Watch crazy video by Tesla Model 3 autonomously retrieving owner in the parking lot
Tesla is currently working on a new version of its Summon feature that allows their vehicles to autonomously navigate parking spaces and pick up their owners upon request.
The latest version gets impressive as the owner demonstrated the opportunity in a crazy (yet low quality) video of his model 3 picked him up.
Earlier this year, we released an exclusive first look at Tesla's new Enhanced Summon, which allows vehicles to drive themselves in parking lots.
Tesla built the feature on top of its existing "Summon" feature, which has been limited only to moving back and forth to get in and out of parking conditions.
Enhanced Summon enables Tesla vehicles to navigate autonomously in far more complex parking conditions than just moving forward or backward.
In the beta version notes, Tesla describes Summon as "a parking assistant feature that helps you take your car towards you or towards your destination, by navigating out of parking lots and maneuvering around objects as needed."
When you have the update in your car and the latest update for mobile applications, you start to see an updated "Summary" tab that not only contains the usual "Forward" and "Reverse" actions, but also "Enhanced Summon" :
When you press "Enhanced Summon", you have the option of "FIND ME", which will request your car to go to your location based on your phone's GPS, or to release a pin to get your car station to a place.
These two options only work if the drive or pin is within 150 feet of the car.
In March, CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla will gradually begin rolling out the new feature to multiple owners.
The feature has been delayed and it is still most limited to some beta testers. Based on feedback we received from any of them last month, the feature is a kind of "hit or miss".
Depending on the situation, it may work well, but the vehicle is often fixed as it is far too cautious in certain situations.
Tesla has improved the features and now some of the beta testers see some more impressive capabilities out of the new Advanced Summon.
One of them created a video of a model 3 that got out of a parking lot and navigated it back to the owner, while having to handle 2 different vehicles driving around the parking lot (warning on the video is super low quality): [19659002]
Electrek's Take
These types of features are exciting because they give us a glimpse of what fully autonomous driving will look like.
The fact that Tesla already puts this in the hands of actual customers is also crazy about his own.
First, it just seemed like a slightly more advanced version of Autopark, but vice versa.
Now with this new video, it shows some impressive ability to handle traffic in parking lots. I can't wait to test this feature in different scenarios.
This weekend Elon said that the feature will be pushed to the wider fleet later this month. He said they "need to merge many updates into the master code."
It sounds like the newly upgraded feature.
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