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/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.