Sentry mode wishes

[ScoobyDoo82]

Hello all!

I’m sure that this topic has been beat to death already but I haven’t seen any posts about it in at least a year so I’d like to hear the current opinion...

Sentry mode (as well as dashcam) is one of the coolest features of our cars but it is wildly not used to its full potential. I understand that there are various limitations to consider- but then again.. not really. Everything I’m wishing for is entirely possible with the current hardware specs - my ideas would only require a software update.

The sentry “laser” shouldn’t be the only alert for when it logs a flag. It should let out a sound as well. A simple soft courtesy honk or even a sound effect from the PWS/Boombox would help a lot. It might even notify me (the owner). Which brings up my next point. Sentry should notify you when it records something and not only if your alarm is activated. Just like “your windows are down” a “sentry mode just recorded an event” would be an awesome addition to the notification side of the Tesla app.

With regards to the app, why can’t the car send a little clip (or even a still image) of the event? Moreover, with LTE coverage and all why can’t we view footage in the app? The car can surely stream it to the phone. I don’t understand this. Bandwidth is not the issue, we stream 4K videos to our phones no problem.

TL/DR:

Enhanced notifications, enhanced alerts, and the ability to view footage from the phone would be a great addition and is entirely possible with today’s tech.

 

[AlexHung]

With regards to the app, why can’t the car send a little clip (or even a still image) of the event? Moreover, with LTE coverage and all why can’t we view footage in the app? The car can surely stream it to the phone. I don’t understand this. Bandwidth is not the issue, we stream 4K videos to our phones no problem.

Tesla would have to absorb the cost of uploading the video clips to their infrastructure. Not trivia cost and may be they can charge extra for that.

 

[ScoobyDoo82]

Tesla would have to absorb the cost of uploading the video clips to their infrastructure. Not trivia cost and may be they can charge extra for that.

This is true, but like you said.. not a big deal. They can afford it.. but, they could charge an extra $1-2 and cover the cost very easily. Also, they could send low resolution images to just get the information you to your phone.

 

[Watts_Up]

Enhanced notifications, enhanced alerts, and the ability to view footage from the phone would be a great addition and is entirely possible with today’s tech.

While Sentry is very useful, I think a lot of improvements need to be made to make it a real product, such as:

- The image quality should be good enough to capture a license plate number, even at night, which is not the case with Sentry.

- A dashcam should be constantly running and recording, there are so many complain of Sentry missing recording an event.

- You should be able to reduce false alarms by selecting the sensitivity of motion detection and select areas covered by the cameras.

- Alerts and download from the cloud should be made available to access anytime your dashcam from your phone.

I installed a Blackvue DR900 dashcam which covers the above topics.

One good point of Sentry is to be controlled remotely, so you can turn on and off as wanted, feature that also turn on my dashcam when the car weak up.

 

[dmh444]

If Tesla charged, say $5 per month for the aforementioned enhancements, I pay it. I pay double that for bird-eye 360 view (which is standard in other cars).