Does Load Shedding Affect Your GPS Tracker or Dash Cam?

It’s a fair question to ask in South Africa: if the power goes out on your street, does your car tracker go dark with it? The short answer is no — but there’s a real, more specific vulnerability worth understanding, especially during extended stages of load shedding.

Why your car’s electrical system doesn’t care about load shedding

A vehicle tracker — whether it’s hardwired into the car’s electrical system or plugged into the OBD port — draws its power from your car’s own battery, which is charged by the alternator whenever the engine runs. That circuit has nothing to do with Eskom’s grid. Load shedding cuts mains electricity to homes and businesses; it doesn’t touch the 12V system inside your vehicle. The same goes for a hardwired dash cam: it runs off the car, not your wall socket, so a stage 4 outage at your house has zero effect on whether it keeps recording.

The real vulnerability: cellular network coverage

Where load shedding actually can affect a tracker is one step removed from the device itself. GPS trackers report their location over the mobile network, and cell towers rely on backup batteries to stay online during outages. Under normal, shorter load shedding stages, that backup capacity usually holds. Under extended or back-to-back outages, some towers do run their batteries down, creating brief local gaps in cellular coverage — not because your tracker failed, but because the network it reports through momentarily did.

What to look for if this worries you

• Data buffering: does the tracker store and resync location points after a network gap, or simply lose them?
• Dual-network SIMs: some trackers use a SIM that can switch between mobile networks, reducing the odds that one operator’s local tower outage blacks you out entirely.
• App notification delays: your own phone’s data connection during load shedding can delay you seeing an alert even when the tracker itself worked correctly and logged the event on time.

None of this is a reason to skip a tracker — it’s a reason to ask your installer what happens during a coverage gap before you buy, not after.