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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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Firmware

Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond

Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.

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1 week ago

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July 29, 2026

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Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.

The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.

Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.

Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features

The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.

Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.

With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific

Published

2 weeks ago

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July 23, 2026

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Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”

In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.


When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”

The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”

Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.

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Cybertruck

Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love

Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.

Published

2 weeks ago

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July 22, 2026

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Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.

The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”

The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.

The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.

Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more

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It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.

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