There are a few things that affect this.
- Sensitivity settings. These determine how much movement must be seen in the camera pixels for something to be considered enough “movement” to count as an “event” worth recording. The higher it is (ie:100%), the less motion is needed to trigger it.
- Motion inside a vehicle will be stifled a little because of the metal blocking the movement, and the glass potentially distorting viewing to some degree. It will also partially depend on the angle of the camera to the vehicle.
- It partially depends what camera model you are using. Wyze Outdoor Cam is based on a PIR sensor, which would be blocked while the person is inside the car.
- It depends on if you were relying on nightvision or not and what the lighting conditions were. The IR is effective to a certain range, and movement sensitivity isn’t always as strong in night vision. Also, when the lighting conditions are low, the camera pixel changes aren’t as dramatic, especially through a car which also obfuscates the viewing.
- Distance. It depends how far away the vehicle is from the camera. The farther away, the harder it will be to pick up movement inside the car.
- Detection Zones. I don’t think this applies to your situation, but just to be thorough for future reference I’ll mention detection zones sometimes make a difference why something may not have been recorded as desired. If the event occurs outside the detection zone or moves outside a detection zone, then event recording can cease until things come back within that zone again.
- SD card: Do you have one? Is it set to Events only (that’s why it probably didn’t record while they were in the car as mentioned in the above points) or is it set on continuous recording? If it is set to continuous recording, it probably did record them inside of the car, but it won’t show this in the “Events” tab. Instead, what you will want to do, is go back to the first event of them breaking into your car. Now at the bottom of that video recording there should be an icon labeled “Playback” and if you click on that, then it will take you to the SD card recording (instead of just the cloud recording) in the exact spot you want to look at, and there you will be able to watch the ENTIRE break-in, including while they were inside your car. I’m hoping that is the case for you and that this solves your issue. You can also access the SD card recordings by going to the live stream area of the camera click “View Playback” at the bottom, then navigating to the correct date and time to find the video you’re looking for.
There are a few other things that could’ve contributed to the above situation, but those are the most probable. Obviously something crazy like your camera rebooting or losing power or internet or something like that could always have happened, but I am guessing that is not the case.
If you have a camera model that will do continuous recording to an SD card, and you don’t currently have an SD card, I would get one. I have SD cards in all my cams that support them and I set them to continuous recording. Once that is the case, they always record everything, even if the normal cloud events don’t due to the sensitivity or detection settings.
I hope what you did capture can help you or law enforcement be able to recover your losses.
I hope that helps give you some ideas of things that might help in the future.
Best of luck.