Superslow Decal and Stealth Dash Cam

TL;DR hiding in plain sight

Since a visible dash cam offers no advantage over one that's hidden in the shadows, I've always tried to keep mine as low-profile as possible.

Let's begin with the rear one : I covered its lateral blue LED with black tape, done.

On the front, my strategy is to divert the eyes to a sticker on the centre of the windscreen, covering the foot of the rearview mirror at the same time. A 2024 Static Rally sticker did a fine job for about a year, it was briefly replaced by a Distinguished Gentlemen Drive one. Both had basically black text on a white background with red accents that didn't exactly match the car's livery.

I finally went with a Superslow decal, a white-on-black parody of the Superdry logo, with the Japanese text on top. Where the original says "extremely dry", the one I got reads "extremely slow car". It also features a quirky "turbo snail" character with a yellow body. I chose the 13x3cm version, that size works well. The white base is actually reflective.

The joke comes from the JDM car scene, where slammed cars with massive "stutututu" turbos that throw flames are comically slow.

I consider my 658cc 'kei' Suzuki machine to be in that category, with its monstrous blow-off valve noise and 170 kph top speed, constrained by the rev limiter. Moreover, Superdry is in itself a British company with make-believe Japanese connotations. How fitting.

While applying that new decal, I realized that the body of the front dash cam has a slate-grey finish, rather than flat black. That itself is a good thing to make it blend. I know from my astronomy years that dark grey is a better colour than black to coat the inside of a telescope. Preferably structured.

But there's even better than that : black felt. The old-school version of Vantablack (the famous nano-tube coating with 99.965% absorption). To the surprise of absolutely no one at this point, I happen to have a roll of adhesive black felt wrap at home.

So I got the camera on the dining room table and wrapped the front in black felt. Now it appears as a black void in front of the relatively reflective rearview mirror.

As I write this 4 (winter) months after the fact, I see that the adhesive remains in place on the curved surface. I would have expected it to peel at the edges.

In the bottom picture, notice that it was done on the day I got the car back from the garage with its black stripes. The job on the scuttle was so poor that I ripped it off immediately and went back to House of Speed to sort that out with the team rather than relying on the subcontractor that did the job for them. The wipers were positioned "up" to free the scuttle area. Which in turn shows how the dash cam lens is located right at the limit of the area cleared by the wiper on the driver side.