Once again our Tesla hacker friend, greentheonly was able to provide us with some footage of an aspect of Tesla’s Sentry Mode that we do not see too often, and that’s its ability to send a clip of a disturbance directly to Tesla for safe-keeping.
A footnote in the Sentry Mode instructions that you can find in the Tesla Owner’s Manual talks about the ability to send a short clip to Tesla, who will hold it for three days, presumably in the scenario where your car is stolen and you obviously cannot recover the footage. The Owner’s Manual states:
Note: When the Alarm state is triggered, the most recent six seconds to the security event may be sent to Tesla for temporary backup for approximately 72 hours. You can enable or disable the collection of this video at any time by touching “DATA SHARING” in Controls > Safety & Security.
The feature did not seem to be well understood and green himself did not believe that it worked as you could not reproduce the feature, but recently uploaded a video and tweeted that it actually worked.
(sorry to distract from all the drama)
Interesting info from a hw2.5 unit I got the other day.
Remember the sentry wording that sentry events are also uploaded to the cloud that I inditially dismissed because cannot reproduce?
I was wrong and it does happen. All 8 cams at that. pic.twitter.com/rxFtFr0nPH— green (@greentheonly) May 2, 2020
He would add that he was probably unable to reproduce the results on his own due to the trigger needing to be something much more significant, like the car actually being lifted like it is in the above video.
Now it only seem to happen if the car happened to shake considerably, not for people walking around and whatnot – that's why I cannot reproduce I guess.
usbdrive was inserted I was told.Now who's going to be the first one to successfully receive their sentry footage from Tesla?
— green (@greentheonly) May 2, 2020
So it looks like the feature is able to work, however, there are several issues. Going back to what is written in the Owner’s Manual, Tesla says that it may take a snapshot of the footage and have it sent over, it is not written to be a definite feature. Secondly, even if Tesla does have the feature, there does not seem to be any easy to reach instructions on how exactly to get your footage, something that green mentioned as well.
No instructions are provided, but instructions say it could be requested. I guess it's a quest? 😉
— green (@greentheonly) May 2, 2020
We hope one day that this feature will be a bit more refined, it can arguably be the most important part of Sentry Mode. Being able to have footage recovered when your car is stolen and not being able to retrieve your USB makes a world of difference in having your car being recovered. Like everything on the software side Tesla, everything is incrementally being improved on as weeks go by, so I imagine that eventually we will have these improvements.
What do you guys think of the usefulness of the feature? Let us know down in the comments below.
