In late December, I shared some musings on recent developments in bicycling safety and how these efforts might transfer to motorcycling safety—primarily video collection tech and evidence sharing in the case of incendents—after speaking to Craig Davis, founder of CyclistVideoEvidence.com. One of the companies I included in that story was Cycliq, an Australian brand that makes cool, innovative combination light and camera devices with unique features designed to ensure that any video captured when something goes wrong stays safe—”safe” meaning it isn’t overwritten by loop recording.
Cycliq describes their mission as “to make cycling safer and give you peace of mind when you’re on the bike.” The company just released their “best of 2018” video (there are monthly “best” videos too). The video effectively illustrates the value of their technology: it’s a hit reel of near misses and painful-looking crashes, some involving other vehicles and some that look like examples of good fodder for clowning one’s riding buddies after the ride. There’s a dipshit diesel coal-roller smoke-screening a cyclist, a near-dooring and a variety of other obvious harassment, including a “good guy with a gun”—basically Walt Kowalski in shorts, presumably in Florida and obviously missing some of the “old guy charm” that made Gran Torino simultaneously entertaining and chilling. There’s also livestock, a gaggle of geese, and a surprising number of kangaroos. Check it out:
Good times, right?
Cycliq makes two devices: the Fly6 CE taillight and Fly12 CE headlight. Both combine lighting and video recording and offer 135-degree wide angle video at 60 FPS or 30 FPS, 6-axis electronic image stabilization, “black box” incident protection, bike alarm, ANT+ and Bluetooth, Strava integration, USB-C fast charging, and of course water resistance and looping video. In the instances where the rider ate it, Cycliq’s devices would have locked the current and immediately preceding video segment, and then shut down after 30 minutes to ensure the footage isn’t overwritten by looping.
In the comments on that cycling safety developments story, both here and on Facebook, some expressed concern about privacy and pervasive peer-to-peer surveillance. As shown in Cycliq’s video, the idea isn’t to capture and share everything, but rather to make sure evidence is available in case of an incident.
Or in case your buddy loops it in a comical way.
Though both types of riders are vulnerable to inattentive and malicious driver behavior, cyclists are probably the subject of overt harassment more often than motorcyclists—sometimes by motorcyclists based on what I’ve occasionally observed on twisty roads shared by both groups of enthusiasts, not to mention the constant crying about three-foot laws. It’s also much easier to escape a situation on a motorbike, using the “drop a gear and disappear” approach that seems to be most popular amongst the macho moron attention-whore segment of motorcycling, who seem unnecessarily concerned with constantly informing the world just how “fast” they are by constantly talking about it.
As mentioned in my “why is this jerk talking about bicycles, not motorcycles” column, I have not previously joined the throngs of motorcyclists who refuse to ride without a camera running, but we’re about to get our hands on Innovv’s K2 dual-channel motorcycle dash camera system to give the always-on thing another try. That testing will hopefully not include me being hit by a car again, although man, that would be a seriously legit test, right?
Anyway, Max took a look at Innov’s C3 moto-dashcam back in 2015, and I’m eager to see how their latest system works. Stay tuned!