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Tesla Dashcam Failed When Needed Most - During an Accident

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I have a 2018 Tesla Model X, HW3 with the latest firmware at the time of this writing (2019.31.12.2) and a high-speed USB drive to capture dashcam footage - worked fine until now. I was unfortunately rear-ended by another driver - luckily fairly minor damage. About a minute after the accident I pressed the Dashcam icon to save the most recent footage thinking I was covered.

Only to find out when I got home that the actual accident footage wasn't there. It saved everything before, and everything afterward, but not the actual accident! Likely there's a software bug that corrupted the file during save in some way.

Super disappointed that when I needed it most, it failed. If you really want a reliable dashcam, better get a third party one.
 
I have a 2018 Tesla Model X, HW3 with the latest firmware at the time of this writing (2019.31.12.2) and a high-speed USB drive to capture dashcam footage - worked fine until now. I was unfortunately rear-ended by another driver - luckily fairly minor damage. About a minute after the accident I pressed the Dashcam icon to save the most recent footage thinking I was covered.

Only to find out when I got home that the actual accident footage wasn't there. It saved everything before, and everything afterward, but not the actual accident! Likely there's a software bug that corrupted the file during save in some way.

Super disappointed that when I needed it most, it failed. If you really want a reliable dashcam, better get a third party one.


Similar experience. Sentry working great. Ran off the road by Toyota SUV who attempted to squeeze his vehicle into the space for a VW in front of me while cruising in the fast lane at 83 in a string of cars. Ran me into the ruff. I think my BYE2GAS license plate pisses them off.

At later check with the super phone check program and all clips were there but the one from the incident. Darn. Saved me from the opportunity to take it to the police and have them tell me, "Tuff luck,buddy, what do you want us to do about it?"
 
IIRC, @wk057 and others have pulled accident footage from salvaged cars. Seems a coincidence that each of you had a scenario with impact for which Dashcam didn’t write to your card for the block of time the incident actually occurred, but successfully recorded for “non-emergency” blocks of time. Could it be that the car actually wrote the footage to internal storage instead of your flash storage, due to systems registering an emergency scenario (eg AEB or ABS triggers, etc)?
 
Just remember that even if you don't hit save, there is an hour's worth of recording on the drive itself. When you hit save, it simply moves those files and closes the current file in progress.

As long as you haven't been running the X for more than an hour, check the drive you're using. Also, in some cases, you can use data recovery software to recover some of the past recordings as long as those blocks haven't been overwritten.

But, of course, there's a chance it really didn't write anything to the drive at all.
 
Just remember that even if you don't hit save, there is an hour's worth of recording on the drive itself. When you hit save, it simply moves those files and closes the current file in progress.

Yes, checked that too, unfortunately, nothing there. I'm baffled as to why it didn't save the footage unless it saved it somehow to internal storage for an emergency scenario? (not sure if that exists). It normally works fine.
 
This happened to me earlier this year too. Dash cam saved everything before and after except for the 1 minute where the accident happened.

The other drivers admitted guilt 100% so I didn’t end up needing the footag, but she wouldn’t take the insurance call for over a month to admit to the accident though.
 
Wonder if they're being "lost" because of a firmware bug, or on purpose..

Bug (not real, just saying how it could go wrong) - on impact detection, automatically save. User hits save, oops, overwritten by nothing. Forgot to implement checks in code.

Purpose - on impact detection, send video to Tesla servers for analysis and delete from drive, in case the fault was the vehicle's, so they can't use it against us (Tesla).

But, in the end, it's more than likely a coding bug... The question is - can you save videos repeatedly without the issue, or, is it really detecting an impact, and the functionality is different at that point.
 
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I had a similar experience. I rear-ended a car (my bad), airbags deployed, no one hurt. I had the presence of mind to try and press the dashcam icon to save the data, but my icon was a red warning symbol so nothing happened, I pulled the USB. There's no data for the crash, even after examining the drive at a low level. Someone this thread indicated that footage could be pulled off of salvaged cars. I wonder if this is possible? Any comments?
 
You have to make sure you press and hold the dashcam icon to make sure it’s safe to eject. Sometimes we might not notice. Regardless I saved tons of clips of people cutting me off and days latter could not find any of them to show my cousin who is a prosecutor and can get them fined through the right channel.
 
All recordings made to the dash cam drive have a 3-second gap between each 1-minute video file where nothing is recorded. Perhaps what you're missing is not a full minute but just those 3 seconds. It's happened to me too - the critical 3 seconds of interest are coincident with the 3-second gap. I've reported this deficiency and hopefully Tesla will see fit to do something about it, but it's been like this for quite some time.

My experience is with a Model 3 but I would assume the same is true for a Model X.