Hindsight?

When towing a caravan, obviously you cannot use your central rear view mirror in your car. No hindsight, as it were.

This makes seeing directly behind the caravan almost impossible. However, modern technology has changed this and many caravans now come with a wired, or even wireless, reversing camera. They can also be added to a caravan after build, but obviously this may be a less integrated system.

As newbies to the towing world, we have thought that we should have one of these systems from the outset. It would make the whole visibility situation somewhat less confronting.

There are several ways to accomplish the viewing part of these systems. One is to install a separate screen on the dash, while some can be integrated with existing car reversing displays.

We are (currently) thinking a little differently

While surfing YouTube, we came across a new type of dash-cam for cars. These new camera systems attach a screen to your rear view mirror. When turned off, they act as a normal mirror, but when on they can display either the front or rear camera view. This can be advantageous even when not towing as the rear view can display what is behind you even if your window is blocked by passengers or loads. It also records both the front and rear camera images simultaneously in case of an incident, just like a regular dash-cam. It does this even when in “mirror” mode.

Below is a video of one such device:

My thought is that we buy one of these devices and two rear cameras. One camera for the car and another for the caravan. We would plug/unplug the appropriate rear camera when we hook/unhook the caravan. If two rear cameras are difficult to source, we may just buy two systems, as we have always planned to have both a reversing camera and a dash-cam, so the total cost won’t be too different from that. The second head unit would simply become a spare.

Tell me what you think.