Google might let you use your Pixel phone as a dashcam

You may already own your next dashcam and you don’t even know it yet.

9to5Google(opens in a new tab) analyzed some unreleased code in the Personal Safety Android app and managed to enable a new, unannounced “Dashcam” feature for Pixel phones. The idea is that you mount your Pixel on your car’s dashboard, at which point it can record your journey while you either continue to use the phone or lock the screen.

It’s true that you could technically already do this by mounting your phone and manually recording videos, but there are a couple of upsides to using this new dashcam feature.

For one, there’s a setting to automatically start and stop recording when the Pixel connects to a certain Bluetooth access point, which would be your car in this case. Recordings are also deleted after three days unless you manually decide to keep them around, which should save on storage space.

As 9to5Google noted in its report, this feature seems like it’s already pretty fully baked and ready to go. Perhaps it’s just a matter of weeks or even days before we hear more about it.