Tesla updated its summon feature. Now this owner can’t get to his car.
Tesla recently sent out an update to its vehicle “summon” feature – which it calls Actually Smart Summon – and as a result, one Tesla owner can no longer use his car.
For years and years, Tesla has touted a “summon” feature, allowing owners to move their cars remotely.
It started off with simple forward/backward movement, but then Tesla promised a “smart” summon which would be able to navigate through parking lots, and even be able to drive coast-to-coast all on its own to pick you up on the other side of the country.
Needless to say – and much like Tesla’s famed Full Self-Driving feature – some of these features haven’t been fully implemented yet. There was a smart summon feature active for some time on vehicles equipped with radar, but when Tesla shifted to vision-only for autonomy tasks, the feature disappeared for some time.
But in September, Tesla finally rolled out Actually Smart Summon, promising to finally bring remote-driving ability to cars, as long as they are on private property (parking lots, long driveways and the like).
The system has shown some impressive uses so far, but is still limited to certain use cases (for example, I can’t use it for the one thing I’d use it for – swapping the position of vehicles from my driveway to the parking spot in front of my house on a low-traffic incredibly wide street, both because it’s a public road and because the system can’t handle the gentle slope of my driveway).
So even though the system is often used as a party trick, there are still people who find legitimate uses for features like these and have come to rely on them – but in the case of one Tesla owner from Nova Scotia, that reliance has turned sour with the most recent update, which broke the system and has left his car stuck in its parking spot for the last two weeks.
Tesla changed summon, now one owner’s car is stuck
We were contacted by Jamie, a Tesla owner in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a simple photo showing his interesting parking situation, which he’s been using for the last four and a half years successfully. In fact, he bought the car specifically for this feature as it’s the only way his parking spot would work, and he commonly gets comments from people wondering how he gets his car out of there.
Which was all fine, until a week or two ago. Upon receiving Tesla firmware version v12.5.4.1, something broke and his car will no longer move.
This version of the software did make changes to both Actually Smart Summon and the old “Dumb” summon. The latter is the system Jamie had been using all along.
Now, when he tries to use the function, it fails in any number of ways, as the car detects walls too close and aborts the move, even if he can visually confirm that the situation is safe. The car cycles through various error messages – “cannot find clear path to pin,” “autopilot temporarily degraded,” “stopped due to unexpected error,” and the like. He’s been able to get it to move some amount occasionally, but estimates it only works one out of every 20 tries or so, whereas it used to be 100% reliable.
Jamie said he tried to contact Tesla customer service three times, who were unable to provide help other than suggesting the default “two finger salute” software reset. They offered no ability to do a software rollback to a functioning version of the software.
He also contacted the local service center – which he managed to bring the car to by opening the trunk and crawling in through the whole car up to the driver’s seat, despite an ailing back which added more difficulty to this comical situation.
At the service center – where he said they were very helpful – they were able to confirm the existence of the problem by stacking boxes beside the car and showing that it wouldn’t move. But they couldn’t offer a rollback, and offered no timeline for a potential fix.
So, he drove the car home, parked it, plugged it in, and has mostly left it there. Now, he walks places instead of driving, though that that won’t remain an option as the Nova Scotian winter sets in. Street parking is also not really an option, as Halifax routinely bans overnight street parking when snow is expected, to allow for snow clearance.
He could charge elsewhere in town, but on level 2 that would require walking to and from a charger, potentially at odd hours, or driving a half hour outside town to the nearest supercharger. The best situation, of course, would be to use his parking spot and charger as he has for the last four and a half years, until this “fix” was applied.
Jamie figures that, while he’s certainly in a niche situation, among the millions of Tesla owners out there, there must be other owners who are seeing similar issues right now. While he’d like a fix for his own problem, he’s also concerned for other owners who could be seeing the same issue.
This isn’t the first time Tesla has suddenly rolled out changes that affected parking. In 2022, Tesla abruptly removed ultrasonic parking sensors from cars, claiming that it would move to a vision-only park assist system. This took about six months to roll out, and is still being improved over time, but surprised some buyers who bought cars expecting this common feature and didn’t receive it.
Electrek’s Take
We at Electrek occasionally get reports from individual customers who have individual problems, but we don’t always do articles for every one of them, especially if there’s some other solution available. We usually like to wait for a pattern to develop.
But this was such an interesting problem, and brings up an important point: it highlights one of the issues with rolling out new software updates, especially when it comes to autonomous driving, or really any other device that people rely on: it’s all well and good to have a feature that works most of the time, but if people rely on a feature, you need to ensure that it works every time.
And this is a relatively minor automation feature in the scheme of things. But it demonstrates the difficulty of automated driving tasks, where in order to receive acceptance, systems don’t need to just work most of the time, but all of the time. A true, driverless, level 5 system needs to be perfectly reliable, even in “niche” situations – and we can’t have software updates coming along and breaking functionality when there’s more at stake than just one person’s parking spot.
And a final note, we can sometimes solve problems simply by emailing an automaker’s communications department to ask them what’s going on. I’ve used this method before, and companies have been able to address an issue for the customer, solving the problem before it turns into bad press for them. Unfortunately, though, this is not possible with Tesla.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company will remove “safety monitors” from the passenger seats of Tesla’s Robotaxi vehicles in “about three weeks,” which would mean we’d see completely driverless Teslas in the Austin area potentially by the end of the year – if that timeline sticks.
Tesla has been working on a system that would allow vehicles to drive themselves, which has been in “beta” release for over a decade now. It calls this system “Full Self-Driving,” despite the fact that the system does not currently drive itself.
That has not stopped Musk from consistently promising more and more of the system, despite its stagnating capabilities. Over the course of the last decade, Musk has consistently promised driverless vehicles within the coming year, with deadlines consistently passing by without achieving that goal.
One of those promises has been the creation of a driverless taxi network, which Tesla used to call “Tesla Network” and is now calling “Robotaxi.” The idea originally came with the promise that owners could use their cars to make money by running them as taxis, but that hasn’t panned out.
Tesla did roll out its own version of a taxi network, though, in Austin, in June of this year. While it’s done a few cool things, the cars each have a “safety monitor” in the passenger seat who can take control at any time, which means the cars aren’t truly “driverless” since there is an operator, they’ve just been moved to the passenger seat.
In the time since Robotaxi’s rollout, it’s made quite a few mistakes and had a high crash rate. But Tesla also delivered one fully unoccupied vehicle from the factory to a local buyer, which was a cool (and, as yet, still unique) stunt.
Throughout the year, Musk has claimed loudly that the system would improve rapidly, stating that by the end of the year Robotaxis would be available to half of the US population (they are not) and that Tesla’s fleet would grow by more than 10x by the end of the year (it has not).
But now we have another bold prediction from Musk, stating that the safety monitors will be out of a job by the end of the year.
During a videoconference at a hackathon event for xAI, one of Musk’s other companies (which he is trying to get Tesla shareholders to bail out), Musk was asked a question about the barriers to unsupervised full self-driving. Musk answered:
Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. There will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them, not even anyone in the passenger seat, in about three weeks. I think it’s pretty much a solved problem, we’re just going through validation right now.
The “three weeks” timeline is familiar to longtime Tesla followers. Over the years, Musk has often promised fixes or software updates in “two weeks,” and they often take longer than that.
Three weeks is a lot closer than the “next year” promise that we’ve heard so many times for full autonomy, but given its proximity to the oft-inaccurate two-week timeline, we’re not sure these vehicles will actually be ready in time for New Year’s Eve celebrations.
Nevertheless, it’s a closer timeline than Musk has usually given, so there may be truly driverless Teslas operating sometime soon™.
Also, reading the statement more closely, it sounds like they won’t necessarily remove safety operators from every vehicle, but some vehicles. This could be similar to the singular driverless vehicle delivery that Tesla did – a PR stunt, rather than a full rollout. We’ll have to wait and see.
Tesla’s main competitor in the robotaxi space is Waymo, which has been operating truly driverless vehicles for several years now. The company has also been operating autonomous, driverless vehicles in Austin since March of this year.
Musk went on to talk about future improvements to Tesla’s software and hardware in his answer.
The company is currently on hardware previously deemed HW4, though to cash in on the AI stock market bubble, it now refers to that system as AI4. He said that AI5 will be 10-40 times better than HW4 and go into volume production in 2027, with AI6 coming soon after.
Musk’s mention of future hardware improvements neglects one important aspect of these improvements, which is that for every hardware improvement Tesla puts into its fleet, the more vehicles it will have to upgrade later.
Tesla long promised that its vehicles had all the hardware for self-driving, which means it’s going to have to upgrade a lot of cars – and there are court cases around the world seeking to force the company to do so. Together, these lawsuits and other potential challenges could mean billions of dollars in liabilities for the company.
Musk then closed his statements by claiming that “our” goal is to “to understand the meaning of life and… propagate consciousness out to the stars,” which is not Tesla’s goal. Tesla’s actual goal is to accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. He may have been referring to xAI’s goal, but given the answer was about Tesla, perhaps he was confused (or perhaps he doesn’t care about Tesla anymore, and isn’t a good CEO for the company as a result…)
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VW’s retro-tastic minivan hasn’t been the sales success the company might have wanted, and a lot of that has to do with the van’s sky high price tag. Now, VW is asking: will a $10,000 discount be enough to create some buzz for the ID.Buzz?
Volkswagen is offering $7,500 in Retail Customer Bonus cash this month – up from the $2,500 the company offered its Black Friday customers – that, along with an additional $2,500 unadvertised dealer cash incentive that CarsDirect is reporting absolutely, definitely exists, adds up to a stout $10,000 total discount on the all-electric VW ID.Buzz … and that’s before you start haggling with your dealer over the MSRP.
It’s a lot
As much as I like the the Volkswagen ID.Buzz, its starting MSRP around $61,545 (incl. destination) puts it at nearly twice what you’d probably expect a minivan to cost if the last time you shopped for one was at a Dodge store. Still, that hefty price tag is some $20,000 higher than the baseline Toyota Sienna hybrid or Honda Odyssey.
That 50% higher price is a lot to swallow even if you do buy into the nostalgia. Still, the ID.Buzz is capable enough, and with ~230 miles of range and 282 hp on offer from its battery/electric motor combo – plus Supercharger access – it’s at least able to keep up with the minivan competition.
So, while that $10,000 discount isn’t going to turn the ID.Buzz into the second coming of the affordable, family-hauling Caravan, it does bring VW’s electric people-mover a little closer to earth. In fact, with a $50K price tag, it’s right in line with the average transaction price of a new vehicles. So, if nothing else, that reduced price could finally gives electric minivan buyers something to buzz about (I tried so hard to work that in, you guys).
If you’ve been shopping for a family-hauler and dig the retro vibe over something like the (excellent) Kia EV9, click through the link below and set up a test drive at your local VW dealer.
SOURCE: CarsDirect; images via VW.
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Peterbilt has jumped into the MD truck ring with the launch three new medium-duty electric trucks that deliver zero-emissions power, ultra-fast 350 kW charging, and proven, versatile platforms for delivery, utility service, and vocational upfitting.
The new Peterbilt 536EV, 537EV, and 548EV medium-duty trucks slot into the same versatile medium-duty segments the company’s fleets already know, but swap diesel power for latest PACCAR ePowertrain, with up to 605 hp and 1,850 lb-ft of torque available at 0 rpm. That big motor draws power from a variety of LFP battery packs and be fitted with ePTO options rated for either 25 kW (two-battery option) or 150 kW (three-battery option), making them suitable for that can be sized for daily delivery routes, urban utility work, and municipal fleets looking to cut both emissions and maintenance costs.
What’s more, the new Peterbilt’s flexible architecture allows for integration with existing PACCAR suspension bits to make 4×2 and 6×4 configurations, and any wheelbase of 163 inches or longer, and up to 82,000 lbs. gross combined weight ratings possible.
“[The new trucks are] optimized for the demands of the medium duty segment, the next generation of Peterbilt electric vehicles deliver excellent efficiency, rapid charging and versatile configurations elevating customer productivity across a wide range of applications,” said Erik Johnson, Peterbilt assistant general manager, Sales & Marketing.
In addition to all those goodies, the PACCAR EV tech continues to be top-notch, with the previously-mentioned 350 kW charging, regenerative braking, and industry-leading ergonomics.
Peterbilt’s new MDEVs ship with a blue accented crown and grille for a distinctive exterior look, as well as EV-exclusive panels on the side of the hood. The interior design features laser-etched trim panels on the EV-exclusive Magneto Gray interior, just in case the driver in the quiet, smooth, and stink-free cabin forgets they’re in an electric truck.
Electrek’s Take
Ignore the headlines. The death of the commercial EV market simply hasn’t happened, and won’t happen any time soon.
If you believe the engineers and analysts at MAN Trucks and Orange EV (and, you should), an EV like this can pay for itself in reduced fuel and maintenance costs even without incentives, then you should already know what I’m about to say: the future of trucking is 100% electric.
SOURCE | IMAGES: PACCAR.
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