A Tesla owner has captured on dashcam a road-raging BMW owner vandalizing a Model 3 and now they are hoping that the footage will help find the culprit.

Cory Janney, a Tesla Model 3 owner from the San Diego area, says that he was pulling into the parking lot of a local mall when he encountered a BMW.

He told ABC:

“As we were coming in, a car drove straight through a stop sign. I honked my horn for a millisecond,”

The BMW drove away.

Janney and his wife parked their Model 3 and went into Best Buy for a few minutes.

When they came back to the car, they found a large scratch along the passenger side:

They said that they were both “shocked”. Such a deep scratch can cost over $1,000 to fix and it’s considered an act of vandalism.

Janney didn’t use Tesla’s Sentry Mode, which has helped catch people vandalizing Tesla vehicles several times now, but he did have a dashcam on parking mode.

He reviewed the footage and found the same BMW owner parked his car next to the Model 3 and approach the vehicle with a sharp object.

The Model 3 owner told ABC:

“He had stiff arm and proceeded to scratch the passenger side of the door, before getting back into the vehicle,”

They showed the footage on TV and they hope that they will be able to find the Tesla vandal:

Janney said about the incident:

“It’s disturbing something so small could lead to so much rage. If he gets this frustrated, who knows if he’s going to escalate it to something bigger.”

We have been seeing a lot more of those acts of vandalism against Tesla vehicles lately since Tesla has released its Sentry Mode feature.

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 is now proving useful in other situations.

It has led to several arrests at this point and the goal is that it gets publicized enough to deter people to mess with Tesla vehicles in the first place.

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