Yes – leaving aside the potential for an Orwellian future of road-bound inter-citizen surveillance, the dashcam’s powerful practicality is obvious.

I sincerely hope all events logged by C3s in the future are just as unexciting, but in a real shunt there’s no doubting the cam’s potential usefulness in logging how it unfolded, and why. I tried an emergency stop in the company car park and sure enough, it appeared in the app’s memory banks as a 90sec ‘event’. It’s triggered by a variety of sensors, including the braking system.

In the event of a bump, the camera automatically stores 90sec of footage: 30sec before the impact, and 1min after. Other than spamming newsfeeds with holiday roadtrip snapshots, for many the dashcam’s appeal lies in its ability to document an accident, like our Oscar-worthy staged collision above. The interface is just as easy as sharing a conventional photo from your phone – I managed to tweet a relatively picturesque bit of country road without difficulty – and you can set it to ‘autoshare’ shots automatically on selected channels. Once the car’s stationary, hit the share button and you can tweet, WhatsApp, Facebook or otherwise broadcast said picture via your social medium of choice, if you must. A broad 120° lens means the resultant snaps take in plenty of the car’s surroundings, with 2m pixels’ worth of zoom-ability and a GPS note of the exact location. To view the results you’ll need to download the corresponding app to your smartphone (Android or iPhone), and pair it to the camera – both tasks quick and easy. A click of a button mounted below the camera (a bit of a fumble to find while your driving) records a photo, and a longer press a video, up to 20sec long. Utilising the same forward-facing camera ahead of the interior mirror that the C3 uses for traffic sign recognition and lane departure warning, the system can store HD stills and videos on a 128Gb internal memory. Citroen is the first manufacturer to cut out the middleman and install one in its cars directly, fitting the new C3 with its ‘Connected-CAM’ system (standard on the top-spec Flair trim, an option on mid-grade Feel).

Insurers can now accept footage as evidence in claims, cam sales have thrived over Christmas, and social media is overflowing with windscreen-lensed mini movies.

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