Tesla's Dashcam let me down when I needed it the most

[HawaiiPirate]

advice for all:

Set your dashcam to Auto + Honk and practice how to manually save footage. Auto-save is not always reliable.
If you don't have a chance to save the footage, turn off Sentry mode to prevent overwriting. You can later connect your USB to a computer and use Testdisk or Recuva to recover the video.

 

[shyboy]

It also doesn't help that there is more than one similar camera-looking icon in the stack!

so which one is the correct one to click?
The one with the DOT or without dot?

I am still confused on to keep it on AUTO or on HONK?

if I have it on AUTO, does that save it even I HONK?
how to setup both AUTO+HONK?

 

[florida_man]

I've had dashcams on non-tesla cars in the past and they just recorded endlessly for weeks, overwriting the oldest footage as they went. I would have assumed that if you threw a 1TB partition at a tesla it would just put in a ton of recordings but it looks like what it actually does is save the last hour in memory and write it to disk if you tell it to save.

 

[stopcrazypp]

I've had dashcams on non-tesla cars in the past and they just recorded endlessly for weeks, overwriting the oldest footage as they went. I would have assumed that if you threw a 1TB partition at a tesla it would just put in a ton of recordings but it looks like what it actually does is save the last hour in memory and write it to disk if you tell it to save.

Not exactly. What it does is write everything to your drive into the RecentClips folder and any footage older than 1 hour is deleted, to create a one hour loop. Whenever you save footage (whether pressing the button, horn, automatic accident, sentry) it just moves it to a different folder (SavedClips or SentryClips) so it doesn't get deleted by that process.

It does this with 1 minute clips, so if you do any action in between that, it's possible for that last clip to be corrupted (have read multiple cases of this where people press horn or save button and that last clip ends up not saving or corrupted).

 

[florida_man]

Wow, that's annoying.

 

[stopcrazypp]

Since a software update, about one year ago, by using an ODB2 cable adapter, you can get a constant 12V source.

Originaly, the ODB2 cable didn't have a constant 12V when the car is on sleep mode.
It seems that when Hertz announced their big Tesla order, this capability was added.
I suspect that Hertz required to have an easy way to install a monitoring device
to access their vehicles a little bit like the Tesla App does.

I added an ODB2 cable adapter to allow me using an ODB2 Bluetooth transmetter to send information,
such as Propulsion Battery's State of Charge and Cells voltage and temperature, to the Scan My Tesla App.
I noticed that my ODB2 transmetter is now in Standby mode when the car is sleeping.
I can connect with the ODB2 transmitter but the CAN Bus is not active, so I cannot get any information.

For what it's worth, I just had a chance to try this after ordering some cables, in my 2021 the ODB2 does not have constant 12V in sleep mode. In fact there is no voltage at all. This is running 2022.20.7. There is only power when the car is awake. From what I can determine, the cable powers the center console.