Most cars built in the last several years with automatic emergency braking or lane keep assist already have a forward-facing camera mounted near the rearview mirror. That hardware often sees the road well enough to act like a dashcam, but the owner usually cannot access the footage in any normal way.

The reason is simple: OEM ADAS camera systems are usually part of a larger supplier-controlled stack. The camera, compute logic, and storage behavior were not designed as a consumer-friendly recording system. Even if the hardware is physically there, the manufacturer typically does not expose it as a user-downloadable dashcam feature.

Tesla is the notable exception because it built a more user-facing video system around its vision hardware. Most other automakers did not. Their cameras were built to feed driver-assistance computers, not to provide a searchable library of clips to the driver.

That gap is part of what makes the comma ecosystem attractive: users can actually access their own driving footage and decide how it is handled, instead of relying on a sealed OEM black box.