Tesla’s ‘Enhanced Summon’ almost doesn’t ‘suck’ anymore, says Elon Musk as software lead joins GM Cruise

Tesla’s ‘Enhanced Summon’ feature has been taking a long time to get pushed to the wider fleet as the automaker is trying to improve it.

CEO Elon Musk now says that the latest version “almost doesn’t suck” as we’ve learned that the former software lead of the feature joins GM Cruise.

Enhanced Summon builds on Tesla’s previous ‘Summon’ feature, which was used by owners to move their cars autonomously for a few feet in their driveway or in tight parking situations.

With the new version, owners are able to Summon their Tesla vehicles from further away and the cars will navigate more complex parking environments.

Earlier this year, we published an exclusive first look at Tesla’s new Enhanced Summon.

According to the beta release sent to owners in the ‘Early Access Program,’ the feature works up to 150 feet from the car.

We got some feedback from the people who had early access to the feature and they seem to think the feature works fairly well, but the main complaint is that it was very slow.

The complaints were mostly about the speed once the car starts moving, but there’s also a delay after the Enhanced Summon is activated, which Tesla fixed with a new standby mode.

Yesterday, Musk said that the latest version that they are testing “almost doesn’t suck”:

It finally almost doesn’t suck

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 4, 2019

Those are strong words of confidence for the new Autopilot feature.

Earlier this year, we started seeing some of the first demonstrations of Enhanced Summon by Tesla owners in the early access program.

The release to the wider fleet was supposed to happen months ago, but it has been delayed several times.

We’ve also learned that Nenad Uzunovic, a Tesla Autopilot software engineer who was the “technical lead” for the Enhanced Summon feature, has joined Cruise, GM’s self-driving startup, according to an update on his LinkedIn.

He said that he was also a lead for the ‘Auto Lane Change’:

“Main point of contact for the motion planning aspect of Auto Lane Change. As of May 2019, Autopilot was executing over 100,000 Auto Lane Changes per day on customer vehicles.”

Now Enhanced Summon is expected to be released later this month.

Musk recently linked the release of the feature to the release of Tesla’s version 10 software update in August.

Featured Image: Watch Tesla autonomously drive in parking lot like a ‘robot valet’ with Enhanced Summon