If you thought you needed to spend upwards of $81,000 to drive a car that can park itself without you having to be present behind the wheel (all-new 7-Series), Tesla is out to prove you wrong.
Their recently launched software update is causing quite the stir thanks to the ‘Summon’ self-parking system. It’s available on both the Model S and the Model X and it allows you to exit the car once you arrive home or somewhere with some sort of parking structure, allowing the vehicle to squeeze itself into place.
Because the system is still in its Beta stage, Tesla would rather owners only try it out on their private property, which does make a lot of sense.
The owner of this Model S isn’t necessarily looking for the car to park itself, but more so to come fetch him from the entrance, so that he doesn’t get soaked by the rain walking to the car. The Model S does move at a painfully slow speed, almost annoyingly slow, but so far that’s a small price to pay for pioneering this type of future tech. Plus, if it was really raining cats and dogs, anyone would appreciate their car coming to get them, no matter how long it took.
The system seems to be working fine and efficiently, and the fact that you can easily control it from your mobile phone is probably the best part – as opposed to being inside the car and telling it what to do by pressing some buttons.
As for the big picture, if we do one day end up with cars that can drive themselves and pick us up from wherever we may be, that would probably mean us reaching the ultimate level of private automotive mobility – unless they invent teleportation devices or a flying vehicle infrastructure or we’ll simply be OK with zooming around at the speed of sound in some type of super-fast trains around the city.
Before any of that happens, let’s just be happy to be a part of this extremely innovative generation of engineers and scientists who can come up with these types of ideas and implement them on a regular basis.