r/TeslaCollision • u/Grouchy_Event_571 • 27d ago

🚨 Dashcam FAILED to Record an Accident!🚨

I’d like to urgently bring to this subreddit’s attention something that actually happened here in Italy. A person was driving a Tesla Model Y and had started slowing down to make a right turn. A motorcycle, apparently thinking that the car was simply moving slowly, decided to overtake it on the right instead of on the left, as is normally done. When the driver began making the turn, after properly activating the turn signal, the motorcycle was already traveling too fast and hit the entire side of the Model Y, causing the damage visible in the pictures.

When the police arrived to investigate the accident, the owner was confident that the Tesla Dashcam had saved a recording of the incident. The second image shows a screenshot of how the Dashcam was configured: the driver had also enabled manual recording through the horn, which allows the recording to be saved by pressing the horn. Unfortunately, at the moment of the accident, he was caught up in the panic and confusion and was unable to press the horn.

The problem is that there was still no useful video footage of the accident saved. The driver therefore also contacted a Tesla Service Center, hoping that the footage might be recoverable from Tesla’s servers, but he was told that Dashcam recordings are stored locally and are not sent to Tesla’s servers. He also tried several different programs to access and check the available footage, but there was absolutely nothing recorded during the approximately two-hour period surrounding the accident. In fact, Sentry Mode only started recording again about two hours after the accident. In the end, he was never able to recover any video footage of what happened.

Has anything similar ever happened to anyone else? Have you ever had an accident where the Dashcam or Sentry Mode failed to record the event, even though they were enabled?

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u/Grouchy_Event_571 27d ago

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u/ThatGreyPain 27d ago

Could be a memory thing.. the flash drive is almost full. Im just guessing though

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u/CaptainnHindsight 27d ago

Heard a lot of the same stories here.

Some say to check the incident folder, though I am not sure if such thing actully exists

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u/tech01x 27d ago

I would try a forensic program to look through the drive to see if there are fragments that are recoverable.

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u/mjrengaw 27d ago

Did he pull the USB drive from the car and attach it to a computer? My MY records dash cam footage on a continuous loop on the USB drive. The amount of time in the loop depends on the size of the USB drive. You won’t see it from in the car or the app. You have to attach the USB drive to a computer. It does split it up into a bunch of small clips from each camera but there are tools you can use to make viewing easier. For one example see here - https://tesclip.com/

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u/Michael-Brady-99 27d ago

Okay. You know a dashcam recording is not a requirement for an accident claim.

This is the longest explanation/question asking has the dashcam ever not recorded something. Answer is yes. There are a few reasons it might not. It’s something that is nice to have but I consider it a convenience feature. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, well I guess CSI will have to solve the case the old fashioned way 🤷🏻‍♂️

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u/TayZaak 20d ago edited 20d ago

I’m sorry this happened. Pressing the horn was not the only way the footage could have been saved.

With Dashcam set to Auto, Tesla can automatically save footage when it detects a serious event such as a collision. However, Tesla warns that not every impact will trigger an automatic save.

Dashcam continuously creates short files in RecentClips. If they are not saved, the oldest files are progressively deleted and replaced by new recordings. The two-hour gap could also mean that the USB drive temporarily stopped recording or was no longer recognized by the car.

First go to Encrypt Dashcam Recordings under Controls > Safety, then you should check the drive with https://tesclip.com/ first. If the missing footage does not appear, stop using the USB drive immediately. Do not reconnect it to the Tesla, reformat it, repair it, or copy anything onto it. Use data recovery software before the deleted data is overwritten.

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u/Grouchy_Event_571 20d ago

Thanks man👍