I found that one has to turn sentry mode on each time he/she leaves the car. Would not it be more simple to have sentry mode as default as turn it off on the few occasions it is not needed?
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Why isn't sentry mode default?
- Thread starter rdfield
- Start date
Probably because it drains battery 1 mile/hour. Lets say you drive 5 miles to work everyday and 5 miles home. Normally you would lose 10 miles a day + vampire drain. When sentry mode on as default, your drive 5 miles to work, park there for 9 hours (lost 9 miles), drive 5 miles home, park there for 14 hours (lost 14 miles). So now you lost 33 miles a day + vampire drain.
BluestarE3
Active Member
Plus you'll have tons of extraneous files on your USB drive that you'll need to clear out to make space. I believe Sentry Mode events are saved permanently rather than overwritten like ordinary dashcam. You're going to get lots of false positives if Sentry is on all the time.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I will find out this afternoon. I drove in to work today and left Sentry Mode on. I parked at the first parking space closest to the entrance. All the people park in my column will have to walk by my car's front to get to work. I will see how many folders I get at the end of the 9 hours... I only have a 16GB flash drive LOL. I think someone else said he parked for 5 hours and it filled up his 32GB drive.
Yup. But I am actually going to turn it on while parking at work and at home. I have solar and I over estimated my usage, so my charging is all free LOL.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
Everyone understands the energy usage, I was just pointing out that it also puts wear and tear on the battery.
Do you really think that it would be a good idea to have sentry alarmed at home in your garage? You want to get a call from everyone asking what is happening when your son accidentally bumped the car when passing?
How annoyed are you when beeping horns go off in parking lots?
WileyTheMan
Peanut Gallery Member
IslandCityEV
Member
Coincidentally, just downloaded sentry mode this morning and thought that once you switch it on it is always on. Just like if you turn on creep or other features then it stays on. Even if it drains battery you would assume you wouldn’t need to acknowledge you want it on each time. Went to lunch and this is what happened. No car alarm or anything. I’m a bit disappointed with this new technology since it didn’t help. Also in the upgrade notes it should have an alert that it needs to be switched on each time.
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Because if it was everyone would complain about crazy vampire drain.
I may need it once a month and don’t find it too onerous to arm it that one time...and save my energy the rest.
Daniel in SD
(supervised)
I also like to drive my Tesla though
The average driver drives 15k miles a year so sentry mode would increase battery wear due to mileage by 58%. In reality it would probably be much less than that because the high loads of driving with acceleration and regen are probably much worse for the battery than a constant ~300W load.
This sums up the entitlement of many Tesla owners nicely
- People complain because Tesla's get broken into in SFO (even though they didn't purchase a car alarm)
- Tesla respond by quickly writing a neat software update that will enable a new sentry mode - they do that without pointing out that if a similar thing happened with (BMW, Audi, Merc etc) the response would be "sorry, thats your problem what do you expect us to do"
- Instead of saying thanks, people then complain because (list culled from TMC)
- Its not on by default
- It was rushed out and seems unfinished (duh)
- It uses up too much battery
- It doesn't have enough features
- It's not location based
- something I haven't seen yet but you know its out there
Sorry to see your photo and damage done to your car back in February. If you had just downloaded the update with Sentry Mode that morning had you turned it on in the car before getting out when you got to work? And guess more important question was did you have a USB drive inserted in the car at that time? If it was on but no alarm notification--maybe they didn't jar the car so the "alarm" didn't go off; however, files should have been saved off in the SavedClips folder from the 3 cameras or was it only one back then? Also don't know if the app feature was available then and maybe you only could set it in the car.
BTW from the broken out window on the pavement there, it looks like you have pretty dark tint on it. Did you have something in the back seat they took? Usually they break the triangular window and flip the seat to check out the trunk. This makes me think they thought they saw something in the backseat area. Another SF Bay area incident.
If there's anything "good" about this, I think the rear passenger window is less expensive to replace and doesn't need the trim to be replaced along with it. How expensive was the repair?
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I don't get from reading this thread that people were complaining about the above. Seems more like lack of info on this feature is the problem, ie. setting it every time you wanted to use it as oppose to just once in the master setting on the car's Security & Safety area. Also having an understanding that when set, what the battery drain would be. People unfamiliar with how much space the buffer and files will take has surprised a lot of people from the posts I've seen. Not everyone is savvy about this kind of stuff. I will say that I don't think some people have read the manual on this and instead look for a quick summary here on the forum and can miss out of info. In general though I think people are very happy to have Tesla develop this and they know it's a first effort that keeps on improving.
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SabrToothSqrl
Active Member
Elon already tweeted that 'always on' will be a future update.. so sit tight and keep enabling the option for now. I also want always on and just overwrite the oldest.
tavish
Member
Wasn't aware of this. Glad to hear. I'm also wanting always on and overwrite.
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