Tesla Sentry Mode Is Bloody Expensive!
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- Опубліковано 3 жов 2024
- I've had the car for over 3 years and now I've figured out the cost and reliability of Teslas sentry mode, I find myself questioning if it's the best choice for owners?
If you think you've seen this before, I had to reupload it due to an audio screw up in the edit!
Website: www.ev-man.co.uk
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Twitter: / evmanuk
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#electriccars #tesla #cars
If you think you've seen this before, I had to reupload it due to an audio screw up in the edit! #youtubeprofessional!
Thought I was getting old 😄 sounded alright on first one..
I thought they changed something in the matrix
I always have mine on when parking away from home. Last December it paid off when a lady parked next to me, drove out and turned left as if my car was invisible and caused over £3000 of damage. Sentry mode caught her walking to her car, the accident, then walking back to look at what she’d done before driving off without leaving a note. Luckily her reg was caught on camera ! The saved excess is one thing but the satisfaction of catching her red handed was better 😏
Was she prosecuted for leaving the scene of an accident? A Van hit my car and drove off my partner witnessed it and we collected the bits of his Van that were strewn around my car. Gave Northumbia police all the details and his reg number and they said too busy to go to his house at the time of the accident and if no one injured too busy to prosecute a hit and run. So under the "party of law and order" people get away with hit and run
what’s the recording length you set at?
@@KevinWuPlus 3 minutes
Just bought a used Model S and was shocked to see similar'ish 5kWh phantom battery drain per day. Thank goodness it shut off at 20%. I turned off Sentry Mode and a couple other features- now fine. Very expensive indeed.
Actually my tumble dryer only uses around 800Wh - the magic of heat pumps!
Same here. Cost me £300 instead of £130. Shame we only use it 5x a year!
Why don’t they install solar panels on roof boot and bonnet? It would only work outdoors but it would reduce the depletion. I know it doesn’t help in you are in a multi-storey car park for example, but solar panels are ‘free fuel’ for EV’s.
I have security cameras, with continuous recording and motion detection, throughout my house and their power consumption is minimal. I have a newish model 3 so plenty of years to have sorted out this feature, so hard to understand why sentry mode consumes so much power.
I noticed that sentry mode used a lot of power, but it is worse in winter as there is a heating element over the windscreen camera that comes on in freezing weather (2019 model 3) which keeps the camera area of the windscreen from freezing up. I would be interested to know how much extra that consumes over winter!
I have mine turned off most of the time and only turn it on when I am worried about the cars location.
Interestingly I did have it turned on in a carpark where a woman decided to sit on the bonnet then lick the bonnet so sometimes it is worth the money!
Using the Sentry Pro app to get realtime notifications is a game changer for Sentry Mode...
❤
My son in law had an identical experience with his Model Y while on holiday earlier this year, like you he turned it off after 3 days. A few weeks later though, it was able to identify the car that reversed into his Tesla while it was on his drive, in the middle of the night, and he got redress from the owner. A very useful feature, but shockingly high power consumption, you would think they could fix this.
I noticed that there is now an option to use sensors only in sentry mode.
Don't know if this is more energy efficient?
Why does sentry mode use so much power? My Ring camera lasts for months on a USB charge. Puzzled
Sends everything back to Tesla for Elons entertainment
It's the way sentry mode works. It's continuously buffering about 10 mins of video but only saves it when it registers an event and timestamps it on the video. It's certainly expensive if you run it 12 hours a day but conversely if sentry mode is in use 12 hours a day then the vehicle is at a much higher risk so you could look at it as insurance. It's really only become a pain point with the price of electricity in the UK and Europe skyrocketing. Also, interesting sidenote - the car is also doing this while driving (continuously recording the cameras) but the energy penalty isn't as much because the system is "awake" anyway.
Maybe the answer is to use sentry mode more judiciously. There are many locations away from home that I know are pretty safe. And there are a few where I would really feel more comfortable with sentry mode on. After seeing your video, I now intend to turn off the automatic sentry mode and only activate it when I think it might catch something. I might outsmart myself, but I think that will be my strategy going forward.
It’s not a safe place thing for me.
You can get a lan accidental ‘prang’ in any location and by anyone.
Begs the question how much do the cameras use when driving? My guess is it's not the cameras but the fact the car has to be on. The computer and the hardware take up a lot of power.
We had a similar issue when we were at Center Parcs for a week, we figured bushes waving in the wind in the car park were setting it off. It used 25% for 5 days.
My house uses 8-9kWh a day when not charging too. I don’t really understand how it used so much!
Park it in front of my house. I charge between 2pm and 9pm…drive it out (occasionally) Run it from 11pm to 5am (I depart) for work around that time. It complements my ring and Google nest nicely. Don’t really use it that often…..if I’m not parking in the back of parking lots, I run it for some stop and go errands….at the airport I probably wouldn’t run it 24/7. I normally stay in the garage, but occasionally I like to run surveillance in a blind spot of my house
You could have dash cams pointing to the sides as well!
Quite supprised I've lost 5% on my humble ioniq 38kwh while I'm on holiday, that's over 5 days so far. No sentry mode etc. Only with Hyundai bluelink enabled. So 2kw just sat at airport carpark.
As a computer guy it was pretty clear to me that sentry mode would use quite a lot of energy. We are talking about evaluating 8 cameras with some big neural networks. So my sentry mode policy always has been to just use it when the car is parked in environments that i perceived as risky. It could probably be optimized a bit, maybe even a lot, but my knowlegde of picture processing isn't sufficient to make that call.
Doesn't need processing. Just record footage like a dashcam. They could make it simple.
@@ElectricVehicleMan A day's worth of footage from 8 cameras would fill any USB drive. That's not really viable. And you still would not know if something bad happened without processing it.
If it's using 200W, they're doing it wrong. The company I worked for was achieving ML object classification from 60Hz video using 3W (trade show in 2022, after I left), and sentry mode should be a simpler algorithm as it doesn't need to classify the object, only detect movement and run anomaly detection as regards impacts or attempted entry. We were running 'put a box around a human' a decade ago on low power embedded processors, it didn't even need a passive heatsink.
@@Pyriold 4 cameras, front, back and sides.
Can just use a 1/2TB SSD and store loads.
Or just record events like most dashcams. Either way, it’s better than having to turn it off or it shut down due to low battery.
@@adventtrooper The hardware they are doing it on is not designed specifically for it. The cameras and AI chips are for autopilot with a lot bigger requirements. I am sure that even with that they could optimize, but not to that degree.
Just one minor point - are you sure the "traction" High Voltage battery will indeed keep the "12v" low voltage battery topped up when the car is sleeping? I don't have personal experience of this, but have seen reports that the low voltage charger only monitors / charges the 12v battery when NOT sleeping (i.e. awake / driving etc).
The USB ports power down when the car sleeps, so any dashcam would need to be hard wired in to a non-switched 12v line.
I was under the same impression, but perhaps after people started having problems of the 12v battery dying even though the car was plugged in all week due to COVID restrictions, they might have made a firmware change?
My i3s always tops up the 12v from the HV battery although some cars don’t, the ioniq 5 often had dead 12v but they have probably fixed this by now.
I`m speaking from a Kona EV background where the high voltage battery topped off the 12v battery when its voltage dropped. This "topping off" happens regularly when the car is off and locked.... I small light in the Hyundai emblem at the front of the car glowed when this process was taking place
@@davidmullenify I’m sure that most EVs do this, my i3s definitely does. I think that the ioniq 5 had a few issues with dead 12v when parked. They have probably fixed this now.
Yes, all EVs charge their 12v battery from the traction battery.
The issue with some cars was that the system wasn't set up to properly monitor the 12v battery when parked up.
It's not a failing of EVs in general, only that their 12v system is used more i.e. when sending updates to the manufacturer's servers so that the owner can do the fancy stuff like turn on the heating, lock the doors, turn off the battery charging, show the state of charger of the traction battery.
Manufacturers have recognised this and have programmed a more active approach to 12v battery management.
I've just done the same, but for two weeks, and given it was the first time leaving it for so long (and had to get home from the airport) I was paranoid about having it on given what I read. So in essence I turned it off. I left it at the airport with 77% (this is a 2019 M3 LR) and after just over a week I checked it and it had 72% oddly I returned home after the fortnight and it then had 71% remaining. This has to be software optimisation, I mean when the dashcam system is running in the car, and it's using all the same cameras, it hardly makes an dent on consumption so I'd be intrigued to know what 'extra' stuff sentry mode is doing which causes it to chew through the battery. Be interested in Tesla's take on this. As you say hardware 4 could help but would you seriously upgrade just to save a few quid on electricity charges, I'm sure the hardware module would cost more than a few years worth of leccy! certainly one to monitor as someone who works in software development I wouldn't be surprised if it's coding and Tesla just haven't bothered sorting it yet
Let’s really hope the new generation of Tesla cars will have improved power management optimization allowing sentry mode to make it actually usable, because it’s quite useless right now
Thanks. Best regards Martin
What is the frame rate and quality ? Could they let you change one or both settings? What if there was access to the cameras via usb and you could fit your own recording/storage device like an old phone?
Seems unlikely it is the cameras or even the recording that is consuming the power - more likely it is the video processing to decide what to record that is using loads of CPU.
I have a dash cam fitted to my Niro ev. With its own independent battery pack in the boot which is charged by the main drive battery when the car is on. Works well for me!!!
Lots of people all about the battery drain. Only a Yorkshireman would work out the cost!
My blink cameras run 6 months on two AA batteries, with over 5 events per day and upload the video to a cloud. I don't know how tesla hasn't figured out a way to run the cameras for basically nothing.
This sort of insane energy use should be outlawed, you couldn't build any other appliance with such inefficiency.
First thing I fit to every car I've had for over the last ten years has been front and rear dash cam's running off their own power bank. The power bank will charge in 30-40 mins if I wake the car up with the app and will run the cameras in parking mode for 4ish days. As a side note bought our SR+ same time as yourself and collected a long range Y last week surprisingly not a huge difference in the performance between a 2020 SR+ and a 2023 Long Range Y, but the build quality is worlds apart.
Which do you use?
Ill just velcro my ring camera on 4 corners of my tesla and call it a day! 😅😊😂
Wow! Compared to other UA-camrs your car's energy usage for Sentry mode seems excessive, could it be that when your car was parked up it had a very hot battery and so used a lot of power cooling it down? Perhaps further testing is required to see if the daily rate of power usage falls after the first day (once the battery has cooled)?
Yeah. One sample seems a bad sample size. Try a 1 day while parked at home.
EVM, remember when you laughed at news stories of people coming home from holiday to an empty car battery.... Maybe you should do a retraction. Since you almost did I too despite being an expert
I didn't. I knew what was happening, and turned it off.
And the Nissan Leaf they were in has no such features to drain the battery so your point isn't valid.
Seems like turning off sentry mode would pay for a lot of dent fixes.
This beggs the question could a Nissan Leafs 360 or Tesla's cameras with a couple added for the Leaf, be tied into a raspberry pi for an alternative system and how many electrons would it sup.
I have a Model Y and I park outside at home. I keep the car plugged in so I don't worry about sentry mode or cost. I've factored that in. One thing I wish the system did was have GPS speed recoding on my front facing camera but it doesn't...so I have a rearview mirror with a front facing camera that records my speed and has video. It runs 24/7 since the 12v it's plugged into is constantly on.
Sentry Mode is a hog. When I went out of the country for a week on a cruise I had to turn it off because of the amount of energy it uses. When I went to Atlantic City NJ here in the US I arrived at the hotel with 75% but it was the same for me. I had to turn it off at a day or two. Fortunately on my way home and not far from the hotel was a super charger so I charged then drove right home.
This could almost definitely be fixed with an OTA update. Most likely the power profile of the CPU/GPU is not optimised for efficiency when driving all the cameras but I’m pretty sure clock speeds and voltages could be decreased for sentry mode. It’s good that you raised it though - no point in me suggesting it’s an easy fix if Tesla haven’t even noticed/acknowledged it.
they sort of fixed it in a update that came couple of months ago, problem is it only gave the option to turn off the camera monitoring so it takes alot more to trigger a recording. I know some who got hit on parking but the sentry lite mode was on but didnt record anything. But since the cameras arent monitoring it uses alot less power.
@@danielstefanovic2604 hmm maybe my “easy fix” suggestion isn’t quite so easy then :/.
Tesla have known about this for many years, the problem is they have to keep a lot of equipment powered up for sentry mode to work, all the video processing gear is optimised for realtime video processing, not 24/7 security.
@@edc1569 exactly. Which is wjhy I suggested the power profiles for the hardware haven’t been optimised for this use case. But it looks as though I was wrong, otherwise it probably would have already been fixed.
I have a 2015 model S so no sentry mode. I do however have a twin dash cam set up with batteries. So front and rear I have front cameras and in the rear quarters I have the rear cameras. Then wired up to batteries that are add ons to the kit. So I get 16 hours off these batteries then they draw off the 12 volt. Add in free supercharging and I’m not worried as the car is covered nearly as well as sentry mode but all incidents are picked up in the field of view. Unlike sentry mode that can miss some so I have seen.
According to a quick Google search it can use up to 7.2 KW so you got off lightly, We leased our car so I don’t use it. Instead I’ll call the leasing company to tell them what just happened to their car.
As a new owner of a Model 3, Sentry is a huge letdown. Found out early on it uses a stupid amount of energy when on, so unlike my previous cars dash cam I rarely use it, and it's not very sensitive. Overhyped waste of time.
After seeing that video and reading the comments, I have only one thing to say "Bloody hell"
Oh two things, great video.
So glad I have a huge net meter solar system. My home, hot tub and car charging runs me an average of 32 kwh per day. We don't have the high pricing per kwh that you have yet. It will be here (Canada) at some point.
5kWh a day, that’s ludicrous 😮
So even I have ludicrous mode 🙈
How does this compare with dash cam costs?
My Garmin dash cam uses 2 watts so not worth counting.
This could’ve been ALOT shower
Shower?
It seems pricey to me and I can buy power for < CAD$0.05/kwh (GBP 0.03) using ultra low overnight charging.
Very valid points and it seems quite excessive. How do other EV marques compare?
Interesting that this comes shortly after how much range you need video. When you're tired and want to get home, "want" and "need" get reordered.
So this is highlighting a power drain which means if it was fixed would reduce the need for as big a battery.
Cant you just turn off Camera Based Detection in the cars settings
The sentry mode does consume a fair bit. We have our Model S on scheduled charging overnight and tend to run sentry mode constantly as it’s parked in a car park, and on days when we don’t use the car it typically tops up around 2.4-3kWh in the overnight charge.
As I understand it, it’s because in its current state sentry mode requires the car systems to be powered on, there’s no selective option to keep only some systems on while sentry mode is running. It was added as a feature in 2019 after being a heavily requested feature by Tesla drivers if I remember correctly, so the camera and sensor system was not originally designed around having it.
But after more than four years since they have added sentry mode, I would have thought they could have optimised the system better for new cars sold.
Didn't realise the tumble dryers were that energy intensive. Looked ours up, 5kWh a load. FIVE. We are running ours at least once a day, often more.
I need to sit down.
Do you have a washing line?
Anything that heats stuff up will eat through electricity...
LESS SO FOR: Heat pumps and microwave ovens.
Our entire household runs on less than 5kWh of electricity per day 🤦♂️ How the hell can it use so much power just to run the electronics for sentry mode 😳 200W is ludicrous - are they using some dated Pentium 4 PC in there 😂
That can ruin someone's plan
very interesting thank you for the share
11h00 as usual thank you for a very informative article. Wow I've never really considered how expensive sentry is, even here in France at 17 cents per kwh it's still going to cost about 100€ a year to run it 12 hours a day.
Let's hope future hardware in newer Tesla's is able to run a more energy efficient sentry mode.
Take an taxi or Uber to the airport leave my Tesla at home problem solved no stress or excess battery drain sentry mode off at home garage parked bc I want my sentry mode on when out and about locally for sure.
As 60 mile trip, each way in a taxi just to not use sentry mode.
Don’t think so.
Thanks ....Great video again. I read somewhere that the sentry mode uses ~10% if activated overnight, so 37% over 3 days is a realistic projection. To understand why / how it uses so much energy, maybe a good experiment would be to leave the car switched on for a 24hr period (just switched on ..without sentry mode activated) and monitor the drop in battery %
This was reported by others.
This should be addressed in a software update, because it's abnormal for a few camera to use that much power.
1st of all they're not on al the time, or are they?! Is tesla doing things without the owners knowledge/acceptance?
2nd, they're a handful of cameras, not some high end server. Googling, we find out that a top level CCTV camera with feaures like ir night vission, pa-ntilt, etc.. will draw like 2-4 Wh, thus a simple camera like these on tesla should be 1wh or less. Plus the electronics. Lets say overall 15-20wh. In a day it will be 20W*24h = roughly 0.5KW, aka 1%
Clearly there is something wrong with tesla programming that the consumtion is so high
3rd, a dashcam, on standby uses 10mah@12v (0.12Wh), thus 1Wh if we were to add several more cameras resulting in a 24W/day usage. Ot should not even register as a percentage. You should leave the system ON for a whole month and not see a dent in the battery charge levels
With Videos like this, now Tesla is aware maybe they can do what they do well and find out how to make it more efficient and less of a drain.
Soo... You don't think they knew about this...!?!?
@@andymccabe6712 Well given Tesla's track record on making everything more efficient I would hope they would have improved things if they knew. They seem to improve everything else.
How! how! how much power? How? The! F#^! can it use that much??
It's not live streaming to Stephen Spielberg or Martin Scorsese from Direction and retakes?
No Tesla here and I don't think I'd ever buy one, but to be perfectly fair they do clearly state that it uses lots of power.
Also I think it's a bit unfair to say it's unreliable. Unusable perhaps? To me unreliable would imply that it doesn't work as advertised (cameras only capture every 30 seconds and risk missing incidents for example)
Thanks for highlighting this issue in any case, I am surprised to hear quite how much energy it eats up!
Unreliable in that it can’t be used as a sole security system. Especially if it drops the charge to when it switches off automatically.
We all know you are paying probably 7.5p/kwh overnight, so your 'out for 19 hours a day' is really 30p a day, so maybe £70 a year. Not nearly such an interest tale.
Take more reasonable usage, my car is at a station car park for 10 hours a day, so that's 15p, or £36 a year. The only time it's worth thinking about is if you leave your car at an airport, in which case just turn it off.
It’s not about me, it’s about everyone.
Can’t charge at home would be 50-60p. Not time of day tariff, 30p+
Different country, take your pick.
Either way, 20million of range a day is ok by you?
@@ElectricVehicleMan It would take me a decade before the running costs at the station 10hrs a day matched the purchase price of a decent multi camera dash cam, so yeah, I’m happy with using the feature.
@@smc812A dashcam that can't record for your 2 week airport car park stay isn't a dashcam worth having. As @ElectricVehicleMan stated, although cost is an issue, reliability IS definitely an issue ~ you cannot rely on SentryMode for more than max 10 days. Ridiculous!
As Sandy Monro repeatedly says, Tesla is constantly seeking to improve, send to have a blindspot where Sentry Mode is concerned though!
@@smc812 Try using it for a week or two. 🤷♂️
@@ElectricVehicleMan glad we’ve agreed the cost for most regular usage isn’t any big deal. So does it seem worth it to buy another dash cam for your many holidays?
Isn't it a feature we have lived without for decades....?
So were dashcams, so were airbags, so were seatbelts, etc.
@@fredbloggs5902 Still dont have any of those in my 1958 Land Rover
First off. Why would anyone in their right mind run Sentry Mode 24 hours a day. A normal person like myself would only have it on only while driving or going into a store for up to 30 minutes.
It is nice to know that Sentry Mode is a very energy hungry system, so use it very sparingly.
Maybe some need the system on all the time, but I do not. Depends on the situations.
End of story.
Why? Why do you think?
I’ve had two events in car parks and all been when I’m not in it.
In an airport car park when anything can happen it’s staying on. 🤷♂️
@@ElectricVehicleMan Well if you do the airport stay for several days at a time then there is nothing you can do about Sentry mode being on and draining your battery. I know it drains the battery quite a bit.
Myself i just do around town daily and I would turn on Sentry mode only when I am out doing errands. There is an exclude home option, because I park in a home garage.
Sorry If you are that worried about your car getting damaged and leaving sentry on 24 hours a day, nothing you can do.
If the Battery falls below 20%, Sentry Mode automatically turns off and sends you a notification, so you’ll still be able to do 50+ miles.
Not in an SR+.
@@ElectricVehicleMan Sentry mode will shut off at 20% on my SR+, it's a software feature that all Telsas should have. Not sure why it doesn't happen on your car.
@@vasil7410 I think he means 20% of battery isn't 50+ miles in an SR+ not that it won't turn off at 20%
Hello mate
U just realize this??? Wow!
The cost in £££’s rather than kWh.
It’s an American car. They don’t care about energy cost. It’s much cheaper than in EU. Sorry. Almost forgot you are not in the EU😂
EVM, how old were you when you bought your Model 3? Just trying to gage vs myself potentially purchasing one in the future.
So it wasn't so long ago that you did a video about a newspaper article about a family new to electric car ownership who went on holiday only to return to find the battery largely drained. There was a certain degree of annoyance from you and commenters on the video that the newspaper article was designed to put down evs together with a view that the driver was a newbie and therefore must have done something wrong. Apparently even the experts of several years experience of evs get it wrong. The fact that there is a feature that can do this is not good if billed as a safeguard. The fact that teslas have it at all is illogical. Who would want to go near one or steal one in the first place as you wouldn't get far. They're only popular because of the charging network and some of the tec. Souless things with looks only a mother could love and who could also accept a wide tolerance when it comes to differing panel gaps.
Your knowledge is outdated, panel gaps are a thing of the past
Um no, you only have to google it and see youtube results from late 2022 and 2023 showing panel gaps that British Leyland would have been embarrassed about and they were shameless when it came to car quality.
AND.....it looks like a fish.....!!?
@@andymccabe6712beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Remarkable that you managed to eke out a 13min video on this topic…
If you’d prefer I could print a script off in PDF format and you could just read it.
Save loads of time then.
Watch it again while you wait :)
@@ElectricVehicleMan😂😂😂
Sorry but according to the channel dave takes it on he says that you are lying
What?
Cheers mate I don't drive or have a car
This is so wasteful it really needs sorting out - hardly green if that's your reason for having an EV.
I have used TeslaFi for years to reduce phantom drain, especially when we’re away.
On a typical day between drives my 2016 MS drains about 1 kWh, whilst when deep sleeping it can get down to about 0.2 kWh per day, which is great for longer trips away. MX from 2017 is roughly similar, although it might be possible to have the car go to a deeper sleep quicker and for longer.
Hi Andy, I see a firm you promoted, that were utter rubbish, have gone into administration owing thousands in deposits, First4Solar. Why not do a video on that?
There are legal ‘complications’ at the moment which are restricting. There’s a Facebook group called last4solar that’s worth joining.
@ElectricVehicleMan maybe you should remove that endorsement video, re-edit it with the endorsement removed or at the very least inform viewers of their demise.
As an aside, how will rhis affect your warranty on the equipment that they installed? Again, a worthwhile video to highlight this possibility and the consequences.
@@David-bl1bt I’ve removed all their stuff quite a while ago.
@@ElectricVehicleMan 👍
But WHY is it so power hungry? Surely it’s only a bunch of cameras, recording? What else is it doing? Making itself a coffee? Cheers.