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My car has uploaded 22GB over Wi-Fi in the past few days. Any idea what's up?

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I'm assuming you have a flash drive/SSD installed in your car for Sentry Mode/Dashcam, yes? How big is it? If so, that's about the only thing I can think of that would amount to that much data being uploaded at one time.

It's a 500GB SSD. I drove less than a hour each day this week so it would be a bunch of videos of the car charging in my garage and not nearly 22GB worth. The videos stored on the drive do go back about 6 months though.
 
Tesla doesn’t upload your dashcam or sentry videos. Not sure where that idea came from.

You experienced a set of events, conditions, or physical locations that Tesla is interested in. They regularly poll the fleet for the sorts of conditions they’re looking for, and if your car is a match, they upload the data for analysis or training the neural networks. You can change this in the “data sharing” screen under controls.
 
Well, if the car isn't uploading actual video footage (e.g., MP4 files), then it's using numerical data derived from said videos to report back to the factory. 22GB over several days is a lot of information. I personally don't think it's simply text (log) files. If it is, then somebody at the factory doesn't know how to compress data.

edit: Maybe this is where I got it in my head: Tesla offers 72-hour backup of Sentry Mode videos in data-collecting effort - Electrek
 
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Well, if the car isn't uploading actual video footage (e.g., MP4 files), then it's using numerical data derived from said videos to report back to the factory. 22GB over several days is a lot of information. I personally don't think it's simply text (log) files. If it is, then somebody at the factory doesn't know how to compress data.

edit: Maybe this is where I got it in my head: Tesla offers 72-hour backup of Sentry Mode videos in data-collecting effort - Electrek
Yes, it’s definitely video and other telemetry, I agree. I’m just trying to break the connection to thinking that big uploads like this are strictly related to sentry or dash cam storage. If Tesla is interested in telemetry from your car and you’ve opted into data sharing it will do this whether you have a USB storage device inserted or not.
 
I simply blocked my car's MAC address in the router as these uploads are adding a lot of lag while I'm trying to play World of Warcraft. Plus I'm on a metered connection, so if Elon needs any data he can have it, but he'll have to use the car's cell connection for that.
My car only gets WiFi access when there is a new software available.
 
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Not all at once but been seeing a lot of ~1 gb uploads the past 30 days as well.

Screenshot_20200817-181212_Google Wifi.jpg
 
Someone else had mentioned this idea in a post awhile back and I have observed same behavior: the car does not seem to recognize speed limit signs on the fly, but days later, it does. So I think the car may be uploading video such as signage. For example, I was driving on roads today that were clearly marked 100km/hr, but car thought it was 80. I once drove on a section of road that had temporarily reduced speed for construction and my car thought it was that reduced speed a week after construction finished.
 
Your upload comes from Data Sharing. Sentry mode is also uploaded up to Tesla and you can find this info on page 122 of the manual.

Note: Sentry Mode will also send recorded video to Tesla for temporary backup. Tesla may also use this footage to help enhance detection for Sentry Mode. You can enable or disable the collection of this video at any times via the "DATA SHARING" video clip in Controls > Safety & Security.”

This is one of the features I uncheck the 3 boxes to “No” As it’s also drains the battery if left on but once you enable Tesla Nav, it will force this Data Sharing for road information to Yes.

If you do a Speed Test from your browser (Speedtest.net) you will see that Tesla upped the bandwidth of the Upload to match your download speed as they need this data ASAP. I use Speedtest to also test my various WiFi configuration 2.4ghz & 5ghz and also different WiFi Antennas especially if you are parked out further in the drive way.

Fred
 
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