Elon Musk: You’ll be able to summon your Tesla from anywhere in 2018

Yesterday, Tesla Motors released software update 7.1 for the Model S and Model X, an update that allows the electric cars to park themselves while you stand by and watch in awe. Today, CEO Elon Musk made a bold prediction: In 2018, this feature will work anywhere that cars can drive.

Called Summon, the functionality is part of Tesla’s Autopilot self-driving technology. Autopilot was introduced with version 7.0 of Tesla’s software in October 2015, and lets drivers take their hands off the wheel in certain conditions.

[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1861517,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"big-data,marketing,mobile,","session":"D"}']

Summon, which is currently in beta (it’s not enabled by default, so you have to turn it on at Controls => Settings => Driver Asssistance => Autopilot), takes that functionality a step further, once you arrive home and exit your Model S or Model X.

According to Tesla’s description, you can prompt the car to:

Open your garage door, enter your garage, park itself, and shut down. In the morning, you wake up, walk out the front door, and summon your car. It will open the garage door and come to greet you. More broadly, Summon also eliminates the burden of having to squeeze in and out of tight parking spots. During this Beta stage of Summon, we would like customers to become familiar with it on private property.

Summon can only drive straight, so you have to line your car up behind your garage door, press and hold the center button on the key fob, and then hit the trunk button for it to do the rest. If your garage door is HomeLink-equipped, the car can automatically open or close it.

But this is just the beginning, according to Musk.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686278452639567876

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920

[aditude-amp id="medium1" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1861517,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"big-data,marketing,mobile,","session":"D"}']

Your Tesla will thus eventually be able to “drive anywhere across the country to meet you, charging itself along the way. It will sync with your calendar to know exactly when to arrive.”

Tesla is essentially bringing the power of software updates to the car. What tech giants have done over the years for computers, tablets, and phones is exactly what Tesla hopes to do for vehicles, from adding cool blinky lights all the way to implementing autonomous driving.