A group of vandals tried to damage a Tesla Model 3 and its charger at the Park MGM in Las Vegas last week. They were scared away by the Tesla Sentry Mode and the video that the surveillance system took went viral.

Tesla’s Sentry Mode is an integrated surveillance system inside Tesla’s vehicles using the Autopilot cameras around the car.

It builds on ‘TeslaCam’, an integrated dashcam system, and in many ways, it has been changing the game when it comes to vandalizing parked cars.

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

In other cases, it helped police with video evidence to help them identify and find the vandals.

Now we’ve got another interesting example that happened in Las Vegas last week.

A Tesla Model 3 owner going by ‘Fernando C’ on YouTube reported an incident with his car that was captured by Sentry Mode:

“Our model 3 was able to alert us that someone was tampering with the vehicle at 2am in Vegas. I had Sentry Mode on and it recorded these individuals trying to break off the charging plug. I was able to report and send this to Park MGM Security. Technology is kind of cool!”

He shared this following video of the incident:

As you can see at the end of the video, after starting recording, which is the first level of Sentry Mode, the system started an alarm detecting a “higher level of threat” as the vandals started hitting the car.

It appears to have scared them away.

The Tesla Sentry Mode video went viral – gathering over half a million views in just a few days.

The motivation of the vandals is not clear and considering this happened in Las Vegas, they could have been just drunk but hopefully not since they left driving in their own cars.

Some commenters speculated that they did it out of spite or jealousy against someone having a Tesla.

It wouldn’t be the craziest thing we have seen captured by TeslaCam or Tesla Sentry mode.

Last month, we published the list of the ’10 craziest Tesla Sentry Mode/TeslaCam videos of 2019′.

In order for TeslaCam and 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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