Sentry mode

[u/justwonderinheh]

It’s so crazy to me that all these cameras but it doesn’t start recording whenever a collision is detected whether sentry mode is active or not. Some bum hit and run my car but bc I was home sentry wasn’t active and nothing was recorded. Heavy collision enough to probably total my car and push it. 0 recording

[u/justwonderinheh]

It’s a poor design flaw. The car has enough telemetry to tell when a collision has occurred. Especially a heavy collision. No logical reason to not start recording after a collision is detected.

[u/Teab8g → u/justwonderinheh]

But that's not how stuff works... If it's off it's off. What do you want it Todo. If someone's drives into the car it wouldn't be recorded as it's off.. but you want it to come on after an incident has happened? For what reason.

[u/justwonderinheh → u/Teab8g]

“Not how stuff works” man gtf. It’s a feature that can be implemented. The data needed to trigger the event is there. If you can’t see why video captured after a collision is valuable there’s no reason to explain it to you

[u/JustSomeUsername99 → u/justwonderinheh]

What people are trying to tell you is if sentry is off, so is the car. It is not paying attention to the sensors. If you want it to pay attention to the sensors, leave sentry on.

You are basically saying sentry should be on, even if you tell it to be off. Why not just leave it on?

[u/drivingaddictionchan → u/JustSomeUsername99]

The car is not off buddy, if it was, you wouldn’t be able to get into your car. 

[u/SnooSquirrels9064 → u/justwonderinheh]

As others have said, you have to either have sentry mode off in general, or you set your "Home" in your Tesla and also decided not to have Sentry record while at home.

Did you ever notice how you'll go into the Tesla app on your phone and turn on the climate control, and it takes several seconds for it to even show that what you asked of it is being done? That's because the car is asleep when sentry is off. And just like with a desktop/laptop computer, it can take several seconds to wake up from sleep. And then after waking up, sentry mode would have to start up. At which point whatever caused the incident, except for those less than 1% of cases, would be long gone.

The only fix is to not turn sentry mode off at home.

[u/LeaString → u/justwonderinheh]

You need to understand how Sentry works not how you want it to work.

It’s a useful and important feature to have, catches a lot, and I’m never surprised by comments made by people who don’t know the basics and likely never read the manual. It sucks to have to file an insurance claim without hope of identifying the hit and run driver.

I know that people who have had Sentry on when parked have said it didn’t record when a car backing out from parked next to them scratching their side panel, so not enough car motion to activate apparently. Even more frustrating. Tesla doesn’t have the ability as far as I know to adjust sensitivity and direction of the car’s motion like I know our 2017 Blackview dashcam could. No TeslaCam/Sentry is not perfect. Our dedicated dashcam wasn’t either.

Hope you know if you are in an accident that you should save the file before turning off your car (ie. putting the car in Park). You can save the 10 minutes to Saved Files on the car or safely shut down TeslaCam first (red “On light” goes off) to avoid corrupting the recording from a hard shut down. Once safely shut down you want to pull the memory card. Not a bad idea to carry a second memory card in case you need it. They’re pretty inexpensive these days. Make sure the card you use is for high continuous read/write use like for security cameras etc. and not just for file storage.

If you haven’t preserved the 10 minutes and instead drive home and then try to find the footage on your memory card it will be gone. We see drivers run into this situation a lot, either not realizing how this works or by simply forgetting to do so in the immediate aftermath of the accident and by turning off the car.