Sentry massively let me down.

[WilliamG]

So, I had just gotten my TapTes dock thingy, so I had been waiting for an opportunity to test out Sentry with it - you know, just to cover all bases and make sure everything is 100%. Don’t want to have an incident to then find out it was never working!

Anyway, went out for dinner last night, parked in between two cars on the street. Figured one of the cars would leave while I was at dinner, which would trigger a Sentry event so I could pull the drive after and check all is good.

Yep, that’s exactly what happened. One Sentry event when the car behind me left (no damage). I pulled the drive when I got home, and it had saved the last 10 minutes before the event, but just as the car was backing up to pull out of the space, that’s it. Recording is done. So literally a second or two before this driver might have hit me, there’s no more recording! What the heck?

So I have 9:50 seconds of a parked car behind me, and then 10 seconds of the guy getting into his car, backing up, and then STARTING to pull out. If he had hit my car it would have happened literally 2 seconds after the 10 minute saved data ended.

Ugh.

 

[Nogasmn]

If he had hit you I think it would have triggered sentry mode again and it would have continued to record. Not 100% sure but it makes sense.

 

[WilliamG]

If he had hit you I think it would have triggered sentry mode again and it would have continued to record. Not 100% sure but it makes sense.

I thought of that, but I really doubt it. If he had just gently scraped my bumper as he left, I really don’t think Sentry would have picked it up. In any case, it really needed to record past where the incident occurred rather than nine minutes and 50 seconds before of literally nothing, and only 10 seconds of the actual incident.

 

[Big Earl]

I'd love to see 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the event.

 

[Puddles]

I'd love to see 5 minutes before and 5 minutes after the event.

People (I include me in that category) have been begging for this for quite some time.

 

[Need]

Your sentry mode event was not trigger by the "car". It was triggered by the guy walking close to your car before getting into his car. That must have happened toward the end of the minute so sentry mode saved off the minute of the "event of the guy passing next to your car" and the previous 9 minutes. If the guy did not not get into his car and hang around looking at your car, it would have saved those clips too. Sentry event usually does not trigger by a car unless the car hits your car.

 

[Watts_Up]

I wonder if you can make Sentry silent, I mean not having the flashing head lights and
the HAL 9000 "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" popping up on the screen?
I would prefer having a more discrete recording like when my Blackvue dash is recording.

 

[Supermanwoot]

I wish that sentry put a mark on the videos of the actual time of the event. I have to zoom through 10 minutes of video to find the actual event and sometimes it me, myself just walking to my car.

Would be nice to have the actual event videos tagged in some way

 

[WilliamG]

I wish that sentry put a mark on the videos of the actual time of the event. I have to zoom through 10 minutes of video to find the actual event and sometimes it me, myself just walking to my car.

Would be nice to have the actual event videos tagged in some way

Agreed. The ACTUAL trigger should be labeled as such. A little bewildering it's not. At least give us a starting point, Tesla!

 

[Knightshade]

I wish that sentry put a mark on the videos of the actual time of the event. I have to zoom through 10 minutes of video to find the actual event and sometimes it me, myself just walking to my car.

Would be nice to have the actual event videos tagged in some way

When sentry alerts it moves the previous 10 minutes of footage to the saved sentry folder.

So you already know the first at least 8 (and usually but not always 9) minutes are going to be useless to you if looking for the triggering event.

 

[WilliamG]

When sentry alerts it moves the previous 10 minutes of footage to the saved sentry folder.

So you already know the first at least 8 (and usually but not always 9) minutes are going to be useless to you if looking for the triggering event.

Which, obviously, makes little sense. Why save ~10 minutes before something happened, and then nothing after it happened?

 

[Knightshade]

Which, obviously, makes little sense. Why save ~10 minutes before something happened, and then nothing after it happened?

It saves footage after too, assuming there's still stuff "going on"

99% of the time there isn't though because it's just something like "Dude walked past you to get into his car"

So as soon as he gets in, it's not in alert mode anymore, and nothing further is saved.

 

[SMAlset]

Which, obviously, makes little sense. Why save ~10 minutes before something happened, and then nothing after it happened?

So it comes in handy for more than car accidents. Your post shows me that you don’t fully understand how TeslaCam/Sentry work and you should read the manual on it.

Sentry was requested by owners to help catch the break-ins perps that Tesla owners were experiencing in the SF Bay area. Break ins are really a problem here with any car but Teslas have been heavily targeted probably because the perps think they might have valuable electronics left in them. Basically you want to see who’s snooping around your car, get some good descriptive video of them, maybe even see what car they came in. Sentry has been in the news catching a number of these perps.

Also it has been great at catching creeps who like to key cars getting video of them approaching the car with their key out and running it along the side of the car. Believe me, you want the extra footage showing them approaching and doing the act.

Of course it can catch an accident as well but best to learn how it gets triggered. Many people go to save a video too soon and interrupt the 1-minute recording that the accident occurred in and cut off the video before it has finished that minute, when they most need that footage.

 

[Trevor B]

It didn't massively let you down

Get a grip.

 

[WilliamG]

It didn't massively let you down

Get a grip.

Thank you for your contribution. Really inciteful.

 

[WilliamG]

So it comes in handy for more than car accidents. Your post shows me that you don’t fully understand how TeslaCam/Sentry work and you should read the manual on it.

Sentry was requested by owners to help catch the break-ins perps that Tesla owners were experiencing in the SF Bay area. Break ins are really a problem here with any car but Teslas have been heavily targeted probably because the perps think they might have valuable electronics left in them. Basically you want to see who’s snooping around your car, get some good descriptive video of them, maybe even see what car they came in. Sentry has been in the news catching a number of these perps.

Also it has been great at catching creeps who like to key cars getting video of them approaching the car with their key out and running it along the side of the car. Believe me, you want the extra footage showing them approaching and doing the act.

Of course it can catch an accident as well but best to learn how it gets triggered. Many people go to save a video too soon and interrupt the 1-minute recording that the accident occurred in and cut off the video before it has finished that minute, when they most need that footage.

I understand exactly how Sentry works. I just don’t agree with how it works. I should post the video. You’ll then see it makes literally zero sense what it did last night. I can’t think of a single time that someone walking past my car, and getting into their car behind me and driving away - that WHOLE thing hasn’t been captured. Last night was not one of these situations, obviously.

So if you’re saying that it was working as intended last night, then Sentry hasn’t worked correctly the rest of the time. You can’t have it both ways.

 

[Trevor B]

Thank you for your contribution. Really inciteful.

Any time. Might want to look up what "massively let me down" actually means. Exaggerate much?

 

[WilliamG]

Any time. Might want to look up what "massively let me down" actually means. Exaggerate much?

There's no exaggeration. If my car had been clipped by the vehicle leaving, which was more than possible given how close he was to me, then it wouldn't have been saved.

It's fine - we can agree to disagree, but if you have nothing useful to contribute to the actual discussion, maybe don't bother saying anything at all?

 

[Need]

Which, obviously, makes little sense. Why save ~10 minutes before something happened, and then nothing after it happened?

It does that because Sentry Mode was using existing DashCam functions so they could have minimal code rewrite. The DashCam saved off the last 10 min of the 1 hour buffer when you press the DashCam icon. So for Sentry Mode, when cameras see a person near your car it does exactly the same thing as if you physically press the DashCam icon except to different named folder for Sentry Mode.

It makes sense for DashCam to saved off 10 min as after an accident, you may have forgotten to press the DashCam icon until you pull off to the side of road. The 10 min was there to make sure you have enough time to get to a safe place before messing with your screen. It doesn't really make sense for Sentry mode but hey the code is already there for re-use.

 

[ilyak]

TeslaCam in general, including Sentry, is unfortunately not reliable enough at this point to actually replace a dashcam. I was in a minor accident last week (no airbags, no pack disconnect, no MCU reboot or any other indication of power being cut - full story and a picture of the damage here). Unfortunately, I did not get the accident on dashcam - TeslaCam failed to write the footage for the critical ~27 seconds. Here're the timestamps from the video files that I was able to scrape off the thumb drive; that jump between the one minute segment that ended at :23 and next one that ended at :50 is when I got hit.

I've read about this happening before - Green recently published a series of tweets on missing footage after accidents here - and planned to buy a real dashcam but, well, didn’t. So I guess this is a PSA: learn from my mistakes, not from insurance liability investigations.