Sentry Mode that arms itself, and a car that answers back

Sentry Mode is a good feature with a usage flaw: you have to remember it. You switch it on the evening you park in an unfamiliar street, you forget the next three times, and the fourth is the one that matters.

iCar starts from that. There is nothing left for you to switch on.

Armed at every parking, off at home

The setting fits in one sentence: iCar arms Sentry Mode every time the car parks, and leaves it off at home and at work. You want surveillance on the car sleeping in the street, not on the one in your garage, and Sentry running every night at home drains the battery for nothing.

Tesla already lets you exclude those places while Sentry is on. What iCar adds is the opposite: remembering is no longer your job, arming is the car’s, except where it serves no purpose.

Not a single address, ever

This is the point we do not compromise on. To know the car is home, iCar reads and stores no address at all. The car emits two booleans, I am at home and I am at work, and nothing else. It says it is home without ever saying where home is.

Pulling the addresses from your Tesla account was the obvious way to build this. It was also the wrong one: this version does the same thing without a single position leaving the vehicle.

Once per parking, and not once more

If you switch Sentry off from the car’s own screen, it does not come back thirty seconds later. iCar arms only on the first message received at a standstill: after that, your decision holds until you drive off again.

It is a one-line rule in the code, and it is what separates a useful automation from software that fights its user.

When someone comes close, the car answers

Sentry Mode records. It does not deter. iCar makes the car answer, at two levels that are not the same :

• Someone approaches: a single flash of the headlights. It happens several times a day in a busy car park, and the message “you are on camera” must be sent without waking the street.
• The alarm goes off: horn and headlights, three times, three seconds apart, then it stops.

Two separate switches, both off by default. A shared underground car park may well want the headlights without the horn, and this is the one iCar setting your neighbours could complain about.

The rule that matters most: never honk late

A car’s data sometimes arrives late, after a reconnection or a network outage. An event can therefore reach you several minutes after it happened.

Beyond one minute, iCar notifies but makes no noise. Honking twenty minutes after the fact, in a car park, at three in the morning, is real damage with no way back. That rule is not an engineer’s caution: it is the difference between a feature you keep and a feature you uninstall.

There is also a five-minute rest between two responses. Outside a café terrace, without it, the car would flash continuously.

The notification says what happened, never who

You get an alert when Sentry detects someone or when the alarm triggers. The text says what the car reported, never that someone tried to steal it, never that a person is there.

No Tesla signal proves a presence, and a notification that accuses is a notification people believe.

What we would rather write than let you hope for

iCar cannot show you the footage. Sentry recordings live on the car’s USB drive, and Tesla’s API exposes no remote access to them. This is not a matter of effort, it is a missing interface.

We say so because it is what you expect from a product you trust with watching your car: what does not exist is not advertised.

There is nothing to install

No server, no script, no container to keep an eye on. You install the app, you connect your Tesla account, you tick what the car should do. It handles the rest every time you park.

The first 14 days are free, and Sentry is armed from the very first parking.