Tesla Autopilot's Enhanced Summon Is A Nice Concept That Opens A Can Of Worms

At the Tesla shareholders meeting on Tuesday, one topic that arose involved the newest Autopilot “Enhanced” Summon feature that is being developed and which has been made available in a beta version for some Tesla owners that are in the Tesla Early Access program.

Usually referred to as either Enhanced Summon or sometimes as Advanced Summon, the concept is that it is “a parking assist feature that helps you bring your car towards you or towards the destination of your choice by navigating out of parking spaces and maneuvering around objects as necessary” (per the reported beta release notes).

There is already an existing Summon feature available that is not considered advanced or enhanced, some say it is “classic” or “simple” Summon, while others point out it is minimally any kind of “summoning” since it involves a human using an app that directs the car to go forward or in reverse and then the vehicle attempts to proceed a short distance, such as backing out of your garage, though Tesla cautions that the car might “not detect certain obstacles, including those that are very narrow (e.g., bikes)” and thus the human remote operator is to “remain prepared to stop the vehicle at any time.”

There is an ongoing argument about whether the word “Summon” aptly captures or misstates the existing simpler version, just as some also argue that the word “Autopilot” perhaps overstates the capabilities of the automation currently available on Tesla cars (suggesting that the automation can fully operate the car without human assistance, which it cannot yet do).

When asked about having missed the promised rollout date for the newer and more full-bodied Enhanced Summon feature, Elon Musk indicated that “there’s a lot of complexity in parking lots, it turns out.”

AI Driving Is Harder To Achieve Than Might Seem At First Glance

Some pundits were quick to point out that Musk’s comment about complexity in parking lots illustrated a prevailing theme of not beforehand realizing or acknowledging how difficult it is to develop a truly autonomous car capability, akin to a Level 4 or Level 5, versus a Level 2 or Level 3 set of capabilities which are semi-autonomous as is the current Tesla’s.

For Level 2 and Level 3, a human licensed driver is supposed to be co-sharing the driving task with the semi-autonomous automation, versus true full automation of Level 4 or Level 5 which is able to perform the driving task entirely without any human intervention. In theory, it is easier to develop semi-autonomous features since you can always toss the driving effort onto the shoulders of a human driver, presumably overcoming any gaps or lacking capabilities of the automation by relying upon the human driver.

Some critics worry that time and again there are misleading expectations being conveyed to the public that imply or at times assert that developing an AI system that can fully drive a car is straightforward, but this tends to misjudge and underplay the full depth and enormity of what humans do when undertaking the driving task and how complex any real-world driving environment can be.

Even in parking lots, it turns out.

In some sense of relief of not perhaps jumping the gun on releasing the Enhanced Summon on a widespread basis before it is properly ready and vetted, Musk indicated that “we don’t want to like, run someone over.”

He also acknowledged that in terms of sticking to predicted release dates that he is “sometimes a little optimistic about timeframes.” This remark regarding stated deadlines got a bit of a chuckle when he also accompanied it with the comment that “it’s time you knew” that he is perhaps optimistic (occasionally) on such matters.

Difficult Facets About Summoning A Car

You might be wondering why it is indeed apparently hard to have a car drive to you as a kind of summoning, which I might add also includes the converse act of telling your car to go find a parking spot once you’ve disembarked from the vehicle.

Thus, there are really two core actions:

• One action in which you have gotten out of your car at the front of a store or restaurant and you want your car to go find a place to park (a type of “dismissing” or “dispatching” of the vehicle).

• The other action is when you have come out of the store or restaurant and you want your car to pull out of its parking spot and come pick you up (a “summoning” or “hailing” of the car).

Human drivers generally seem to be able to undertake these two core actions, usually without adverse encounters, though certainly there are fender benders and at times pedestrians that get struck during these maneuvers. Normally, the parking lot traversal is at low enough speeds, and the human driver is overall attentive to the driving task, such that incidents only tend to involve minor injuries and modest property damage, rather than severe damages and actual deaths.

There are lots of objects and obstacles in most parking lots.

You’ve got cars that are parked in the parking lot, you’ve got cars that are in motion throughout the parking lot, you’ve got pedestrians walking to their cars or merely crossing through the parking lot, you’ve got adults, you’ve got children, you might have animals like a dog on a leash or one that has gotten off its leash, you might have skateboarders, bicyclists, motorcyclists, people on scooters. And so on. It can be as busy as any city street.

When I helped my children learn to drive, we drove in a mall parking lot early in the morning before the mall opened, and so there were very few cars parked there, and almost no pedestrians or other moving objects. It was relatively easy for them to learn to drive at first, but when we came back to try while the mall was busy, the complexity of the environment and the hard choices of how to drive were a far cry from an empty parking lot.

Considerations About Summoning

To-date, the Autopilot Enhanced Summoning involves a human that presumably gets out of the car, and while standing outside of the car will use a mobile app to invoke the feature, doing so to either summon the vehicle or to dismiss it to park itself.

Here are some questions or thoughts to be considered:

• Is the human doing the summoning able to see with full line-of-sight the actions of the car?

The answer is potentially not. Though the manual states that the human ought to be in line-of-sight, this allows discretion to the human, which though yes you can say that the human is ultimately responsible, but this belies the aspect that there is no system enforcement of a line-of-sight requirement and thus the human might not be aware of some untoward act that is about to occur and therefore not going to stop the car by using the mobile app accordingly.

• Is the feature restricted to solely being used in parking lots?

The answer is apparently not, as exemplified by videos posted on the web showing some using the beta version to have their car come to then while standing down-the-street from their garage. In that sense, this feature can presumably be used in your neighborhood, essentially allowing a seemingly driverless car to be on your street. Some say that the final version might have a geo-fencing that restricts the usage to parking lots, but this is somewhat doubtful as to how the system would realize the distinction between a parking lot versus not being in a parking lot.

• Does the distance limit ensure that this will be safely used?

Currently, the stated distance limit is 150 feet, meaning that in theory you the human standing outside the car must be within 150 feet to invoke the feature. Though 150 feet might seem like a short distance, when you consider the dynamics of a busy parking lot, I think you’d agree that a lot of untoward things can happen within even just 150 feet of where you are standing. Also, some suggest that you might be able to trick the car with electronic hacking such that you could be much further away than 150 feet, but the car doesn’t realize it.

• How will this impact parking lots?

If all of us drove autonomous cars, presumably the traffic in parking lots would be improved by all of us summoning our driverless cars, which would likely also use V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) electronic communications to coordinate their actions. We aren’t yet anywhere near that day. Thus, the odds are that there will be a lot of human-driven cars trying to get around a parking lot and inserted into this mix will be an occasional semi-autonomous summoned car, which given that it is not at all equivalent to a human driver would suggest that it will likely gum up the flow and create difficulties. Other than the spectate of seeing it happen, the first time, human drivers are bound to get upset with the summoning occurring in their midst.

• Is this summoning a legal capability?

It is muddled as to whether this kind of parking lot summon feature is legal or illegal. Essentially, you have a semi-autonomous vehicle that is supposed to have a driver inside attending to the co-sharing of the driving task, and instead you now have a human outside of the vehicle that is trying to remotely control some aspects of the vehicle, though they might or might not have complete access to the driving controls. Also, suppose someone hands their smartphone to their kids and tells them to go ahead and summon the car, in which case you’ve now got unlicensed drivers and that are not even adults, presumably acting as some form of remote driver operator. Not good.

Conclusion

I realize that some would argue that the summoning is only supposed to be used by responsible adults that are licensed to drive a car, but you are not taking into account human behavior. People don’t do things that they are necessarily told they are supposed to do. This idea that you can swipe away any unsafe practices by merely pinning it to the responsibility of the human driver is really just allowing for the possibility of unchecked unsafe efforts.

In one sense, some would say that the beta program has already let the genie out of the bottle since those Tesla owners that have access to the Enhanced Summon can already use it, as they wish, where they wish, when they wish to do so. If the feature does cross-the-line into being illegal, it would seem that the line has already been crossed, though it has not gotten any fanfare and so far has fortunately not apparently produced any publicized untoward results.

Overall, there is no question that having a robust summoning feature is something that will be a boon to the advent of self-driving driverless autonomous cars, especially since it provides an added benefit for those that might be mobility marginalized, but such a feature should only be unfettered in our real-world environment once it has proven itself to be safe and sound.