The App Summon Feature: A Mixed Bag of Success and Challenges

I recently had the opportunity to test Tesla's app summon feature, which is designed to bring your car to you when you're outside. The idea behind it sounds perfect - you're at a mall, it's raining, and you don't want to walk through the rain with all your bags. You simply open the app, press the "Summon" button, and voila! Your car will come from the parking lot right up to the door and find you. You never get wet, and you get right into your car.

However, in reality, it's still kind of a work in progress. There is a limit to how far away it can smart summon feels like about 100-150 yards before you're outside the circle and it won't let you summon at all. But once you press Summon, the car wakes up and as long as you hold that button down in the app, the car will continue along this path it's drawn using GPS and imagery that it figures out that it can get to you and it'll keep you updated on what's happening as it's following that path.

I'm doing this in an empty parking lot to minimize risk, but even from all the times I've tried this in a half-full parking lot in a full parking lot, Smart Summon just does not drive like a regular human driver. It drives maybe like a human, but like a five-year-old human that can barely see above the steering wheel. So it does see signs and intersections usually, it slows down for them and will say when it is. But sometimes it doesn't. And it does see pedestrians and moving objects again, sometimes it slows down for them which you would hope every time it would slow down for pedestrians. But sometimes it just doesn't.

That's a really weird look when this car with no driver almost runs someone over and then proceeds to drive over to you while you're standing there holding the button on your phone like "sorry, I didn't mean to, I'm just summoning my car to me, I didn't know it wasn't going to stop." And it completely ignores all the lines on the road which, I guess isn't actually that much of a problem by itself. But it just makes it hard for other drivers to deal with it when it's not behaving predictably like a normal driver would.

I've tried this in other active parking lots and it has not gone well. So, all sounds pretty rough, but the upside is that people are willing to test this for Tesla. They have thousands of millions of drivers and fans and enthusiastic users all over the world who are willing to test this over and over and over again and just keep using it anyway.

And that's where Tesla's competitive advantage comes in - they're a tech and software company really as much as they are a car company. And their ability to gather data from all the successful and failed attempts, is turning it around and working on new software to make it better. It's an underrated advantage, but it's one that sets them apart from other car manufacturers.

It's also worth noting that when you get a Tesla, you don't just get a car, you get a product that is supposed to improve over time. The way they want you to think about it is you get the car and it does get older, but it gets softer update maybe. You get the new Cheetah Launch Mode Stance and then it's getting older and older, but then a new Autopilot update and it's getting older and older but then a new software update and it gets faster.

And that's one of the most variable options in any car in the world - the cost of self-driving. And Elon keeps tweeting about how much its value is to the actual car and that it's underpriced. It's one of the most underrated aspects of Tesla's business model, but it's also one of the most interesting.

So maybe cars should be like pieces of tech and attempt to get better over time. Maybe they don't have to just sit there as a depreciating asset, but instead can become something that improves with each passing year. And if that's the case, then Tesla is leading the way in this regard.

That's my take on the app summon feature and what it means for the future of electric vehicles. Thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what is up guys i'm pbhd here and this is my tesla model s i named it phantom this is not apollo which was the car i had before this one and apollo was great but the lease was up so i got into a newer tesla model s after it and as soon as i get into this car i immediately notice there's all these little things that are different about it which got me thinking about how teslas change over time and how that's the best and worst thing about them so if you were to look at the the window sticker or the registration on phantom it would say that it's a 2020 tesla model s performance but the thing is tesla doesn't really do model year updates like pretty much every other car manufacturer instead what they do is a steady series of slowly ongoing constant minor changes that over time add up to a bigger difference and when i say minor changes i mean like really minor so the first couple days in phantom i noticed a couple little things all of which i liked by the way first of all the trim around the main screen is now matte dark gray like space gray instead of the previous chrome and the trim in the air vents is also now matte black instead of lighter and then this whole front dashboard this whole top here is now all leather instead of before it was half leather half alcantara the cover of the storage between the seats this used to be just black plastic now it's a carbon fiber matching the trim of the car and then there's the seats of the car and they change the seats all the time in teslas if you follow this but the new ones here these have this motorized telescoping memory headrest that goes up or down for taller or shorter passengers the list goes on and on and i notice all these and they're all pretty small minor inconsequential who would even notice or care but there's also been a couple medium-sized changes so at some point between 2016 and 2019 they upgraded the computers behind that touch screen making the ui noticeably faster and smoother and more responsive and supporting more features like arcade games and youtube and netflix that older cars like apollo don't support they also moved from a two camera setup to a six camera setup for the autopilot system that now supports more advanced navigate on autopilot and a dash cam feature built into the car that again older cars just straight up don't have and then there are the huge changes the major ones these are the ones that get named these are the ones that would probably be worthy of an actual model update like with other car manufacturers so the newest one is the latest air suspension and drivetrain update called raven which literally added miles to the range of the car and changed the feel of the drive and there's also the great front nose cone refresh in 2016 where they went from the black plastic nose cone to the new front end here which to me looks a lot better and also just a few weeks from that in 2016 there was the announcement of the p100d the first time they offered a 100 kilowatt hour battery in their lineup and it was at that point that i decided okay that's a major update this is a good time to buy you see these constant rolling changes whether you're a customer or the company itself are both a good thing and a bad thing for tesla it's a good strategic manufacturing decision to simplify manufacturing as much as possible to streamline it and often that just means removing options simplifying everything getting rid of skus that you don't ship as much so all you really can choose as options when you custom build a tesla model s is performance or long range wheel type paint color and then just one of three interior trims then autopilot and actually the performance versus long range by the way are not even a different battery size they're just a motor and inverter difference so they've completely eliminated all of the smaller battery sizes from their lineup every tesla model s that ships has the same battery that is that is a really small number of options for a premium luxury car but that also means the day you decide to get a tesla that version of the car you're getting will be the best version of the car there's ever been probably even better than if you had bought it a month or two ago like a piece of tech it's the best version ever usually but that also means that the tesla you'd be considering getting you're never really sure if it's about to be updated by a new sized or plaid sized update that's just again the nature of buying tech but easily the biggest most valuable thing in all of this is the software updates these cars get a lot of software updates in fact since i've gotten that car it's gotten more software updates than my phone has and in that time it's gotten faster it's got new features new launch control the autopilot now recognizes and reacts to new things and shows animations differently it's a lot so if rule number one of tech is never buy a product for the promise of future updates is tesla breaking this rule well they're trying to because it helps them a lot for people to trust that and and remember that their cars get better with software updates i think the best example of this would be the summon feature so in the tesla app there's been a summon feature and it's been there for years and way back at the very beginning it was dead simple it was just forward or backward so basically you could just summon the car in a straight line forward or backward out of tight spaces you know i guess kind of clutch if someone parks really close to you and you can't get in the door so you can summon it out neat but honestly it's it's not much more than a party trick at the beginning then they start adding features it can kind of turn a little bit it does the mirror folding it gets homelink support so now it can sort of maneuver out of a tight driveway space every day and open and close the garage door if you wanted to but now in 2020 many updates later there's a full-on smart summon which will just have the car find you anywhere open up the app summon the car to you it'll find you so okay so technically speaking that was a success but in every other way that was kind of a nightmare i mean the feature the idea the idea is there and it makes perfect sense in an ideal world you're at a mall it's raining you walk outside with all your bags you don't want to walk through the rain so you summon the car it comes from the parking lot right up to the door and finds you you never get wet you get right into your car uh but in reality it's still kind of a work in progress first of all there's a limit to how far away it can smart summon feels like about 100 150 yards before you're outside the circle and it won't let you summon at all but once you press summon the car wakes up and as long as you hold that button down in the app the car will continue along this path it's drawn using gps and imagery that it figures out that it can get to you and it'll keep you updated on what's happening as it's following that path in the app now i'm doing this in an empty parking lot to minimize risk but even from all the times i've tried this in a half full parking lot in a full parking lot smart summon just does not drive like a regular human driver it drives maybe like a human but like a five-year-old human that can barely see above the steering wheel so it does see signs and intersections usually it slows down for them and it'll say when it is but sometimes it doesn't it does see pedestrians and moving objects again sometimes it slows down for them which you would hope every time it would slow down for pedestrians but sometimes it just didn't and that's a really weird look when this car with no driver almost runs someone over and then proceeds to drive over to you while you're standing there holding the button on your phone like sorry i didn't mean to i'm just summoning my car to me i didn't know it wasn't going to stop i could have let go of the button but and it just completely completely ignores all the lines on the road which i guess isn't actually that much of a problem by itself but it just it makes it hard for other drivers to deal with it when it's not behaving predictably like a normal driver would again i've tried this in other active parking lots and it has not gone well so that all sounds pretty rough but the upside the upside is people are willing to test this for tesla they have thousands millions of drivers and and fans and enthusiastic users all over the world who are willing to test this over and over and over and over again and just keep using it anyway and tesla will use all of that data from all the successful and all the failed attempts to turn around and work on new software to make it better it's an underrated competitive advantage tesla is a tech and software company really as much as it is a car company and it's the reason their cars feel more high-tech than the rest and as you know it's very very rare that a car improves over time we know about car collectors trying to find cars that will appreciate in value but usually when you get a car you know you drive it off a lot and just over time it slowly gets worse and worse until it's too old and it's time to replace it when you get a tesla the way they want you to think about it is you get the car and it does get older but it gets softer update maybe you get the new cheetah launch mode stance and then it's getting older and older but then new autopilot update and it's getting older and older but then a new software update and it gets faster and it just doesn't it's supposed to feel like you end up with a better car later after you bought it no wonder elon keeps tweeting about the price of self-driving going up over time and how much its value is to the actual car and that it's underpriced it's one of the most variable options in any car in the world it's software tesla's stance i'm sure if you ask them would be please buy autopilot even if you don't think you need it just buy it and eventually maybe try it once or twice use it fall in love with it and then start putting hundreds and thousands of miles in so that the entire fleet can be learned from and all this data can go back to tesla and they can learn from it and they can push a software update and make it even better and you know what maybe that's not such a bad thing for the car world maybe cars should be like pieces of tech and attempt to get better over time just a thought maybe in the comments section let me know what you think that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peacehey what is up guys i'm pbhd here and this is my tesla model s i named it phantom this is not apollo which was the car i had before this one and apollo was great but the lease was up so i got into a newer tesla model s after it and as soon as i get into this car i immediately notice there's all these little things that are different about it which got me thinking about how teslas change over time and how that's the best and worst thing about them so if you were to look at the the window sticker or the registration on phantom it would say that it's a 2020 tesla model s performance but the thing is tesla doesn't really do model year updates like pretty much every other car manufacturer instead what they do is a steady series of slowly ongoing constant minor changes that over time add up to a bigger difference and when i say minor changes i mean like really minor so the first couple days in phantom i noticed a couple little things all of which i liked by the way first of all the trim around the main screen is now matte dark gray like space gray instead of the previous chrome and the trim in the air vents is also now matte black instead of lighter and then this whole front dashboard this whole top here is now all leather instead of before it was half leather half alcantara the cover of the storage between the seats this used to be just black plastic now it's a carbon fiber matching the trim of the car and then there's the seats of the car and they change the seats all the time in teslas if you follow this but the new ones here these have this motorized telescoping memory headrest that goes up or down for taller or shorter passengers the list goes on and on and i notice all these and they're all pretty small minor inconsequential who would even notice or care but there's also been a couple medium-sized changes so at some point between 2016 and 2019 they upgraded the computers behind that touch screen making the ui noticeably faster and smoother and more responsive and supporting more features like arcade games and youtube and netflix that older cars like apollo don't support they also moved from a two camera setup to a six camera setup for the autopilot system that now supports more advanced navigate on autopilot and a dash cam feature built into the car that again older cars just straight up don't have and then there are the huge changes the major ones these are the ones that get named these are the ones that would probably be worthy of an actual model update like with other car manufacturers so the newest one is the latest air suspension and drivetrain update called raven which literally added miles to the range of the car and changed the feel of the drive and there's also the great front nose cone refresh in 2016 where they went from the black plastic nose cone to the new front end here which to me looks a lot better and also just a few weeks from that in 2016 there was the announcement of the p100d the first time they offered a 100 kilowatt hour battery in their lineup and it was at that point that i decided okay that's a major update this is a good time to buy you see these constant rolling changes whether you're a customer or the company itself are both a good thing and a bad thing for tesla it's a good strategic manufacturing decision to simplify manufacturing as much as possible to streamline it and often that just means removing options simplifying everything getting rid of skus that you don't ship as much so all you really can choose as options when you custom build a tesla model s is performance or long range wheel type paint color and then just one of three interior trims then autopilot and actually the performance versus long range by the way are not even a different battery size they're just a motor and inverter difference so they've completely eliminated all of the smaller battery sizes from their lineup every tesla model s that ships has the same battery that is that is a really small number of options for a premium luxury car but that also means the day you decide to get a tesla that version of the car you're getting will be the best version of the car there's ever been probably even better than if you had bought it a month or two ago like a piece of tech it's the best version ever usually but that also means that the tesla you'd be considering getting you're never really sure if it's about to be updated by a new sized or plaid sized update that's just again the nature of buying tech but easily the biggest most valuable thing in all of this is the software updates these cars get a lot of software updates in fact since i've gotten that car it's gotten more software updates than my phone has and in that time it's gotten faster it's got new features new launch control the autopilot now recognizes and reacts to new things and shows animations differently it's a lot so if rule number one of tech is never buy a product for the promise of future updates is tesla breaking this rule well they're trying to because it helps them a lot for people to trust that and and remember that their cars get better with software updates i think the best example of this would be the summon feature so in the tesla app there's been a summon feature and it's been there for years and way back at the very beginning it was dead simple it was just forward or backward so basically you could just summon the car in a straight line forward or backward out of tight spaces you know i guess kind of clutch if someone parks really close to you and you can't get in the door so you can summon it out neat but honestly it's it's not much more than a party trick at the beginning then they start adding features it can kind of turn a little bit it does the mirror folding it gets homelink support so now it can sort of maneuver out of a tight driveway space every day and open and close the garage door if you wanted to but now in 2020 many updates later there's a full-on smart summon which will just have the car find you anywhere open up the app summon the car to you it'll find you so okay so technically speaking that was a success but in every other way that was kind of a nightmare i mean the feature the idea the idea is there and it makes perfect sense in an ideal world you're at a mall it's raining you walk outside with all your bags you don't want to walk through the rain so you summon the car it comes from the parking lot right up to the door and finds you you never get wet you get right into your car uh but in reality it's still kind of a work in progress first of all there's a limit to how far away it can smart summon feels like about 100 150 yards before you're outside the circle and it won't let you summon at all but once you press summon the car wakes up and as long as you hold that button down in the app the car will continue along this path it's drawn using gps and imagery that it figures out that it can get to you and it'll keep you updated on what's happening as it's following that path in the app now i'm doing this in an empty parking lot to minimize risk but even from all the times i've tried this in a half full parking lot in a full parking lot smart summon just does not drive like a regular human driver it drives maybe like a human but like a five-year-old human that can barely see above the steering wheel so it does see signs and intersections usually it slows down for them and it'll say when it is but sometimes it doesn't it does see pedestrians and moving objects again sometimes it slows down for them which you would hope every time it would slow down for pedestrians but sometimes it just didn't and that's a really weird look when this car with no driver almost runs someone over and then proceeds to drive over to you while you're standing there holding the button on your phone like sorry i didn't mean to i'm just summoning my car to me i didn't know it wasn't going to stop i could have let go of the button but and it just completely completely ignores all the lines on the road which i guess isn't actually that much of a problem by itself but it just it makes it hard for other drivers to deal with it when it's not behaving predictably like a normal driver would again i've tried this in other active parking lots and it has not gone well so that all sounds pretty rough but the upside the upside is people are willing to test this for tesla they have thousands millions of drivers and and fans and enthusiastic users all over the world who are willing to test this over and over and over and over again and just keep using it anyway and tesla will use all of that data from all the successful and all the failed attempts to turn around and work on new software to make it better it's an underrated competitive advantage tesla is a tech and software company really as much as it is a car company and it's the reason their cars feel more high-tech than the rest and as you know it's very very rare that a car improves over time we know about car collectors trying to find cars that will appreciate in value but usually when you get a car you know you drive it off a lot and just over time it slowly gets worse and worse until it's too old and it's time to replace it when you get a tesla the way they want you to think about it is you get the car and it does get older but it gets softer update maybe you get the new cheetah launch mode stance and then it's getting older and older but then new autopilot update and it's getting older and older but then a new software update and it gets faster and it just doesn't it's supposed to feel like you end up with a better car later after you bought it no wonder elon keeps tweeting about the price of self-driving going up over time and how much its value is to the actual car and that it's underpriced it's one of the most variable options in any car in the world it's software tesla's stance i'm sure if you ask them would be please buy autopilot even if you don't think you need it just buy it and eventually maybe try it once or twice use it fall in love with it and then start putting hundreds and thousands of miles in so that the entire fleet can be learned from and all this data can go back to tesla and they can learn from it and they can push a software update and make it even better and you know what maybe that's not such a bad thing for the car world maybe cars should be like pieces of tech and attempt to get better over time just a thought maybe in the comments section let me know what you think that's been it thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace\n"