Glenn points to this article about battlefield use of high-storage-capacity videocameras.

I suspect that it won't be long before people start having these installed in their cars to quickly resolve disputes in accidents. It would be particularly helpful against people who deliberately cause fender benders for insurance fraud. I'd think that the insurance industry would start offering discounts for people who have them, and that eventually they'd become factory equipment.

I have thought about something like these for cars just for the purpose you have mentioned.

The only concern I have is will the 5th Amendment protect you from being incriminated by your own camera?

... along with the mandatory GPS equipment to tell them where you've been, and how fast you were going on any given stretch of road.

The product you describe has been sold for several years by a company called Drivecam. It's a digital video camera that writes to a flash memory card. When triggered by a jolt, the camera saves the last 30 seconds of buffered video.

Or as the joke goes:

When this, along with cockpit voice recorder technology was trialled in Alabama some years ago the most common last words were : "hey Bubba, hold my beer and watch this!"

There was a story on "All Things Considered" a few months ago talking to parent's who have installed such devices in the cars of their children. In a few cases, it proved that the kids were very much at fault in some accidents (non fatal).