So as far as I know, I may be the first person in history to use the new V10 Tesla Smart Summon on the Samsung Galaxy Fold phone. So shameless plug, I work at Samsung and I think the Fold is amazing. Yea it has its issues, its new, but I love it. I’ll write a post about it another day. So, that aside, I also did a few experiments with smart summon and got a mixed bag. So I shot a few vids and posted them. The tl:dr, GPS is not very accurate and if you are in an area with lots of building, it can through it off a few feet. If you are in a parking garage, its far worse. Next it sees many open spaces as an intersection and thus will pause. Better safe than sorry I guess. It also can ‘trap’ itself if it does not back out of the parking spot correctly. This has only happened once, but then again, I have only just started playing with it. That aside, it works most of the time. Sometimes you will have to restart your app because it will get ‘stuck’ after performing a summon.

First experiment went pretty well. The car moved from the parking space to me with only a few pauses. Did not make it all the way. I think it was not sure where I was given how odd the parking is here. I made it easy by backing the car in, which is how I park most of the time anyway. You can see on the large screen that the car is sending back what it ‘sees’, not video mind you. I would LOVE to get video instead, but may need a special encoder on the car for that to get the data load low enough. So test 1 was pretty good.

Test 2. As you can see on the Fold, this time I placed a pin and had the car come to the pin. This worked pretty well as well. But again I made it pretty easy since I backed the car in. Still, pretty cool! There is a distance limit, but hopefully that will get expanded as time goes on.

Test 3. I made this a little harder, and unfortunately, it failed this one. In this test I put it in a parking garage and parked next to a pillar. The pillar got it backing up incorrectly. Its also possible the GPS was messed up and it was thinking I was somewhere else, but either way, once it gets messed up as far as local path-finding, it has a hard time recovering. In this case it tried to leave the garage. I had to stop it since it was about to hit the pillar.

Test 4. In this test, I wanted to get away from the buildings and try to find a more open parking area so that GPS will not have reflection issues. That proved to be accurate, however, it saw each intersection in the parking area as perhaps normal intersections? Paused a few second each time. I do not mind once, but it seems to see far too many intersections. You can see this towards the end of the film.

Test 5, final test. I did this one because I read a comment on Reddit that made me want to get a film with our security robot. Two self driving systems living in a harmonious world… or something like that. Worked pretty well again, but this time, I was simply after a nice shot. 🙂

So there you go. Pretty impressive so far. The first experiment was actually last night in a different parking lot after shopping. Worked pretty much the same. It reversed out, and headed over. However, it tends to head straight for you and stop in the middle of lane. You need to be quick to get to the car. Do NOT recommend of its busy.