Tesla owners who have experienced trouble with the car’s self-driving Smart Summon feature have discovered that there’s a way to update the maps used for routing.

TMC member Armee_1 discovered that Tesla seems to be using Open Street Maps (OSM) for parking lot mapping. What’s more, owners can create an account with the open source project to make edits to mapped areas that confuse the self-driving feature.

OpenStreetMap is built by a community of mappers that contribute and maintain data about roads, trails, railway stations, and more, all over the world. Contributors use aerial imagery, GPS devices, and low-tech field maps to verify that OSM is accurate and up to date.

“I read online that Tesla might be using OSM so I checked my area,” Armee_1 wrote. “Sure enough, areas where it worked awesome were mapped and areas that failed were not.”

He then created an OSM account and mapped his local parking lots.

“I just re-tested one area today and the routing completely changed,” Armee_1 wrote.

The photo on the left is the original route Armee_1’s car traveled. The photo on the right shows the improved route taken after he updated OSM.

It appears that Tesla is pulling data in realtime from OSM.

TMC member bijan offered an overview of editing maps on OSM:

Create account. Log in with your account. Find the parking lot you want to edit. Click edit. Click line. Click where you want the parking aisle to start, click along the path of the parking aisle (it will create line segments, in the simplest case you click once at each end of the aisle), when done click on the beginning or end point to complete the path. On the left side where it says select feature type, start typing parking aisle and then click on that when it appears. Save your changes. There’s a tutorial when you sign up. That shows you how to do paths, areas, and points of interest.

Enhanced Summon enables Tesla owners to operate their car through the Tesla app rather than from behind the wheel. The vehicle is able to autonomously travel to the driver’s location. For instance, a driver could summon their car from a parking lot and have it meet them at the front door.