Many cars these days offer the ability to control them from the outside, for example to get out of a tight parking space or parallel park. Tesla a few years ago offered a Smart Summon function, which made it possible to call a car at some distance from the driver. However, this function later failed. And now an improved version of this function has been presented under the capacious name ASS.
Image Source: Tesla
As TweakTown notes, in the new implementation, the function has received the convincing designation Actually Smart Summon (ASS), which literally means “a really smart call.” It appeared in the list of capabilities of Tesla’s on-board systems after a recent software update.
ASS differs from the simple version of this technology, which involves the driver with a smartphone in his hand in close proximity to the car, in that there is no need to manually control the electric vehicle from a smartphone and direct visual control of its movements. The car may be out of sight of the driver when he calls it to the indicated location on the map, which can be up to 65 meters away from the parking space. Accordingly, it also allows the driver to leave the passenger compartment of the electric vehicle in a convenient place and drive the car automatically to the parking spot.
The previous Smart Summon feature was provided with the Tesla FSD kit, but it relied on ultrasonic sensors that have not been installed in new Tesla models since 2022 – since some time ago Elon Musk decided to entrust the autonomous control of Tesla electric vehicles to neural networks using exclusively visual information received from on-board cameras. This transition required the company’s specialists to seriously rework the software, so the “smart call” function temporarily disappeared from the functionality of machines of this brand, but now it has been returned even in an improved form.