Watch Teslas go around the parking lots without anyone inside

The long-awaited and delayed "Smart Summon" feature is finally available to the general public, the company announced Thursday.

"Customers who have purchased the complete self-driving capability or improved autopilot can allow their car to navigate in a parking lot and go to their home or to the destination of their choice, as long as their car is in their field of vision, "said Tesla in the post blog announcing version 10 of Tesla software.

"Customers who had early access to Smart Summon told us that it makes their trip more convenient and gives them a unique moment of joy," writes Tesla.

For security reasons, customers must constantly monitor the vehicle – by holding down a button in the Tesla application – when it is moving into a parking lot. Tesla urges customers to maintain a direct line of sight on the vehicle.

Tesla has only begun to release the official version of version 10 in the last 24 hours, but preliminary versions have been available for several weeks for members of Tesla's test program, the program of 39, early access. The videos can give us an idea of ​​how these features work, although we hope that the final version will work a little better, with fewer bugs.

Here's a week-long video, with a preview of Smart Summon, which gives a good overview of how the technology works (go to around 9:10 am):

The Tesla Enhanced Invocation screen displays a blue dot representing the phone's location and a red triangle indicating the location of the car. The owner can press the "come to me" button to have the car come directly to the phone's location. Or, the owner can drag the map to reposition the crosshairs and ask the car to go elsewhere. The function can only be used in a limited area around the phone, bounded by a large blue circle on the map.

The feature does more than draw a straight line to its destination. The car tries to follow the lanes as a human driver would. This sometimes leads to quite long diverted routes, as shown in the video above.

In pre-publication versions, cars sometimes seemed confusing for no obvious reason. In the video above, for example, the car goes to a sidewalk at the end of a row of parked cars, hesitates a few seconds, then corrects its trajectory and continues until the destination.

As technology becomes widely available to Tesla owners, we can expect to see many more videos released in the coming days. It will be interesting to see if Tesla has been able to solve the problems encountered in the drafts.

The technology is designed to be used in private parking lots. Ars asked Tesla and the federal regulators of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration when it was legal to use the technology on public roads. We will update this story if we get an answer.

It is unclear who would be responsible if a car caused damage in Smart Summon mode. Tesla designed the application only to work when the user presses a button, monitoring the progress of the car. This could help the company to say that it should not be held responsible for any malfunction. But there is no guarantee that the courts would buy such an argument.

Smart Summon technology was the most notable feature of Tesla version 10, but the update also brought a number of improvements. Once the car is parked, Tesla owners can now watch Netflix, Hulu or YouTube videos or play video games. Copper. The car now has native Spotify support. You will also be able to press a "I feel lucky" button that directs the car to a random destination, or a "I feel hungry" button that chooses a nearby restaurant.