Tesla owners are going to be able to remotely view what their Autopilot cameras can see - Electrek

Tesla’s Sentry Mode is about to bring things to a whole new level by enabling Tesla owners to remotely see what their cars can see through Autopilot cameras.

We recently learned that Tesla is planning a big software update, likely version 11, to be pushed to its fleet around the holidays.

CEO Elon Musk is teasing a ‘fire’ update with new surprise features.

We are still trying to figure out what new features are going to make it into the update and we might have a good lead on an interesting feature.

For a while now, Tesla has been talking about better integrating its Tesla Sentry Mode feature into its mobile app.

Sentry Mode is an integrated surveillance system inside Tesla’s vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car and it has been changing the game when it comes to vandalizing parked cars.

On several occasions, Sentry Mode videos went viral, and the vandals turned themselves in after online pressure.

In other cases, video evidence helped police identify and find the vandals.

The feature was built on top of “TeslaCam,” a previously released integrated dashcam system with similar capability as Sentry mode, but used when someone is inside the car.

TeslaCam helped several Tesla owners with insurance claims by proving that they weren’t at fault in some accidents captured by the integrated dashcam system.

In order to activate the TeslaCam and Sentry Mode features, owners have to plug a storage device, thumb drive, or SSD inside their Tesla and activate the features in the settings.

Originally, owners had to take that storage device and connect it to a computer in order to view the footage.

Earlier this year, Tesla released a new in-car Sentry mode viewer – facilitating the review of the footage for owners.

Now hacker ‘green’, who has been revealing new Tesla features found in software updates, believes that the automaker is working on letting owners remote livestream what their cars’ see with their Autopilot cameras:

“Well, the remote camera viewing seems to be in the wings, whenever they’ll drop it in 2020.48 or if they’ll postpone it again – I don’t know.”

Everything is apparently going to be handled through the app:

it looks like there's going to be a livestreaming of car videos to the phone app.

— green (@greentheonly) November 28, 2020

Tesla owners can already have an extensive look at the status of their vehicles, including the doors open or close, same for windows, charge port, and more.

Now they are going to be able to see around their vehicles even if no Sentry Mode event has been activated.

Electrek’s Take

I don’t think it’s going to be an extremely useful feature, but it’s one of those Tesla features that is just cool and I am sure some creative Tesla owners are going to find some interesting use cases.

It’s not clear if the feature is going to make it into Tesla v11.

As green said, the feature has apparently appeared in the software before, but it has been delayed.

However, with the way Elon has been hyping the holiday update, I think that’s a likely candidate as one of those “surprise features”.

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