Tesla Sentry Mode stops a thief from stealing wheels off parked car

A thief started removing the nuts off the wheels of a Tesla vehicle when the vehicle’s Sentry Mode security system activated. He appears to give up after noticing that he was being recorded – leaving the loose wheels in a dangerous condition.

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 has recently proven useful in several other situations, including acts of vandalism against Tesla vehicles.

Now it also intervened in another strange situation. Someone was removing the nuts off the wheels of a Tesla vehicle parked in a parking lot near the Bergen airport in Norway when he appears to notice that he triggered the Sentry Mode and leaves:

When Sentry Mode detects a potential threat through its camera system, it lights up the display inside the vehicle to show that is recording its surroundings.

If the threat persists, it will start the alarm.

In this case, it appears to have convinced the thief to give up stealing the wheels, but it resulted in a potentially dangerous situation because the owner didn’t realize that the wheels were loose before getting into the car.

However, the owner, Kees Ihlhaug, told local news that he noticed that something was wrong quickly after starting to drive and came to a stop before leaving the parking lot:

“It could have gone really wrong. If I had come up to speed, the wheels would flow off and the car could haver hit others along the way and potentially kill people.”

Local police have been notified and they said that they never heard of a similar incident.

They are investigating, but the face of the thief is unfortunately not visible from the Tesla Sentry Mode video.

In other cases, Tesla’s new security system has already proven to be quite useful for Tesla owners and the police.

We recently reported on a Tesla Sentry Mode video leading to another arrest in California.