Sentry IQ / Guides / Sentry Mode guide
Tesla Sentry Mode: the complete owner's guide.
Updated 19 August 2026
Sentry Mode turns a parked Tesla into a camera system. The car watches its surroundings, records anything suspicious, and can sound the alarm. It is one of the best anti-vandalism features ever shipped in a car, and it has two gaps every owner should understand. This guide covers how it works and how to close the gaps.
The three states
- Standby. Armed and watching. The cameras record to memory, the screen shows the red recording dot.
- Alert. Something is close, a person lingering or leaning. The car saves the footage and shows a warning on the screen.
- Alarm. An actual break-in signal: forced entry, glass break, hard impact. The alarm sounds and the Tesla app gets a notification.
Note where the phone comes in: only at Alarm. Everything at Alert level stays between the car and its storage. That is gap number one, covered in the notifications guide.
Turning it on
- On the screen: the Sentry Mode toggle in the car's safety settings.
- From the Tesla app: Security, then Sentry Mode.
- By voice: "keep Tesla safe" or similar commands.
Sentry Mode stays on until you turn it off or the battery hits 20 percent. There is no built-in timer or schedule; that is gap number two, and the fix is in the scheduling guide. You can tell the car to skip Home, Work and Favorites, which saves battery where you do not need watching.
Where the footage goes
Clips are saved to the car's dashcam storage, on most cars a USB drive, in the SentryClips folder. You can watch them on the car's screen, or pull the drive and read it on a computer. With Premium Connectivity you can also open a live view of the cameras from the Tesla app while the car is parked. Sentry IQ never touches any of this; footage stays in your car.
What it costs
Roughly 250 to 300 watts on older software, around 150 on cars with the late-2024 update. Call it up to a mile of range per hour at the high end. Real numbers and ways to cut them are in the battery drain guide. The short version: exclude home, and arm on a schedule instead of around the clock.
The two gaps, and closing them
- It rarely tells you anything. Three event types reach your phone. The rest, the lean, the circling stranger, the parking-lot dent, are recorded in silence and found later. An app on Tesla's official streaming platform can push every event as it happens.
- It has no clock. On around the clock costs battery; off means unprotected. A schedule arms the car for the hours it is actually exposed.
Sentry IQ closes both: real-time push for every Sentry event, honk, flash and lock from the alert, and a weekly schedule the car follows by itself. Free, no hardware, sign in with your Tesla account.