The Owl Car Cam is one of the first 4G dashcams to hit the market, offering the ability to peer into the car in real time to check on the security of your vehicle. Plus Owl has another unique feature.
Owl is led by Andy Hodge, a veteran leader of iPod, iPhone, HoloLens and Dropcam. Owl launched the Car Cam the first of this month. It is a dual facing car camera that shows what’s happening in front of the car plus in the car cabin.
A notable feature of the Owl is that when you are driving you can say, “Okay, Presto,” and the dashcam will automatically send a clip of the latest video footage to your phone.
When there’s a security alert you can check in on a live stream of the car from any where. The camera also includes WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. It is user installable, and works with an OBD2 device plus a cable that can be hidden.
Since Owl is paired with your phone (iPhone only), it knows if it is you who is approaching the car, or someone else. If a stranger breaks into the vehicle, Owl’s LED floodlights turn on to scare off the thieves. Then you get an alert so you can watch a live feed. There’s also an intercom feature so you can literally tell the thief to go away.
On-board sensors automatically detect events while you’re away from the car. If someone dings a fender you can check the video footage and see what happened. And it continues recording during traffic stops if you want to record an interaction with law enforcement.
Owl captures HD quality video. It has a touch screen, a “powerful processor,” speakers, microphones and a security beacon and lights. The Owl Car Cam has a street price of $299 with service fees of $10/month, including up to 60 minutes of Live View use or up to 60 video tags.
Owl is based in Palo Alto, CA. It just received a Series A funding round of $18 million. Owl’s investors include defy.vc, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Sherpa Capital, Moment Ventures, Maniv Mobility, and CSAA Insurance Group, a AAA insurer.
Two other companies we know of that are planning 4G dashcams with live views of the car are Waylens and Raven. Both plan to ship the devices this quarter.
wrong decision based on past experience. a sale is a sale.
owl is going to make the same mistake that Harman made with their hud. just direct sales.
when are you all going to learn that you need us independent retailers to push your products.
doomed to failure.
g
Oh so you mean that Owl needs a lot of dealers across the country that don’t build value, demand discounts, and drive pricing down because they cannot sell on the merits of the Brand/feature/performance. They can also offer the product online and fulfill unauthorized websites so the price can plummet to a point that no one wants to offer the product? Most other industry’s have watched what the 12v industry has done to itself and are avoiding many of our sales practices.