Tesla Model 3 follows the owner, testing ‘Enhanced Summon’ in beta

Elon Musk has been talking about a Tesla Model 3 feature called ‘Enhanced Summon’ for some time now, last week Tesla CEO said the feature will start rolling out within a week but according to his latest tweet it’s pushed a few weeks for a stable release.

Tesla has an Early Access Program where the participants get the latest software updates before the rest of the Tesla owners, one such program member shared the testing video of the Enhanced Summon feature via YouTube channel Like Tesla.

The previous version of this feature called ‘Summon’ was able to move the car only vertically without anyone in the driver’s seat, the feature proved useful for getting the vehicle in and out of tight parking lots and garage spaces.

With one of the latest Tesla software updates, Model 3 is now also able to use the Summon feature with the key fob which was only accessible through the Tesla Mobile App previously.

In the past Tesla/Elon Musk described the Enhanced Summon feature in a bit detail, claiming:

With Smart Summon (now Enhanced Summon), your car will navigate more complex environments and parking spaces, maneuvering around objects as necessary to come find you.

Car will drive to your phone location & follow you like a pet if you hold down summon button on Tesla app.

Also, you’ll be able to drive it from your phone remotely like a big RC car if in line of sight

Let’s watch how the feature works in the video below, this is still in pretty much ‘beta mode’ and the final version will be even better as predicted by Elon Musk.

That was amazing to watch, a car driving without a driver and finding its owner will be a cool new way to impress the people around.

As we can see in the video above that you can set a point on your Tesla Mobile App’s map where you want your Tesla vehicle to stop, it also has a defined radius in which the Enhanced Summon feature will work.

This new upcoming Tesla Autopilot software update has some UI enhancements as well such as the car’s rendering on the left of the screen is now much more detailed and larger, the car also zooms-out on wide or multi-lane roads and zooms-in on single lane/narrow roads.

An important safety feature that we saw the demonstration in the above video is the car driving through obstacles and detecting humans while driving all by itself, Tesla Model 3 did a good job at it.

The car even drove to the owner in a busy parking lot, slowly and reluctantly but the Tesla Model 3 did it, at last! expect this to only improve in the future.

As this feature is part of the ‘Full Self Driving’ suite, it will only be available to Tesla Model 3 and Model S and Model X manufactured after August 2017 (Hardware 2.5+), Tesla owners who previously bought Enhanced Autopilot (EAP) might also get this update.

Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.

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