Elon Musk has been promising some major improvements to Tesla Autopilot’s Summon feature, and now he has now released some new details.

The CEO now claims that the next-gen Summon feature will be able to navigate parking lots of its own, find a parking spot and even read signs for parking instruction to avoid tickets.

Tesla’s Autopilot has often been called a “self-driving” system, even though its a driver assist system. However, its Summon feature is certainly the closest thing to being “driverless” we’ve seen yet, since it can be activated without anyone in the car.

The feature enabled owners to remotely move their cars a few feet in parking areas.

It has been primarily used by owners to automatically pull their cars out of the garage.

Some owners have managed to find some pretty useful applications for the feature:

I was not sure when I would use this feature… till today. @elonmusk @tesla pic.twitter.com/bC6rFt2SuW — D Shawn Kennedy (@rarelyserious) October 31, 2018

Musk has been promising some major improvement to the Summon, which has so far been using the ultrasonic sensors around Tesla vehicles.

With its latest update to the Autopilot neural net, Tesla has introduced a camera agnostic computer vision system that has been deploying on all 8 cameras around the car.

The CEO says that Summon feature will soon take advantage of those cameras and be able to navigate more complexed areas.

Now he says that it should even be able to navigate a parking lot, find a spot and read parking signs:

For those unfamiliar, this uses Tesla Autopark/Summon. Slightly smarter version hopefully ready soon. By next year, a Tesla should be able to drive around a parking lot, find an empty spot, read signs to confirm it’s valid & park. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2018

The feature can be used remotely at the moment, but the owner still needs to remain within viewing distance and be able to stop the vehicle if needed.

What Musk is suggesting would represent a significant change that would enable the vehicle to truly navigate remotely on its own.

Update: Musk has tweeted that this update will be available “in ~6 weeks.”

Tesla advanced Summon ready in ~6 weeks! Just an over-the-air software upgrade, so will work on all cars made in past 2 years (Autopilot hardware V2+). — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2018

Car will drive to your phone location & follow you like a pet if you hold down summon button on Tesla app — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2018

Also, you’ll be able to drive it from your phone remotely like a big RC car if in line of sight — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2018

Electrek’s Take

Plenty of humans can’t understand parking signs. It would be quite an achievement if Tesla could get an AI to do it successfully.

I am skeptical that Tesla can achieve that as soon as next year, but I won’t pretend that I know more about this than Elon, so for now I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Though I do think that the new neural net is going to enable advanced capabilities quicker than ever before.

Either way, it sounds like we are getting closer to the “ticket-avoidance-mode”:

Featured Image: Screenshot from a video demonstration of Model S saving owner from the rain by picking him up with ‘Summon’ by Drag Times

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