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It's a bit difficult to tell from the videos, but it seems like the only one of those that was a production vehicle was the Nissan, and there was quite a bit of
by sjburt 11y ago
It's a bit difficult to tell from the videos, but it seems like the only one of those that was a production vehicle was the Nissan, and there was quite a bit of manual intervention (shifting into forward and reverse).
To be fair, I don't really understand the point of the Tesla feature either... can it do anything but pull the car from right outside a garage to inside the garage and vice versa?
- sandworm101 11y agoThey have rolled out some of the autopark features. I think all the sold cars required the driver in the seat. The versions that I have tested myself have all been horrible. They were so slow, or required unnatural maneuvers to scan the space. One dealer told me the feature was only for "People who cannot look over their shoulder, you know ... old people." None of them would un-park the car. I still needed the basic parallel parking skills to get out of the spot.
- arethuza 11y agoWe live in the centre of a city, Edinburgh, where there is only street side parking and I've been using autopark for years and it works really well - it is faster and more accurate than my parking and I thought I was pretty good at parallel parking!
- tempestn 11y agoI don't own one, but one possibility that springs to mind is, if you wanted, you could pack your garage with crap, leaving only a car-spaced hole. (You know, like most people do, except for the hole.) Then you use this feature to extract the car from the garage, without needing space to walk to it or open doors. I'm only partially joking. Our two-car garage is basically large enough for two average size cars and.. that's about it. We prioritize parking over junk-collection, but I could see the use. Of course in the winter, in some climates at least, it removes one of the main benefits of the garage. I guess one other benefit would be that you could always use your front door, whether walking or driving, so your shoes and stuff could all be in one place. Might be a minor advantage for some.
- will_hughes 11y agoThe Model S is a very large car, that makes it hard to fit in car parks in buildings (apartments, offices, shopping centres). I've seen more than one or two stories of Model S owners having to climb in/out via the rear doors, because there's a pylon or wall in the way. Having the car be able to pull out/park itself in those situations would likely be a major win for some people.
- lucaspiller 11y agoI rented a Ford Focus in France at the end of last year which could park itself either in a car park (i.e. cars parallel to each other) or parallel park at the side of the road. I tried it parallel parking on a bend with a big drop next to it (so no walls to figure out where it should stop), and once I figured out which button to press it worked quite well.You still have to manually shift from forward to reverse (when it prompted you) and use the brake, but other than that it's hands off. The best feature of this car wasn't this, but the technology that powers it - sensors all around the car to detect how close you are to something. It had a small indicator on the dashboard to let you know the distances.