follows these benchmarks: With a 128GB drive, you’ll now retain up to 3 hours of rolling footage, based on available storage space (with saved Dashcam/Sentry footage counting against it, primarily). With a 1TB Drive (or larger), you’ll now have up to 24 hours of rolling footage.
This change allows users to retain video for much longer before it is overwritten. Even for smaller USB drives, the 3-hour limit is a significant increase over the previous 1-hour limit for rolling footage.
Release Notes
The translated release notes in the update state:
Dashcam Dynamic Recording Duration The dashcam dynamically adjusts the recording duration based on the available storage capacity of the connected USB drive. For example, with a 128 GB USB drive, the maximum recording duration is approximately 3 hours; with a 1 TB or larger USB drive, it can reach up to 24 hours. This ensures that as much video as possible is retained for review before it gets overwritten.
Advantages
It also offers a distinct advantage for owners who use larger drives. Up until now, larger drives have meant you could keep more saved footage, but most of the drive still went unused. Now, the vehicle will take advantage of the larger drive and overwrite data less frequently.
For owners on long road trips or dealing with incidents that weren’t immediately noticed, this 3x-24x increase in retention is a significant upgrade. If you notice damage to your vehicle, even up to 24 hours later, you may still be able to see footage of the incident.
While 1TB drives will be able to hold up to 24 hours of recording, they must meet Tesla’s sustained write speed requirements of at least 4 MB/s to prevent footage corruption, so you’ll want to invest in a quality SSD that’s also capable of enduring hot and cold conditions as they happen in your region. We love the Samsung T7 SSD drives, available in 1TB and 2TB capacities.
The “Why” Behind the Change
Historically, Tesla limited dashcam storage to 60 minutes, likely due to a mix of privacy regulations (particularly in Europe) and processor overhead for managing large file structures on slow USB sticks.
However, as the majority of the fleet transitions to AI4 and AMD Ryzen MCUs, more cars than ever are capable of managing significantly higher data throughput. By linking retention to drive size, Tesla is finally rewarding owners who invest in high-end SSDs over the basic drive included in your Tesla.
Supported Vehicles
It’s not clear yet which vehicles or regions will support the dynamic recording duration feature.
Legacy Intel Atom owners may not be able to benefit from the full length of changes to Dynamic Recordings, but we’ll keep a close eye on this feature and let you know what to expect once it begins rolling out to users.
Release Date
The feature just started rolling out to employees in China. It may take a few weeks for this feature to roll out for Chinese users. However, we expect this feature, along with the new custom Automations feature, to roll out to other regions in a future Tesla update.
