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Honest question, Can somebody explain me the use case for this feature? I don't get it. I mean, if the summoned car came to me in a totally autonomous way, it

• m3kw9 7y ago
  Ever more want for Convenience.
• dannyw 7y ago
  Most people won't use it everyday. However, maybe it's raining outside and you don't have an umbrella. Or you got a shopping trolley full of stuff. Or the spot is so tight, it's easier to get into your car after it pulls out.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• x38iq84n 7y ago
  It's to show your friends and colleagues, it has no practical purpose given the conditions and requirements for the use of the feature.
  • wnorris 7y ago
    This is a critical part of the overall full self driving equation. Any vendor working on this problem will be spending inordinate amounts of resources on this as parking lots are one of the more challenging environments. In certain locations (especially in winter) this will be a very nice feature. This is especially true to anyone with disabilities or extreme laziness. ;-).
  • MobileVet 7y ago
    Your life circumstances may not present practical uses... But I can assure you they exist.
    • vkou 7y ago
      In what circumstances will you have 100%, unobstructed line of sight to: 1. Your car. 2. Your car's avenue of travel. [1] [1] This is the important part. If you can't clearly see the entire path of travel, you could run a child over. Tesla obviously doesn't give a shit about that, because their collision detection doesn't work, and because the feature does not require this kind of line-of-sight to work. The former is hard, but they want to be first to market, so they don't care about not building it right, and the latter would make this feature near-useless, so naturally, they don't ship this sort of fail-safe.
• LogicX 7y ago
  My brother just had serious back surgery. We've been dropping him at the store entrance, and picking him up. He can sit fine, but walking is difficult. I can see this being a benefit for certain people with injuries or disabilities.
  • Hamuko 7y ago
    You still need to be in sight of the vehicle, so the car would still have to be located near the store entrance. And as this article shows, you have to have a good, unobstructed view of the car in order to not accidentally run into something.
    • heavenlyblue 7y ago
      And it doesn’t seem like you can leave your car at the entrance, which also means you are only saving yourself half of the round-trip.
      • gpm 7y ago
        You can tap a location on the map and have the car drive their... and it seems to generally respect the rules of driving in a parking lot (going up and down the lanes instead of through parking lots) - I wonder if you could get it to park itself... If not that capability will probably be added in the near future.
  • blub 7y ago
    If it was major surgery, that's the only way they should ride in a car for now, as a passenger.
  • targonca 7y ago
    Are there no dedicated parking spots for the disabled in the US?
    • elihu 7y ago
      There are, and they're usually the closest spots, but picking someone up and dropping them off right in front of the store is usually closer. (Oftentimes, doing pickups/dropoffs there is explicitly disallowed, because stopped cars obstruct the view of pedestrians for drivers of moving cars.)
• wnorris 7y ago
  This is a step in their progression toward self driving. No one should expect this to be flawless from the start, similar to Waymo's self driving work. Tesla getting this out now should allow for the feature to begin improving at a quicker pace due to more data. A lot of naysayers will certainly harp on the number of wonky videos to hit the web, but this will quickly decrease once the newness of the feature wears off and improves.
  • CPLX 7y ago
    It’s worth noting that many of us consider self driving to he essentially analogous to full AI in its complexity and difficulty, and thus believe that we are literally nowhere near anything that fits this description. No amount of “data” is going to solve the problem. Driving a car requires making a full mental model of the immediate world you’re in and creating accurate predictions of what everything else in that world is about to do, many of those things being sentient beings with whom you’re communicating through your own actions. Nothing that Tesla is doing is getting much closer to that. The next major landmark on this timeline is a team successfully passing the Turing test, not a car moving across a parking lot. If you share that opinion, that makes the Tesla a lethal toy.
    • bdamm 7y ago
      What’s a “full mental model of the immediate world”? I’d argue that nobody has anything approaching “full”. You have “enough to get by” and that’s all computers need as well. This isn’t a full sentient AI, it’s just sensing the world and navigating a path, at an industrial scale.
      • CPLX 7y ago
        It’s just not. How does it tell when the other car is waiting for them to move? What does it do when two people go into an alley at opposite directions and one has to back out? What happens when there aren’t any markings in the lot, or when people ignored the markings and parked in a different pattern? And so on. These aren’t “edge cases” that “data” will sort out. These are common everyday occurrences in parking lots that require something like consciousness to navigate and involve subtle communication with other participants.
• megablast 7y ago
  It clearly is just the beginning of what is possible. And a cool thing to show people.
• MobileVet 7y ago
  My father is almost 80 and had hip surgery. Part of the danger of getting old & feeble is becoming isolated. Any chance to enable mobility without compromising safety, theirs or others, is a huge win.
• pgt 7y ago
  Minority rule: if a minority of disabled people can get around by summoning their car, then - all costs being equal - their families will always buy a Tesla. Apple's ecosystem also benefits from the iPhone having the best accessibility features, thus drawing in all developers working on accessibility software. https://nassimtaleb.org/tag/minority-rule/ https://nassimtaleb.org/tag/minority-rule/
  • u2fme 7y ago
    Why are people stating this ? You can not do basic things like zooming the page for a preset factor in Safari.
    • whenchamenia 7y ago
      Exactly, I bought an android partilly for accessability features. Apples are better intergrted, but much more limited.
      • keithnoizu 7y ago
        I've had a user complain the lack of a physical button on the new iphones making everything a guessing game for the seeing impaired now.
        • dillonmckay 7y ago
          That happened with my Macbook Pro w/ touchbar. There was an issue with the graphics, and it initially booted into an assistive mode for first-time setup, and I wondered how a visually-impaired person would use the touchbar.
    • Tomte 7y ago
      That's what you think is important. Blind people for example don't care about zoom factors, but they care very much about the fact that they can completely control and use their iPhone using text-to-speech and certain gestures.
  • 7y ago
• EliRivers 7y ago
  I'm replying to this comment only because there are numerous other comments talking about the use of this for people who are in some way physically impaired. What's the state of designated parking spaces for such people? Just yesterday I crossed the parking lot at my local supermarket and passed a dozen extra-wide spaces right by the door, all marked with the generic symbol, painted in blue, and clearly marked for use by such patrons only. As it was most of them were empty, but that's good; every shopper with that need, currently at that store, had been able to park right by the door. A short way beyond those spaces, are spaces marked for those shepherding children, which is less vital but still helpful. So what's the state of this facility - extra wide designated spaces right by the door specifically intended for the people who need it - across the US and other countries? If it's being done, then this "smart summon" seems more of a gimmick. If it's not being done, it feels a little like an unnecessarily high-tech solution to a low-tech problem.
  • sverige 7y ago
    In the U.S., there are laws that determine how many such spaces must be designated in parking lots, based on the size of the parking lot and/or venue. I have a friend who is physically handicapped and very much needs to park in these spaces. The only problem he has ever told me about is finding a spot to park at work. Apparently it's somewhat common where he lives for middle-aged women (his description) to game the system and obtain handicapped placards. He says he knows they are not really handicapped because he sees them walking briskly through long corridors at work without distress. Sometimes too young people will borrow an older relative's placard to park in those spaces. Incidentally, he would never be able to afford a Tesla. He buys three- to five-year-old Hondas and drives them till they can't be fixed.
    • MereInterest 7y ago
      While I can't comment on the exact instances of people using handicapped placards, I would like to bring up the existence of invisible disabilities [1]. These are disabilities that are not immediately obvious to onlookers. For example, people with xeroderma pigmentosum[2] have a very severe sensitivity to sunlight (sunburn within a few minutes, vastly increased risk of skin cancer). A handicap space would be needed to minimize time spent in the sun, but no issue would be present walking inside a building. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_disability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_disability [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeroderma_pigmentosum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeroderma_pigmentosum
• mannykannot 7y ago
  Tesla is well aware that people will use the feature in ways that you describe, and its main concern, as with its other statements to the effect that drivers should pay as much attention to what is going on as if they were driving, is to avoid liability.
• radicalbyte 7y ago
  My wife has recently had trouble with people parking so close to her that she couldn't get into the car. If her car could have reversed itself it would have been fantastic. That, or jerks could not park people in (especially when they're heavily pregnant). After that I just told her to either park in the disabled spots or the mother/child spots. She has more right to them than the lazy boomers and BMW drivers who consider them their private parking spots.
  • vageli 7y ago
    > After that I just told her to either park in the disabled spots or the mother/child spots. She has more right to them than the lazy boomers and BMW drivers who consider them their private parking spots. I was with you till that statement. I know several people with disabilities who have been yelled at for parking in the handicap spot when they don't "appear" disabled. People don't need to be wheelchair bounded to be disabled, and calling boomers "lazy" who use the spots (presumably legally) is in really poor taste imo.
    • benj111 7y ago
      Can't speak for elsewhere, but in the UK there are disabled badges for (partially) this reason. And for parent and child spaces, you can tell by the lack of children with the 'adult'.
      • avar 7y ago
        > And for parent and child spaces, you can tell by the lack of children with the 'adult'. Can you? Is it not allowed in the UK for one parent traveling alone to use such a space for the purpose of picking up their spouse and children?
        • benj111 7y ago
          We can construct all sorts of hypothetical scenarios, but when a person arrives sans children, and with no booster seat, which is a legal requirement up until age 12 (or a certain height). Plus most of my experiences with parent and child parking is supermarkets, that tend to have drop off points anyway.
• jaxn 7y ago
  The primary use case right now is pulling your car in and out of your own garage at your own house. As a Model 3 owner, I also went and tested out the capabilities in a few parking lots, just for fun.
  • dragontamer 7y ago
    https://mobile.twitter.com/abgoswami/status/1177773811497721856?s=19 https://mobile.twitter.com/abgoswami/status/1177773811497721... It doesn't seem like its even safe for that though.
    • eclipxe 7y ago
      I use summon every night to pull my car out and it works flawlessly. Based on that damage it’s not clear how that could be caused by anything in a garage.
      • dragontamer 7y ago
        I think parking-lots make more sense than a garage. 1. Garage is full of tight spots. If something "goes wrong", you have to lift your finger off the cell-phone (capacitive sensor, so its innately laggy to a few dozen milliseconds), that signal then has to be trasmitted over the internet, to the car which then applies the brakes. 2. Or... you could be in the car itself... and directly connected to the accelerator / braking system. No delays if something goes wrong. ------ At least with a parking lot, you can argue that you didn't feel like walking (even if you need to keep the car within visual range). But in a garage + visual range, it means that you're giving up control for what amounts to a party trick. Its not like Electric vehicles give off fumes, so there's basically no disadvantage to getting in the car inside the garage instead.