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Tesla Sentry Mode makes vandal internet famous

Some people still don’t know about Tesla’s Sentry Mode, and they are making fools of themselves. Another vandal who keyed a Tesla Model 3 was caught by Sentry Mode and made “internet-famous.”

Building on its previously released dashcam feature, Tesla enabled the use of more cameras around the vehicle and activated a “stand-by” parking mode.

The feature became Sentry Mode, which also includes an alarm and notification system to deter thieves even more — efficiently creating a system to watch over Tesla vehicles when their owners are not around.

It was first developed to address a growing problem with break-ins that Tesla owners were dealing with, especially in California, but it is now proving useful in other situations.

Several Tesla owners have captured instances of vandalism on their cars with the feature.

Tesla Model 3 owner Alan Tweedie from Broomfield, Colorado, parked his car at a local school to watch his daughter’s soccer game this weekend.

When he came back to his car, he found a massive scratch on the side.

Tweedie said:

You can feel down to bare metal and you can see it’s scratched all the way completely through the paint.

He saw that there was a Sentry Mode event recorded on the car, and when reviewing the footage, he realized that an unknown woman keyed his car.

The Tesla owner shared the video from Sentry Mode on Facebook and it was seen over 100,000 times:

In the video, you can clearly see the woman’s face and that she is dragging her keys on the side of the Tesla for seemingly no reason.

After going viral on Facebook, Tweedie’s video and the story was picked up by the local CBS station.

He told them:

It really speaks to the level of anger for a crime like this, that so many people are willing to spread it and share the word and try to help us find it, because nobody likes this. This is my car but it could be yours next.

A spokesperson for the Broomfield Police said that these types of crimes are generally very difficult to investigate, but with Tesla’s Sentry Mode video, they have a shot at finding the vandal.

They ask to call them if you recognize the woman and ask for Officer Lundsford.

Earlier this year, a Tesla owner posted a video of two men keying his car for no apparent reason, and the men turned themselves in after the video went viral.

Tesla’s Sentry Mode has helped find vandals before on top of capturing some strange events.

We gathered some of them in our post: Tesla’s millions of cameras are capturing some crazy things.

In order for Sentry Mode to work on a Tesla, you need a few accessories. We recommend Jeda’s Model 3 USB hub to be able to still use the other plugs and hide your Sentry Mode drive. For the drive, I’m now using a Samsung portable SSD, which you need to format, but it gives you a ton of capacity, and it can be easily hidden in the Jeda hub.

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

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