Ask people why they turned parking mode off, and you get the same answer. They were worried about the battery. Usually they had one bad morning, or they read enough forum threads to decide it was not worth finding out.
It is a reasonable fear. Parking mode means your camera keeps drawing power from a car that is not running and not charging anything. Leave it long enough and a healthy battery becomes a flat one, and you find out in a car park at eleven at night.
The usual answers are workarounds
You can buy a separate battery pack so your camera never touches the car battery. You can hardwire with a voltage cut-off so the wiring gives up before your battery does. Or you can do what most people do, which is switch parking mode off and accept that your camera only works while you are driving.
All three work. None of them fixes the actual problem, which is that your camera has no idea what your battery is doing.
Why most cameras cannot tell
Most dash cams run off a regulated 5V supply, which is a stepped-down version of your car's power. It is a clean, simple way to run a camera, and it also means the camera never sees your battery. It knows it is getting power. It does not know whether taking more is a problem.
A voltage cut-off is the usual patch for that. It is a threshold someone picked, applied to every car regardless of the battery in it, and it only acts once things are already going wrong.
What Beam4 does instead
Beam4 runs on your car's 12V or 24V architecture directly via its OBD cable connection rather than through a 5V step-down, reading your battery voltage to manage power draw safely. Not against an assumption about cars in general, and not against a threshold set at the factory.
Nothing else in our range does this.
In practice, it changes what you do rather than what you know. You are not checking the app to see whether it is safe to leave the camera on. With direct battery monitoring and an internal 700mAh battery, you don't need to install a dedicated external battery pack to leave parking protection on safely. You leave parking protection on, and it stays on.
Beam4 also does not use a hardwire kit and does not need one. The OBD cable in the box powers it while you drive and while the car is parked, so the thing most people install specifically to make parking mode safe is not part of this at all.
Pair Beam4's intelligent battery protection with the LTE Protection Plan to receive instant impact alerts and live stream your parked car from anywhere.
Three questions worth asking
If you are shopping rather than reading, ask these about any camera you are considering.
Does it need a hardwire kit for parking mode? Does it protect your battery with a fixed
cut-off or by measuring? And does it need a separate battery pack to be safe to leave on?
Those three answers will tell you more about living with the camera than any resolution number.
Worth reading next: our guide to dash cam battery packs, if you are running a camera that needs one, and our explainer on buffered parking mode, which covers how cameras capture the moments before an impact rather than just after it.
Protect Your Car Without Battery Drain