On 17th July, Elon Musk tweeted that the current Tesla’s smart summon feature is only a fun trick and is yet to be a useful feature in upcoming updates. Summon trick allows Tesla owners during torrential downpours or tricky parking lots, however is not a fully reliable option currently.
Tesla is fully aware of the limitations of their summon feature, which is possibly why they stated it was a fun trick. Recently version 9 of Full-Self Driving (FSD) technology showed impressive results. With Pure vision and developments with Dojo Computers, Tesla’s FSD is progressing at a faster pace.
Current Summon is sometimes useful, but mostly just a fun trick. Once we move summon (plus highway driving) to a single FSD stack, it will be sublime.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2021
Autonomous features in cars are specifically for the safety of passengers, easy driving, and automated features. Parking at tricky places is yet to be implemented by electric vehicle manufacturers. It is mostly considered as an “assist” and not fully autonomous. However, Tesla could be the one to first have an advance summon feature. Last year Elon Musk mentioned that the advanced improvement could allow the car to go on steep slopes.
While Ford Mustang Mach-E is currently working on fixing their models as they failed to handle the regenerative braking in steep slopes. Tesla is working on advancing its technology. Tesla cars are often known to have more stability, consistent performance. In a race with the all-electric vehicles at all-Japan EV Grand Prix Series, the Model 3 was seen to win the race multiple rounds because Porsche Taycan Turbo S couldn’t maintain its high speed after 10 laps. As usual, Tesla’s futuristic cars continue to dominate the electric vehicle industry.
Neural networks
Tesla highly depends on its software, which is from the Dojo computer currently being developed. Elon Musk says that with ~2.5D to 4D. Recently, Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence, Andrej Karpathy detailed the upcoming possibilities of Tesla’s autopilot. While the Dojo computer is expected to be made available for other companies, their main objective would be to take autonomous driving cars to next level.
The computer can handle large networks and data. As Tesla cars are available worldwide, the need to have a powerful computer comes along. FSD Version 9 has improved drastically without the Dojo computer, it is possible that the summon feature will be more useful when Tesla is aligned with Dojo.