His Tesla Was Vandalized, Now A Model 3 Owner Wants Elon Musk To Enable This Powerful Feature

Tesla, Inc.'s TSLA Elon Musk is quite active on Twitter and invariably responds quickly when users raise any issues.

What Happened: A Tesla Model 3 owner from Israel on Saturday shared on Twitter a photo of his vandalized vehicle, which had been left with deep scratch marks. Agonized over the incident, the user, going by the twitter handle @MosheShekhter, tagged Musk and requested the Tesla CEO to enable sentry mode in Israel so that such malicious acts can be avoided in the future. Musk was hands-on and replied that he is planning to address the matter.

What's Sentry Mode: Tesla's sentry mode is an anti-theft feature installed in its vehicles and allows monitoring of suspicious activities when it's parked and locked in specific locations. When enabled, sentry mode enters a standby state like many home alarm systems, allowing the car's external cameras to detect potential threat, according to Tesla.

If the threat detected is minimal, sentry mode switches to an alert state and displays a message on the touchscreen warning that the cameras are recording.

If a more severe threat is detected, like if someone breaks a window, sentry mode switches to an alarm state. This will activate the car alarm, increase the brightness of the central display and play music at maximum volume from the car's audio system.

The owner of the car will also receive an alert from their Tesla app in his/her mobile, notifying that an incident has occurred.

Sentry mode has to be enabled each time by going to sentry mode under safety & security found in controls. Tesla began rolling out this feature in the U.S. in Feb. 2019.

Earlier this month, a report suggested that in Singapore, a vandal who used his key to scratch a Tesla parked at a car park was caught in the act on one of the cameras mounted on the Model 3 car.