Tesla Sentry Mode managed to capture footage of an incident where a Tesla owner was attacked by someone over a dispute regarding the attacker blocking a charging station.
The police was able to use the Sentry Mode footage to make an arrest.
Sentry Mode is Tesla’s integrated surveillance system inside its vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car to record potential vandalism or other incidents.
Tesla owners have to plug a storage device in one of the USB ports in the center console, and footage recorded by Sentry Mode and TeslaCam, the automaker’s dashcam feature, will be stored on it.
The feature was first launched after thieves, especially in the Bay Area, started targeting Tesla vehicles — resulting in a stream of cars left with broken windows and valuables missing.
Since the launch of the feature, it has helped catch vandals and thieves, as well as some pretty crazy videos of things happening around Tesla vehicles.
In a latest incident, a Tesla owner used Sentry Mode as evidence of an armed assault against him over a dispute about ICEing, which is a term used in the EV community to describe an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle blocking an electric vehicle charging station.
Tesla owner Mathew Lambert arrived at a mall in Manresa, Spain, and wanted to park and plug in at the facility’s charging station, but two gasoline vehicles were blocking it.
He told Electrek:
When I arrived there were two ICE cars, one parked on each of the 11kw chargers that the mall installed one year ago. One of them was just waiting for somebody, and they moved the car so I could plug in when I asked, and while I was plugging in my Model 3, the owner of the other ICE arrived and I told him that he should not park on these two spots as they are reserved for charging EVs.
That’s when things turned sour.
Lambert continued:
He then started backing up his car and while doing so he showed me the middle finger, then when I asked him why he was doing so (he had already completely backed up, and he was on the front-right part of my car, so no footage) he tried to roll over me, he then stopped and grabbed a tool from the trunk of his car.
That’s when Tesla’s Sentry Mode was able to record the altercation, and you can clearly see the aggressor trying to attack Lambert with a tool:
Lambert managed to protect himself with some wrist control that would have made a jiu jitsu instructor proud.
With the help of his wife and passersby, they managed to get the man off of Lambert, and the man ran away.
The Tesla Model 3 owner told Electrek about the aftermath:
I called the police and shared the video with them, so they were able to identify this person as he’s already known, even with the face mask on! Later in the evening the police called to inform that he was arrested and asked me to identify him, and I did so, he was then released. I’ve pressed charges, and there will be a trial.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to get the footage from the B-pillar camera from Tesla that would have shown a longer version of the incident, but the Tesla Sentry Mode footage was still really helpful.
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