Vehicle vandalism—especially the misguided vandalism of privately owned Teslas has been on the rise. While some owners are fortunate enough to catch perpetrators with Sentry Mode or security cameras, many vandals escape without consequence, often without even triggering the vehicle’s alarm.
Recently, Tesla vandalism has escalated, including the arson of a Tesla showroom in France and the destruction of a Supercharger site in the U.S. Beyond attacks on the company itself, Tesla owners are also being targeted, regardless of any connection to the controversies surrounding the brand.
Although Sentry Mode is effective for capturing incidents after the fact, it does little to prevent them in the moment. While useful for insurance claims and law enforcement, it doesn’t actively deter criminal activity. A simple honk or alarm trigger could go a long way in discouraging bad actors before they cause damage.
Littleton Fire Department
Honking at Vandalism
Now, that may all come to an end. In response to a post requesting Tesla’s engineers to find a way to protect vehicles from getting keyed, Elon Musk responded that your Tesla could potentially honk at people when it detects activity like your vehicle being keyed or spray-painted.
Musk suggested the idea in response to a video on X showing a Tesla being keyed. While this type of vandalism isn’t new, incidents have been increasing. Given Tesla’s ability to detect lane markings and surrounding objects, it could just as easily recognize destructive behavior like keying. A simple honk can go a long way in deterring this kind of behavior.
It’s a small change but increasingly necessary in a world where tensions are rising and Tesla owners are being targeted. This addition would shift Sentry Mode from a mostly reactive feature to a proactive one, helping to reduce vehicle damage.
Sentry Mode has continued to improve throughout the years. In the Christmas update, Tesla added the ability to view Sentry Mode videos directly on your phone. Although this is limited to iPhones right now, we expect this to open up to Android devices in the future. We’re also expecting Sentry Mode efficiency changes in an upcoming update.
Emissions Pooling is an incentive-based program supported by various governments—most notably the European Union—to help automakers meet strict carbon reduction goals under Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.
CAFE standards mandate that automakers reduce the average CO₂ emissions across their fleet of newly manufactured vehicles. The EU’s 2025 targets are particularly aggressive, and manufacturers risk hefty fines if a sufficient portion of their new vehicles aren’t low- or zero-emission.
Emission Pool
Emissions pooling is a regulatory mechanism that allows automakers to combine their fleet CO₂ emissions to collectively meet environmental targets. Companies with low or zero emissions—like Tesla—can partner with higher-emitting automakers to help reduce their combined average and avoid costly fines.
In practice, this means pool members purchase emissions credits from Tesla, which uses its all-electric lineup to generate surplus credits. These credits help other manufacturers offset their emissions, while Tesla earns a tidy profit.
Tesla has long capitalized on this model, regularly selling emissions credits to strengthen its financials. Now, its European Union emissions pool is expanding again—with Honda and Suzuki joining existing members like Stellantis, Toyota, Ford, Mazda, and Subaru.
Green Bottom Line
Every automaker in Tesla’s emissions pool is effectively buying credits from a company with a 100% zero-emission fleet. In Q4 2024 alone, Tesla earned $692 million from regulatory and emissions credits, making up nearly 30% of its quarterly net income.
That’s a major chunk of profit driven by programs like emissions pooling—and with Honda now onboard, Tesla gains a significant new partner (and revenue stream) in the EU.
Tesla quietly included a cabin radar in its vehicles for several years before recently activating it through software update 2025.2. Tesla now uses the interior radar for several features, and later this year will add additional features that take advantage of the interior radar.
Cabin Radar Features
The first feature Tesla developed that uses the cabin radar is front row cabin sensing. Instead of relying on sensors in the seats to detect occupancy, Tesla now uses the radar to determine where people are sitting in the vehicle. The radar is much more accurate than a seat sensor, so not only will it prevent false positives that occur when placing a heavy object on the passenger seat, but it could also improve reliability by reducing the number of parts in the vehicle.
In future updates, Tesla intends to expand the occupancy sensing to the rear of all of its supported vehicles, which will help improve vehicle safety by correctly deploying airbags as needed on a dynamic basis.
Regular Radar vs 4D Radar
The 4D radar is Tesla’s latest iteration of the radar, which is capable of even more sensing features. While many of these features are still a work in progress and haven’t been enabled, we recently covered what’s coming for the cabin radar. For now, these 4D radars are limited to the Cybertruck and the refreshed Model Y, but Tesla intends to expand the 4D radar to other vehicles as parts become available. Older vehicles include a different part number for the cabin radar, but it’s not clear if or how that will affect upcoming cabin radar features.
Upcoming Cabin Radar Features
In Q3 2025, Tesla intends to add child-presence detection, as well as health-detection for critical emergencies. In short, the radar is a safety-focused addition and will be able to help protect an individual left behind in a vehicle.
In addition to child detection, the radar will also determine passenger sizes to dynamically determine which airbags to deploy, which can help reduce airbag injuries for shorter individuals sitting in the front seats.
The radar can automatically note if a child or baby is left behind in the vehicle and will notify you via the Tesla app immediately. It will also turn on the HVAC system to ensure their safety. In the case of an emergency, the vehicle can also automatically call emergency services in some cases and even report its location.
As a reminder, while Tesla vehicles outside of the United States support eCall, vehicles within the US cannot call 911 unless a phone is connected to the vehicle via Bluetooth. We hope that Tesla looks to add similar capabilities in North America to improve safety capabilities.
Which Vehicles Have Cabin Radars?
Tesla’s more recent lineup of vehicles includes cabin radars, but this isn’t an exact science, and we’ll explain why a bit further below.
Tesla includes the cabin radar on the 2024+ Model 3 and some 2022+ Model Ys. It’s also included on all refresh Model Ys, the Cybertruck and some 2021+ Model S and Model X vehicles, however, the exact hardware version of the cabin radar does differ between models. While there are different hardware versions for the cabin radar, it’s not clear whether all hardware versions will support all features in the future.
To complicate things further, some pre-refresh Model Ys (late 2022+) are already equipped with the cabin radar, while others are receiving a notice from Tesla to come in and have the radar installed. This is due to Tesla using the radar for driver and passenger occupancy sensing.
As such, some older Model Ys and Model 3s may either be equipped with the cabin radar or may receive a notification from Tesla to have it equipped to address the occupancy sensor recall.
Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured from approximately September 2024 should also include the cabin radar sensors, but it’s best to check to be sure. We’ve got some instructions below on how to do just that.
How to Check If You Have a Cabin Radar
There’s actually an easy way to check whether your vehicle has a cabin radar. To do this, you’ll need to enter Tesla’s Service Mode, which is aimed at technicians, but it’s perfectly safe to do so as long as you exit it before driving and don’t change any settings.
If you’re not sure how to access Service Mode, check out our Service Mode guide that will walk you through the process. Once you’re in Service Mode, use the menu on the left to navigate to the Safety & Restraints section and thenchoose Seats.
You’ll be presented with the seats panel that shows passenger occupancy. Between the two front seats, you’ll see a green box below or above the virtual screen. Tap on it and it’ll either say Restraints Control Module (RCM) or Cabin Radar (ICR).
Location of Cabin Radar
Not a Tesla App
On supported vehicles, the cabin radar is located between the two front seats above the rearview mirror.
Future Features
We expect Tesla to continue to develop features that rely on the vehicle’s cabin radar. Dog Mode, for instance, could be turned on automatically if you leave your pooch inside the vehicle and fail to turn on Dog Mode. Tesla can also trigger the rear HVAC fan even when the seat occupancy sensor isn’t triggered, which happens regularly with child seats.
Tesla is also expected to stop including seat sensors in every seat and instead rely on the cabin camera to detect passengers, reducing the cost of each vehicle. As with other Tesla features, new feature ideas on how to leverage the cabin sensor will come later as owners and product owners think of other clever uses for the new hardware.
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