Tesla’s ability to think outside the box is undoubtedly one of the reasons behind the company’s ongoing success. From its vast Supercharger network to its steady stream of over-air-updates, Tesla has quite literally changed the dynamics of the automotive experience. At the same time, Tesla’s penchant for thinking outside the box can sometimes stretch far beyond what is necessary or even practical.
Take Smart Summon, for example. The feature enables users to summon their vehicles in parking lots. It sounds intriguing, but at the end of the day, all it does is save you a quick walk to your parked car. The downside, though, is that we’ve already seen a number of instances of Tesla vehicles getting into accidents while cruising with Smart Summon engaged. While the technology behind Smart Summon is impressive, it’s essentially a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist.
Nonetheless, Elon Musk took to Twitter recently and suggested that we might see a feature called Reverse Summon sometime soon. As the name somewhat implies, Reverse Summon would allow a Tesla owner to get out of the car whereupon the vehicle would drive itself to a wide open parking spot. That sounds incredibly useful, but given Tesla’s previous track record, I’m a bit skeptical that the implementation would work well enough or consistently enough to trust.
We need to finish work on Autopilot core foundation code & 3D labelling, then functionality will happen quickly. Not long now.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 2, 2020
“CEO Elon Musk hinted that the feature could be coming soon and linked it to an upcoming Autopilot core foundation code rewrite that would enable to deploy a faster pace of improvement to Autopilot features,” Electrek notes. Incidentally, Musk earlier today responded to a user on Twitter and said that more full self-driving features are set to arrive on Tesla vehicles later this month.
