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Smart Sentry Mode (Enables Sentry mode automatically)

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Super useful feature, took 3 minutes to enable automatically
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Let’s hope you don’t forget and come out to damage on the car. That would suck big time.
At least that would be on my fault. The disclaimer that it could have some delay (up to 30 minutes!) means that if something happens and its not captured, people are going to blame the app for not turning on soon enough, instead of themselves for not turning it on.

Not being argumentative, just pointing out how a lot of people are.
 
Having it turn on automatically means you create a SavedClip file whenever you enter your car and later exit as it would be triggered by motion around the car to record. 900mb x 2 (30mb per camera per 1-min of camera time x 3 cameras x 10 minutes on average x 2 enter/exit moves). Seems like a waste since not easily deleted off the USB for most people.

I personally rather assess where I’m parking and make that decision on my own. Not hard to develop good car habits just like putting on your seat belt or locking your house when you leave. You can always activate/deactivate from your app under Controls no matter where you are and avoid setting off the Sentry Mode recording yourself.

The possible 30 min. wait time bothers me as well. Turning it on or off via the app gives you instant feedback as to its status instead of wondering if it activated at that setting or not.
 
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Love it, but don't know why the car doesn't have "off/manual/always on" as option right in the car... why wouldn't I want it on?!

1.8 GB each time it gets set off?? So you park your car inside your garage for the night. Let’s say your garage has a window/s on it. Light from outside could trigger it to come on for example. The motorcycle driving by close to your house could too from other reports. You walk into your garage to get something you left in your car—recording!
 
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Ohh no! it puts video of me getting in my car on my USB card? that's awful. (i'm not that pretty).
That gets overwritten when full? That's a horrible tragedy. At that rate, it could only occur 32x before.. it just over wrote the oldest video..?

I've been enabling every time I park. I'm not aware of any issues... alarm hasn't been triggered by anything yet.
 
Ohh no! it puts video of me getting in my car on my USB card? that's awful. (i'm not that pretty).
That gets overwritten when full? That's a horrible tragedy. At that rate, it could only occur 32x before.. it just over wrote the oldest video..?


Funny. But Wrong, it doesn’t get overwritten. Only your 1-hr buffer files do, not any of the SavedClip folders. Those have to be manually deleted or they will fill up your drive and give you the X shutting your recordings down. Important distinction. So you have wasted storage space each time unless you do like looking at yourself...and some people do. ;)
 
Having it turn on automatically means you create a SavedClip file whenever you enter your car and later exit as it would be triggered by motion around the car to record. 900mb x 2 (30mb per camera per 1-min of camera time x 3 cameras x 10 minutes on average x 2 enter/exit moves). Seems like a waste since not easily deleted off the USB for most people.

I never got the "exit" clip. I think Sentry Mode starts only after the car is locked. And by the time it auto locks, I am already far away from the car not to trigger SM. Coming back to car, yes, it will trip and record a clip, so now I remotely disable SM on my phone app before getting back to the car.
 
Having it turn on automatically means you create a SavedClip file whenever you enter your car and later exit as it would be triggered by motion around the car to record. 900mb x 2 (30mb per camera per 1-min of camera time x 3 cameras x 10 minutes on average x 2 enter/exit moves). Seems like a waste since not easily deleted off the USB for most people.

I personally rather assess where I’m parking and make that decision on my own. Not hard to develop good car habits just like putting on your seat belt or locking your house when you leave. You can always activate/deactivate from your app under Controls no matter where you are and avoid setting off the Sentry Mode recording yourself.

The possible 30 min. wait time bothers me as well. Turning it on or off via the app gives you instant feedback as to its status instead of wondering if it activated at that setting or not.
The app sends you a notification when it enables Sentry mode automatically, so there won't be any ambiguity.
The 30 min disclaimer about the delay is more to set the expectations; in reality, it enables it much sooner.
 
1.8 GB each time it gets set off?? So you park your car inside your garage for the night. Let’s say your garage has a window/s on it. Light from outside could trigger it to come on for example. The motorcycle driving by close to your house could too from other reports. You walk into your garage to get something you left in your car—recording!
The feature allows the user to designate certain locations (e.g., home garage) as "Safe" where the app does not turn on Sentry mode.
 
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Love it, but don't know why the car doesn't have "off/manual/always on" as option right in the car... why wouldn't I want it on?!

You wouldn't want it on by default because it uses about ~1GB of space for each event and it has no way of overwriting the oldest events... once storage is full it simply stops recording.

It also uses some battery, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-4 miles of range per hour used depending on outside temps, # of events, etc.

That's why.
 
Wow didn't know it doesn't overwrite. how do you know without having to pull the USB to see if there is space and when to delete old items?

If you're replying to me then use the REPLY button, that quotes what I wrote and creates a notification so that I know someone asked something that I might need to follow up on rather than you just typing in the white box at the bottom of the thread and having a response that isn't alerting anyone about anything.

The answer to your question is, the only way you'll know the USB drive is out of space is when it stops recording unless something has changed in recent firmware.

With the dashcam feature the oldest video is continuously overwritten and if you want to save an incident for long term storage you tap the video camera icon and it will save the last x minutes of the footage as a separate clip that can't be overwritten.

It would be helpful if in the future Tesla did something similar with Sentry mode video but for now, the idea that you would want it recording every time you parked is not a great idea unless you want to do a lot of manual data management where you unplug the USB drive and clean it up every so often.