When Tesla revealed the “Smart Summon” feature in September of 2019, the potential for automated parking was engineered into existence. Smart Summon is a Full Self-Driving feature that enables owners to bring their automotive to them using the mobile app. The feature is helpful in helping owners safely summon their vehicle from tight spaces, especially narrow parking spots. While Tesla owners have had mixed reviews of Smart Summon, the convenience of this feature became abundantly clear in a viral 2020 video that shows a Tesla Model Y exiting a flooded parking spot with ease.
This video proved the practicality of the Smart Summon feature, which allowed the user to retrieve their Model Y in a sticky situation where access was obstructed by unexpected weather conditions. Although Tesla’s current Smart Summon feature is a step in the suitable direction for fully automated parking, Tesla owners are more smitten by Reverse Summon. Reverse Summon would allow an owner to get out of their vehicle at the doorway to a constructing and have the vehicle robotically discover a parking spot and park itself.
When asked in regards to the feature in March of 2020, Elon Musk responded: “We’d like to complete work on Autopilot core foundation code & 3D labelling, then functionality will occur quickly. Not long now.” A yr later, Autopilot & 3D labelling have improved drastically but not much has been said in regards to the latest feature. Latest information from an unsubstantiated Reddit post reveals that we could see the Reverse Summon feature in an upcoming update very soon.
Within the Reddit post, user u/110110 states that Tesla’s “Reverse Summon” feature has supposedly been made available to engineers for testing, meaning it’s getting closer to wide release. The insider also mentions that the feature would come with parking options resembling “closest to the door”, “near cart returns”, or “end of the parking zone”. This makes Reverse Summon a way more dynamic feature than Smart Summon in that the user is capable of pick how and where the vehicle is parked, based on their preference. To this point, Tesla engineers’ reviews of the feature have been “quite good”. Based on this news, we could soon see reverse summon released as “Smart Park, or Self-Parking” later this yr although the feature name and release date is yet to be officially confirmed.
While the Smart Summon feature is advantageous for retrieving a parked automotive, reverse summon could prove to be a more useful and practical use of the vehicle’s full self-driving capabilities. This feature would enable the vehicle to seek out an appropriate parking spot for the owner which might effectively accomplish fully automated parking.
