Original research · Schmicko
Chinese brands are now the most common new car getting a dash cam fitted — and almost all of them are electric
An analysis of 4,064 mobile dash cam installations across Sydney and Melbourne, and what it says about who is buying Australia’s new cars.
Key findings
- Chinese-brand share of 2026 installations on near-new cars
- 33.5%
- Japanese-brand share of the same installations
- 28.8%
- Chinese-brand customers driving an electric or hybrid vehicle
- 86.2%
- Median age of a Chinese-brand vehicle at installation
- 0 yrs
- Median age of all other brands at installation
- 3 yrs
- Installations analysed
- 4,064
Among brand-new cars getting a dash cam fitted in Australia this year, the largest single group no longer wears a Japanese badge.
Across 792 installations carried out in 2026 on vehicles aged zero to one year, Chinese brands accounted for 33.5% — ahead of Japanese brands on 28.8%, Korean on 17.4% and European on 12.0%. BYD alone made up 13.0%, more than Toyota’s 9.9%.
Five years ago, four of the ten most common marques in that list were either absent from the Australian market or selling in negligible numbers.
The electric connection
Almost every one of them is electrified
The Chinese-brand story and the electric-vehicle story are difficult to separate here, because in this dataset they are largely the same customer.
of Chinese-brand customers drive an electric or hybrid vehicle, against 28.5% of everyone else.
The concentration holds at marque level where sample sizes allow it: all 48 BYD owners in the sample drive an electrified vehicle. Other Chinese marques show the same pattern but on samples too small to report individually.
Timing
They also fit them far earlier
The second difference is when the camera goes in. Across 2,558 installations in 2025 and 2026 where vehicle year was recorded, owners of Chinese-brand vehicles had a camera fitted at a median vehicle age of zero. The car had not yet had a birthday.
Owners of established brands behaved almost in reverse. Median vehicle age at installation was three years. Only 21.9% were fitted in the same model year, against 63.0% of Chinese-brand vehicles, and 44.4% were on cars four years or older, against 2.3%.
At the extremes the spread is wider still. BYD, Chery, Geely and Zeekr all sit at a median of zero years, while Honda, Mercedes and Volkswagen owners wait a median of five. Some of that reflects how long each brand has been sold in Australia rather than how their owners behave.
Why
The waiting period explains most of it
The obvious objection to the timing gap is fleet age. BYD only launched in Australia in 2022, so there are no ten-year-old Chinese-brand SUVs to fit a camera to. That accounts for a good deal of the raw difference and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
What it does not explain is why those buyers arrive so early, and the reason has less to do with the cars than with how they are bought.
“Most of these bookings arrive before the car does. Someone’s bought a BYD or a Zeekr, there’s a month or two before delivery, and they use that window to line up the dash cam. By the time we’re in the driveway the car might have a hundred kilometres on it.
“At that point the driver wants to protect their new purchase — paint protection, tints, dash cam. And because most of these are EVs, that cohort tends to be tech-driven. They already understand why they want a dash cam. It’s just a question of which one.”
Dave Bui, Founder, Schmicko
Chinese-brand vehicles in Australia are overwhelmingly ordered rather than bought from stock, and most are shipped, which means a lead time measured in weeks or months. That waiting period appears to be where the accessory decisions get made. Buyers of established brands, by contrast, frequently arrive with a car bought used and owned for some years before an incident or a near miss prompts the call.
The control
Testing it against new cars only
Restricting the analysis to near-new vehicles removes the fleet-age problem, because every car in the comparison is the same age.
On that basis Chinese brands took 33.5% of 2026 installations, against approximately 27% of Australian new-vehicle sales in the first half of the year as reported through VFACTS. That figure covers all sales including fleet and commercial purchases, which are weighted toward vehicles this business rarely sees, so it should be read as indicative context rather than a like-for-like benchmark.
The trajectory is steeper than the market itself: 1.2% of near-new installations in 2023, 19.4% in 2025, and 33.5% so far in 2026.
Buying behaviour
New-car owners arrive without a camera
Booking records point the same way. Customers with near-new vehicles are markedly more likely to need a camera supplied rather than bringing their own — consistent with an installation being arranged before the vehicle is in the driveway, and before the owner has settled on a product.
| Vehicle age | Brought their own | Needed one supplied |
|---|---|---|
| 0–1 years | 44.9% | 55.1% |
| 2–3 years | 63.5% | 36.5% |
| 4+ years | 57.1% | 42.9% |
The pattern is sharper among electric and hybrid vehicles, where 57.6% of owners needed a camera supplied, against 42.2% of petrol and diesel owners.
Someone who has owned a car for four years and finally decides to fit a dash cam has had four years to form a view on which one. Someone arranging an installation while their new car is still on a ship is settling the whole question in a single decision.
Market context
A second reading on how fast the market has turned
Because a car must be sold before anything can be fitted to it, installation records offer an independent check on Australia’s changing vehicle mix.
Chinese-brand share of all installations has risen from 1.6% in 2022 to 17.7% in 2026. BYD went from a single installation in 2024 to 42 in 2025 and 115 in the first eight months of 2026.
| Marque | Share of near-new 2026 installations |
|---|---|
| BYD | 13.0% |
| Toyota | 9.9% |
| Hyundai | 8.5% |
| Kia | 8.5% |
| Mazda | 7.7% |
| Geely | 4.6% |
| Chery | 4.0% |
| Zeekr | 3.2% |
| Subaru | 3.0% |
| MG | 2.9% |
Specification
Front-only cameras have fallen out of favour
Separately from the brand question, the specification Australians buy has shifted. Single-channel installations have fallen from around 15% of bookings in 2022 to under 8% in 2026. The default purchase is now a two-channel system covering front and rear, with three-channel systems — adding an interior-facing camera, favoured by rideshare and delivery drivers — more than doubling their share over the same period.
“Front-only fizzled because people worked out that accidents don’t only happen from the front. There’s also the logic that if you’re going to set your car up with one surveillance system, you may as well get one that does the job properly.
“We’re not saying go and buy a five-channel system. But think about how annoyed you’d be if something happened and you missed it because you’d only fitted a single channel. If you’re going to install it, do it right rather than twice.”
Dave Bui, Founder, Schmicko
What it means for buyers
For anyone waiting on a new vehicle, the practical point is that the waiting period is the easiest time to arrange an installation — the car goes into service already fitted, rather than the job being remembered after an incident makes it urgent.
Schmicko carries out mobile installations at the customer’s home or workplace across dash cam installation in Sydney, dash cam installation in Melbourne and Perth.
Cite this research
Journalists and researchers are welcome to reproduce these figures and charts with attribution.
Schmicko (2026). Dash cam installation patterns in Australia, 2022–2026. Analysis of 4,064 mobile installations. https://schmicko.com.au/research/dash-cam-statistics-australia/
Chart files, aggregate data tables and additional breakdowns are available on request — media@schmicko.com.au
Methodology and limitations
Dataset. 4,064 mobile dash cam installations carried out by Schmicko between 22 April 2022 and 14 August 2026, at customer premises. The great majority were performed in Sydney and Melbourne, with a smaller number in Perth. This is a single-operator dataset drawn from one mobile installation business concentrated in two capital cities, and is not a representative sample of the Australian market.
Vehicle age is calculated as installation year minus vehicle model year; a 2026 vehicle fitted in 2026 has an age of zero.
Coverage. Vehicle-age analysis covers 2022–23 and 2025–26. Records from 2024 are excluded from age-based analysis owing to an inconsistency in how vehicle year was recorded that year. All other analysis includes 2024.
Completeness. Vehicle year is unrecorded for 466 records (11.5%), concentrated in 2025. Records for established brands are somewhat more likely to be incomplete than those for Chinese brands, reflecting the introduction of a revised booking form during the period. A further 5.7% of near-new 2026 records could not be classified by brand origin owing to spelling variation in the source data.
Sensitivity. The 33.5% near-new figure for 2026 ranges from 28.8% to 34.8% under worst- and best-case assumptions about records with no vehicle year. The finding holds across that range.
Market share comparison. VFACTS, administered by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, reports all new-vehicle sales including fleet and commercial purchases. Private-buyer share of Chinese brands may differ. Figures cited cover the first half of 2026, when the total Australian new-vehicle market was 606,793 units.
Camera-supply and electrification figures derive from booking questions introduced in May 2026, giving a sample of 549 records. No trend can be shown for these measures. The 2–3 year age band comprises 52 records and is the smallest cell reported.
Minimum cell size. Figures are reported only where the underlying sample supports them. Marque-level electrification is reported for BYD alone (n=48); other Chinese marques in that sample range from 4 to 19 records and are described in aggregate rather than individually.
Channel-mix figures should be read as indicative. The booking form’s description of the single-channel option changed during the period, which affects comparability across years; the direction of the shift is clear, the precise magnitude less so.
The delivery-wait explanation is an operator observation. Booking records capture the date of enquiry, not the date of vehicle delivery, so the waiting period is not directly measurable. It is offered as the most plausible mechanism for the observed pattern, supported by the camera-supply figures.
Brand classification. Chinese brands are defined as BYD, Chery, GWM, Haval, Geely, Zeekr, MG, Omoda, Jaecoo, LDV, GAC, Leapmotor, Deepal, Polestar, Aion and XPeng. Tesla is classified as non-Chinese despite most Australian-delivered vehicles being built in Shanghai, as the analysis concerns brand choice rather than country of manufacture.
No individual customer, vehicle or address is identified. All figures are aggregates.
About Schmicko
Founded in 2018, Schmicko is a mobile car care business serving Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. Over that time the company has been recognised as an industry leader in the Australian automotive space, reflected in a five-year run as Local Business Awards finalists and, more recently, finalist status at the Australian Small Business Champion Awards. Services span car detailing, paint protection, window tinting, roof lining repair and dash cam installation, all carried out at the customer’s home or workplace.
Media enquiries: Dave Bui, Founder — media@schmicko.com.au. Phone contact available on request.
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