Does Sentry Driver drain my Tesla's battery?

No. Sentry Driver never asks your Tesla for data, so a parked car has nothing to answer and nothing to wake up for.

Most battery drain from third-party apps comes from polling — the app asks your car “what’s happening?” every few minutes, and every question wakes it. Sentry Driver is built the opposite way.

We don’t poll your car:

Sentry Driver uses Tesla Fleet Telemetry, which is a push system. Your Tesla streams signals out to our servers on its own; we never send a request through Tesla’s API that your vehicle has to answer. There is no polling loop, no scheduled check-in, and no background refresh.

Telemetry only streams while the car is already awake:

Fleet Telemetry sends data only when your vehicle is awake — normally because someone is driving it. Parked and asleep means there is nothing to stream and nothing sent. Your Tesla wakes because someone got in, never because Sentry Driver asked it to.

Drives, Stats and Events never touch your car:

These are assembled on our servers from telemetry your Tesla streamed while it was awake and moving. Opening those screens in the app reads our servers, not your vehicle. You can scroll back through months of trip history, stats and events on a car that has been parked for a week, and your Tesla stays asleep the entire time.

Nothing wakes your car on its own:

There are no scheduled check-ins and no background refresh. Nothing we do to build your Drives, Stats or Events involves contacting the vehicle. Waking a Tesla only ever happens if you explicitly ask for it.

Showing as disconnected while parked is correct behaviour:

When your vehicle appears offline or disconnected in the app while it’s parked, that’s the system working as intended — your Tesla is asleep and we deliberately leave it that way. Waking it just to show a green dot would cause exactly the drain you’re worried about. See Why does my vehicle show as offline? for more.

Common causes of drain on a parked Tesla that aren’t Sentry Driver:

• The official Tesla app — opening it wakes your car to fetch current status
• The Tesla home screen widget on your phone, which refreshes in the background
• Viewing the live camera feed, which keeps the vehicle awake for as long as it’s streaming
• A phone key in Bluetooth range, which can keep the car from settling into sleep
• Tesla’s data sharing upload, which sends footage and data from the vehicle

If you’re seeing unexplained drain, these are the places to look first.

For a longer explanation of why push-based telemetry behaves so differently from polling, read Does Monitoring Your Tesla Drain the Battery?.