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Tesla Sentry Mode captures politician in Model 3 hit-and-run

Tesla Model 3 captures a hit-and-run incident with Sentry Mode. | Credit: emeraldik/YouTube

Published

7 years ago

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A former traffic court judge currently in the running for a seat on the Philadelphia City Council was caught hitting a parked Tesla Model 3 and subsequently leaving the scene without reporting the incident. A video captured of the event using the Model 3’s Sentry Mode feature was published by the vehicle’s owner on YouTube.

Judge Willie Singletary is seen backing out his Cadillac Escalade into the Tesla Model 3 parked next to him in the video, triggering the car’s alarm. Singletary then exits his SUV and appears to assess the damage caused to the all-electric sedan and even attempts to buff out the apparently visible marks at the point of impact. The affected part of the Model 3 isn’t visible in the video, but given the drawn-out contemplation and multiple attempts to smooth out the damage by Singletary, a police report or (at minimum) note to the owner was definitely warranted.

UPDATE: The owner of the Model 3 contacted Teslarati and provided additional details regarding the outcome of the incident. Singletary was easily identified thanks to the owner’s prior work on local elections and his contact information was available from campaign filings. The owner subsequently reached out to Singletary regarding the hit, which he says the former judge first denied but provided insurance information once made aware the event was on video. The police were then brought in to handle the matter further. The Escalade Singletary was driving in the video was a rental car. Additionally, the estimate for repair of the Model 3 provided to the owner by a Tesla certified body shop was $2000.

The Model 3 hit-and-run incident isn’t the first time Singletary has run afoul of the law, adding to the irony of his prior position as a Philadelphia Traffic Court judge. In 2015, the City Council hopeful was sentenced to 20 months in prison, followed by a year of supervised release, after being convicted of lying to the FBI in a ticket-fixing scheme investigation while serving as a judge. Singletary appealed the sentence as beyond the advisory range of 0-6 months for such convictions, but a federal judge resentenced him, citing the highly pervasive nature of the scheme. The judge claimed the corruption was so extreme, the Traffic Court was disbanded in the fall-out, thus the longer sentence was deserved.

Singletary, for his part, denied that the Traffic Court’s closure was related to his role, noting that he and all the other court judges were not convicted of corruption, only lying to the FBI, which he argued is a position the agency can easily manipulate into occurring. The state attorneys involved in the original case regarding the ticket-fixing responded to the appeal, citing witness testimony establishing Singletary’s participation in the scheme and noting the difficulty faced by the government to obtain convictions for fraud even in the face of significant evidence.

Given former Judge Willie Singletary’s colorful history with vehicle violations, this latest encounter with a Tesla Model 3’s Sentry Mode is likely not going to bode well for his City Council ambitions.

Tesla may be leading the charge in the electric vehicle revolution, but perhaps it’s about to take the lead in vehicle security solutions as well. Sentry Mode was created to address vehicle break-ins that appeared to target Tesla owners specifically, especially in California’s Bay Area, and the security advantages it’s providing are already proving the feature was well worth the effort it took to create.

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Sentry Mode is a security feature available on all Tesla models and was recently launched via over-the-air updates to improve and complement existing vehicle security features and options such as GPS tracking and the Enhanced Anti-Theft Device cabin motion sensor. Once activated, the Tesla owner is alerted via the company’s mobile app, video footage is recorded, and in the event of an intrusion, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor is played at full volume to draw attention to the car. Once the vehicle’s “Alarm” state is entered following a detected incident, a video beginning 10 minutes prior to the event can be downloaded by the owner. Should Willie Singletary have been aware of this Tesla feature, perhaps his choice of action after backing into the Model 3 would have been different.

Watch the full Sentry Mode recorded hit-and-run incident below:

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Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

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1 day ago

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August 13, 2026

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

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Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

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4 days ago

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August 10, 2026

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

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7 days ago

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August 7, 2026

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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