Sentry Mode - Depressing how many people open doors into the car

[rincewind]

Well, I found the lady online as it was a company car with her company logo and website fully visible. I also caught her littering. So yeah, I’m going to file a report and if she doesn't contact me out of her own goodness (she's an "alchemist in the natural world" so not sure how much goodness there will be..), I'll at least know how to reach her.

I'd be contacting her company directly. In my view it could be argued that her actions are bringing the company into disrepute. They may, of course, also not give a monkeys.

 

[Durzel]

I get to £788/year @30p unit price if car was sat without being driven. Assuming 300W for car being kept awake.

.3kW x £0.30 x 24h x 365d

300W is based on general consensus for car not being standby. Personally I think it’s a little high, maybe 200-300W.

£0.30 is a ball park non discounted unit price - was worse in uk in last 12 months. Some won’t have access to home charging so may be significantly worse.

Assuming car is driven for 1 hr twice a day, that is ~90% when car would be on sentry not standby.

So about £700/year

Even halving that, it’s significant when compared to a decent dedicated dashcam albeit with no view of doors.

I'd say that Sentry is worth having on in public places. Guaranteed the first day you decide to turn it off to save battery will be the day you get a nasty ding and no note.

I don't really know why Sentry consumes as much energy as it does. Theoretically it need only run 4 cameras for it, and they don't necessarily need to be at full FPS. it seems to me like many things a bit of an afterthought as a feature - the cameras are there so the minimum viable product is just to leave them running "as is" if the customer wants, and call it "Sentry Mode".

I'm grateful that it exists, and I leave it on in public, but at the same time I am aware that it is not infallible and can miss things whilst capturing the mundanity of people just walking past your car. In my experience if I park in a supermarket I'll come back to the car having 10+ events which are people just walking past the front, or whatever.

 

[WllXM]

I get to £788/year @30p unit price if car was sat without being driven. Assuming 300W for car being kept awake.

.3kW x £0.30 x 24h x 365d

300W is based on general consensus for car not being standby. Personally I think it’s a little high, maybe 200-300W.

£0.30 is a ball park non discounted unit price - was worse in uk in last 12 months. Some won’t have access to home charging so may be significantly worse.

Assuming car is driven for 1 hr twice a day, that is ~90% when car would be on sentry not standby.

So about £700/year

Even halving that, it’s significant when compared to a decent dedicated dashcam albeit with no view of doors.

With Sentry disabled at home but active everywhere else, Tessie tells me that the car used around 50kWh while idle in the last 30 days. So almost a full battery, but for a cost of £8 quid. So less than a £100 annually for me.

Recently caught a driver who did a horrible parking job and scratched my bumper. Got the footage to send to their insurance, so this has probably saved me thousands ££. Paid for itself quickly enough...

 

[WannabeOwner]

While an interesting feature I’m pretty sure most of us only use at the beginning of ownership, I’ve done the math and sentry costs me about 2000$ per year in electricity

I don't need it at home (got CCTV there) so for me its just in public places.

Have to remember to turn it on, when needed though ...

I use TeslaFi to do that in all my normal / recurring haunts. I still put it on manually (good habit), but if I forget TeslaFi will do it shortly after I park.

it seems to me like many things a bit of an afterthought as a feature

But it was an afterthought I'm figuring you've been around that long to know, so at risk of Granny + Eggs: cameras were originally AP-use-only and some bright spark (I assume) discovered that they could route the footage through to the centre console USB socket. The downside was that the power consumption was horrendous. They did improve that (to merely "bad"), and maybe we will find that Highland, or some future model, has done some re-engineering to reduce the power consumption even more.

I reckon that if power consumption is a problem (e.g. needs to be on 24/7) then a 3rd party DashCam is likely to be a better answer - they have tiny power consumption. But I dunno if they can see a car-park door-ding

 

[_MJF_]

I get to £788/year @30p unit price if car was sat without being driven. Assuming 300W for car being kept awake.

.3kW x £0.30 x 24h x 365d

300W is based on general consensus for car not being standby. Personally I think it’s a little high, maybe 200-300W.

Mine was left with sentry on for 24 hours almost-exactly over the weekend, and lost 9%, so on a 2022 M3 RWD I reckon that's ~225 W.

So, if it's at home for 90% of the time on a rate of 30p/kWh then that's ~£600 per year. At that point for many a CCTV system for the home would pay for itself before too long, as that would provide much better coverage and also provide cover when the car's not there. But, the CCTV system will take some power, maybe ~50 W. Either way it's got to be worth thinking about.

I don't need it at home (got CCTV there) so for me its just in public places.

Have to remember to turn it on, when needed though ...

I use TeslaFi to do that in all my normal / recurring haunts. I still put it on manually (good habit), but if I forget TeslaFi will do it shortly after I park.

Isn't it easier to set sentry to normally be on but then exclude Home (and Work if appropriate) ? That seems to work a treat.

 

[Durzel]

I don't need it at home (got CCTV there) so for me its just in public places.

Have to remember to turn it on, when needed though ...

I use TeslaFi to do that in all my normal / recurring haunts. I still put it on manually (good habit), but if I forget TeslaFi will do it shortly after I park.



But it was an afterthought I'm figuring you've been around that long to know, so at risk of Granny + Eggs: cameras were originally AP-use-only and some bright spark (I assume) discovered that they could route the footage through to the centre console USB socket. The downside was that the power consumption was horrendous. They did improve that (to merely "bad"), and maybe we will find that Highland, or some future model, has done some re-engineering to reduce the power consumption even more.

I reckon that if power consumption is a problem (e.g. needs to be on 24/7) then a 3rd party DashCam is likely to be a better answer - they have tiny power consumption. But I dunno if they can see a car-park door-ding

That’s the problem, regular dashcams typically record front and maybe back, for the purposes of helping with accident/insurance disputes. They won’t capture door dings etc which is to be fair Sentry’s pièce de résistance.

The CCTV I have at home consists of several bullet cameras all powered off PoE. If they can record 24/7 at a high enough resolution using a max of 30W (in reality I suspect they’re more like 7-11W because I have them plugged into a regular consumer-grade hub that has basic PoE, not PoE+ or anything fancy) then I’m sure the Tesla ones ought to be able to do the same. Even factoring in the Mac Mini that is doing the actual recording, that only uses a max of 30W as well. It might even be possible to reduce the power usage with a RaspberryPI etc if I were bothered enough to try (the Mac is used as a media server too).

It’s possible the lion share of the power consumption comes from the motion detection. If that’s the case I’d be happy to simply continuously record raw footage from the relevant cameras with no additional processing while the car is awake until either a disk capacity threshold is reached or a reasonable period of time elapses before it starts overwriting. I can sift through it myself at my leisure if I notice damage. Disk space is cheap.

 

[WannabeOwner]

Isn't it easier to set sentry to normally be on but then exclude Home (and Work if appropriate) ? That seems to work a treat.

Yes, but I would park at the airport for a week and forget to turn it off ... so I prefer to turn it on "manually" (and run the risk that I forget) - and have TeslaFi (in my case) back me up

 

[QuanTim]

How did it pan out?

I'd be contacting her company directly. In my view it could be argued that her actions are bringing the company into disrepute. They may, of course, also not give a monkeys.

Oh cheers for asking! Actually I just got the car back from the Tesla body shop yesterday lol.

The lady was good about it once I reached out to via her company website. She called straight away and got her insurance involved and they sorted it out from there.

Only few snags were that Tesla were reluctant to accept her insurance company (esure) because they have poor history of paying the bills apparently so it took about 5 weeks of back and forth to get that authorised with Tesla and esure. Also the rental car I got was absolute sh!te (esure again) so it did make me long for my car back which was a nice feeling.

Tesla charged the car up to full which was a nice touch too.

 

[Wattsisname]

Oh cheers for asking! Actually I just got the car back from the Tesla body shop yesterday lol.

The lady was good about it once I reached out to via her company website. She called straight away and got her insurance involved and they sorted it out from there.

Only few snags were that Tesla were reluctant to accept her insurance company (esure) because they have poor history of paying the bills apparently so it took about 5 weeks of back and forth to get that authorised with Tesla and esure. Also the rental car I got was absolute sh!te (esure again) so it did make me long for my car back which was a nice feeling.

Tesla charged the car up to full which was a nice touch too.

Wow! Five + months to get it sorted. Anyway, glad it hear that at last you have your Y back. Interesting comment about esure; I was with them for a year but following a ludicrous renewal quote, I went back to Admiral.

 

[pjuk]

Maybe the other round for me - I've almost had someone take out the falcon wing doors. They decided to reverse into a space whilst they were closing. Fortunately I stopped them closing in time. Funny thing was that when they got out they banged their heads on the semi-closed doors