Enhanced Summon, where are you?

[jebinc]

The head of the program just quit.

Tesla's 'Enhanced Summon' almost doesn't 'suck' anymore, says Elon Musk as software lead joins GM Cruise - Electrek

I wonder why he quit? Perhaps he felt the boss lost confidence in him (based on the recent and very public "sucks" comments from said boss) - and felt working tirelessly 20 hours a day (or whatever more than eight), and getting indirectly criticized (and publicly) by the boss, left him feeling like it was best to move on (for health and/or other reasons). Tough to be an effective leader in that kind of environment. No one really wants to work in a hostile work environment anyway (right?); so if he did leave under his own power, that's good for him.

 

[EVNow]

The head of the program just quit.

Tesla's 'Enhanced Summon' almost doesn't 'suck' anymore, says Elon Musk as software lead joins GM Cruise - Electrek

He wasn't head of the program - he was the tech lead. He didn't "just quit" - he left in May, so atleast 2 months back.

I'm surprised he wasn't fired earlier. Clearly summon has been the most embarrassing (or may be one of the) delay for Tesla.

Anyway, it seems to me
- Tesla approach to summon is wrong OR
- You almost need Level 5 FSD to solve summon

May be when EM says parking lot is very difficult, he thinks it is the latter.

Whenever they use rule based heuristics to do a feature, Tesla is going to be later and worse than Waymo. Rule based takes a long time and matures very slowly.

ps : The tech lead left Tesla in May … my speculation, he kept telling Musk, great Enh Summon can be released very soon. Then EM found out it still sucks. He is trying to make it less suck, since then.

Apr 6 : Tesla Enhanced Summon coming out in US next week for anyone with Enhanced Autopilot or Full Self-Driving option

May 23 : Smart Summon coming soon!

May 31 : New Tesla Summon will

ur

Jun 24 : Third revision of Enhanced Summon hopefully going to Tesla owners with early access later this week

Jul 13 : Parking lots are a remarkably hard problem. Doing an in-depth engineering review of Enhanced Summon later today.

Jul 13 : Good progress on fast activation of summon down to ~1 second

Jul 16 : Agreed. That’s approximately date when we expect Enhanced Summon to be in wide release. It will be magical. Lot of hard work by Autopilot team.

Jul 27 : Yes, V10 will include several games & infotainment features, improved highway Autopilot, better traffic light & stop sign recognition & Smart Summon

Aug 4 : It finally almost doesn’t suck

 

[diplomat33]

He wasn't head of the program - he was the tech lead. He didn't "just quit" - he left in May, so atleast 2 months back.

I'm surprised he wasn't fired earlier. Clearly summon has been the most embarrassing (or may be one of the) delay for Tesla.

Anyway, it seems to me
- Tesla approach to summon is wrong OR
- You almost need Level 5 FSD to solve summon

May be when EM says parking lot is very difficult, he thinks it is the latter.

Whenever they use rule based heuristics to do a feature, Tesla is going to be later and worse than Waymo. Rule based takes a long time and matures very slowly.

ps : The tech lead left Tesla in May … my speculation, he kept telling Musk, great Enh Summon can be released very soon. Then EM found out it still sucks. He is trying to make it less suck, since then.

Apr 6 : Tesla Enhanced Summon coming out in US next week for anyone with Enhanced Autopilot or Full Self-Driving option

May 23 : Smart Summon coming soon!

May 31 : New Tesla Summon will

ur

Jun 24 : Third revision of Enhanced Summon hopefully going to Tesla owners with early access later this week

Jul 13 : Parking lots are a remarkably hard problem. Doing an in-depth engineering review of Enhanced Summon later today.

Jul 13 : Good progress on fast activation of summon down to ~1 second

Jul 16 : Agreed. That’s approximately date when we expect Enhanced Summon to be in wide release. It will be magical. Lot of hard work by Autopilot team.

Jul 27 : Yes, V10 will include several games & infotainment features, improved highway Autopilot, better traffic light & stop sign recognition & Smart Summon

Aug 4 : It finally almost doesn’t suck

Looking at the timeline of Elon's tweet, it looks like a roller coaster. Elon was probably shown a demo that looked good, so he got excited. Then he probably saw a demo that was not so good and realized ES is really hard. Then he's probably told of some nice progress by the team and got excited again, etc...

I love my car and I love what Tesla is trying to do but I do wish Elon would learn to be patient and be quiet. Just say "the team is working hard". That's it. No qualifier. No promises. Just let the team release features whenever they release the features.

 

[TT97]

Clearly summon has been the most embarrassing (or may be one of the) delay for Tesla.

More embarrassing than this?

Elon Musk on Twitter

 

[jebinc]

More embarrassing than this?

Elon Musk on Twitter

View attachment 437966

Yeah, you can take that to the bank...

 

[Octo]

I love my car and I love what Tesla is trying to do but I do wish Elon would learn to be patient and be quiet. Just say "the team is working hard". That's it. No qualifier. No promises. Just let the team release features whenever they release the features.

Yeah. I don’t get his weird approach to autonomous driving. I find the Model 3 to be the best car I ever had. Really amazing. And I do like the whole autonomy R&D and even Tesla’s NN camera approach. But why do they promise the moon but only deliver small morsels?

The car is sooooo good that all this FSD hype isn’t necessary. I find Tesla’s decision to overpromise, charge a lot of money and then don’t deliver on these promises a shocking and unnecessary stain. Really puts me personally off this company. It’s so unprofessional.

 

[diplomat33]

Get ready folks. After months and months of Tesla owners complaining that Tesla is taking too long to release Enhanced Summon, we will soon enter the next phase where owners will have the feature and will complain about how much it sucks and saying Tesla should not have released it yet. It is the Tesla circle of life.

 

[Daniel in SD]

Get ready folks. After months and months of Tesla owners complaining that Tesla is taking too long to release Enhanced Summon, we will soon enter the next phase where owners will have the feature and will complain about how much it sucks and saying Tesla should not have released it yet. It is the Tesla circle of life.

What about me? I don’t think it’s taking too long, it’s an absurdly difficult problem. I think they should not release it until it’s level 3.

 

[diplomat33]

Yeah. I don’t get his weird approach to autonomous driving. I find the Model 3 to be the best car I ever had. Really amazing. And I do like the whole autonomy R&D and even Tesla’s NN camera approach. But why do they promise the moon but only deliver small morsels?

The car is sooooo good that all this FSD hype isn’t necessary. I find Tesla’s decision to overpromise, charge a lot of money and then don’t deliver on these promises a shocking and unnecessary stain. Really puts me personally off this company. It’s so unprofessional.

I think an obvious answer is that there is value in hype. It keeps people interested and more importantly, buying Tesla.

The fact is that FSD is the Next Big Thing. No matter how great your car is, if you are not working on FSD, you will be left behind. So it is important for Tesla to remind people that they are still working on FSD and have stuff coming soon. Of course, they could do that without making misleading promises.

What about me? I don’t think it’s taking too long, it’s an absurdly difficult problem. I think they should not release it until it’s level 3.

You are the exception I guess.

 

[follow.johnny]

New video of Enhanced Summon (v.4) posted to Youtube

 

[diplomat33]

New video of Enhanced Summon (v.4) posted to Youtube

Thank you so much for posting! Definitely looks better than V1 of Enhanced Summon.

 

[willow_hiller]

New video of Enhanced Summon (v.4) posted to Youtube

The most interesting part to me is the car hesitating at the transition from brick to asphalt. So many people were claiming that there was no vision involved in enhanced summon (that it was strictly radar/sonar). This proves there's some vision processing for curbs and edges going on.

 

[diplomat33]

The most interesting part to me is the car hesitating at the transition from brick to asphalt. So many people were claiming that there was no vision involved in enhanced summon (that it was strictly radar/sonar). This proves there's some vision processing for curbs and edges going on.

Yes, and I think this video illustrates why Enhanced Summon has been so difficult. Something like a transition between brick and asphalt may seem obvious to humans because our brains have already been trained to understand it, but it is far from obvious to computer vision. It takes time to train the NN. And there are a lot of cases that you need to train the NN to handle. But I think vision is the right approach for a general solution.

I wonder if maybe Tesla tried a radar/sonar approach at first and got some success in limited cases but then ran into problems and switched over to a vision approach?

 

[Ugly]

Consider the liability if a release happens to have a malevolent bug causing widespread damage and injury. The Boeing mad Max is an example and rushing release was the cause.
This is the nature of development so quit whining and accept it.

 

[AlanSubie4Life]

New video of Enhanced Summon (v.4) posted to Youtube

Yikes! That looks really bad. I guess I fully agree with Elon that it almost doesn't suck! But it definitely still sucks. 3 months maybe, 6 months definitely?

It's nice that the video author is optimistic, but I am not sure there are any grounds for his claims for why Summon was doing what Summon was doing - I'd have to see a lot of similar situations and tests to see whether a pattern of responses developed.

complain about how much it sucks

I definitely also think it should not be released if it does not work (as illustrated in the video above!) - it could be dangerous, and also look bad for Tesla.

What is your feeling on when it should be released?

Can you list some things that in your mind Enhanced Summon must be able to do prior to release? In other words, what would it need to do for you, for it to not suck? Or in other words, what would be must-have features / minimum specs for it to be released? What is your metric?

Some metrics to consider:

1) Unattended Collision Rate - curbs/cars/pedestrians (How often would collisions occur without intervention? What % is acceptable?)
2) Range - how far, does it have to be literally line of sight?
3) Speed (avg miles per hour over entire summon event?)
4) Weather conditions - when must it work?
5) Understanding - does it know to pull to right? Does it understand how to park in a loading zone? Does it know what a loading zone is? Does it understand how not to block/impede other drivers? Does it understand parking lot markings and flow of traffic? Can it detect and avoid shopping carts? Does it understand bricks and different surfaces and can it generate a 3D map of the surrounding like a human can?
6) Parking garages - now or later?
7) Precision - how tight a parking lot can it operate in?
8) Connectivity requirements - what if it goes under a cover and loses GPS in the middle of the summon? Inertial guidance support? What happens when cellular is weak?

I don’t know... Guess we have to start a bunch of polls or something. Seems like a lot of ways in which we need to define what sucks and what does not suck.

I like the L3 metric described above, or the "Tesla takes responsibility" metric, but probably not realistic. So not sure where that leaves us.

It's so complicated...the list above probably leaves out 90% of the issues!

 

[jebinc]

New video of Enhanced Summon (v.4) posted to Youtube

Thanks for sharing. Seems like it will be quite a while before ES is viable/reliable for a real parking lot, like Costco - certainly longer than "August 16th," and possibly longer than v10 release... It's sad that Tesla doesn't update their order page for FSD (see below) to reflect reality (i.e., remove the "Really" misinformation and update the "Coming later this year:" list). I can understand the Charlatan over promising (and under-delivering), because everyone knows he does that regularly as the sanctioned (or not) "visionary," but the Tesla (publicly traded) company, should be held to a higher standard, IMHO. Quite disappointing.

 

[EVNow]

More embarrassing than this?

Elon Musk on Twitter

View attachment 437966

Yes. While that is a one time weird tweet - summon has been promised multiple times and even released to EA but withdrawn.

 

[diplomat33]

Yikes! That looks really bad. I guess I fully agree with Elon that it almost doesn't suck! But it definitely still sucks. 3 months maybe, 6 months definitely?

It's nice that the video author is optimistic, but I am not sure there are any grounds for his claims for why Summon was doing what Summon was doing - I'd have to see a lot of similar situations and tests to see whether a pattern of responses developed.



I definitely also think it should not be released if it does not work (as illustrated in the video above!) - it could be dangerous, and also look bad for Tesla.

What is your feeling on when it should be released?

Can you list some things that in your mind Enhanced Summon must be able to do prior to release? In other words, what would it need to do for you, for it to not suck? Or in other words, what would be must-have features / minimum specs for it to be released? What is your metric?

Some metrics to consider:

1) Unattended Collision Rate - curbs/cars/pedestrians (How often would collisions occur without intervention? What % is acceptable?)
2) Range - how far, does it have to be literally line of sight?
3) Speed (avg miles per hour over entire summon event?)
4) Weather conditions - when must it work?
5) Understanding - does it know to pull to right? Does it understand how to park in a loading zone? Does it know what a loading zone is? Does it understand how not to block/impede other drivers? Does it understand parking lot markings and flow of traffic? Can it detect and avoid shopping carts? Does it understand bricks and different surfaces and can it generate a 3D map of the surrounding like a human can?
6) Parking garages - now or later?
7) Precision - how tight a parking lot can it operate in?
8) Connectivity requirements - what if it goes under a cover and loses GPS in the middle of the summon? Inertial guidance support? What happens when cellular is weak?

I don’t know... Guess we have to start a bunch of polls or something. Seems like a lot of ways in which we need to define what sucks and what does not suck.

It's so complicated...the list above probably leaves out 90% of the issues!

Interesting. This is what I mean by "suck:" is subjective. I don't think Enhanced Summon sucks in that video. It's not perfect but it does not suck.

My metric for not sucking is that Enhanced Summon should be able to move from A to B within 150 ft in a parking lot at a reasonable speed and without hitting anything.

 

[jebinc]

Yikes! That looks really bad. I guess I fully agree with Elon that it almost doesn't suck! But it definitely still sucks. 3 months maybe, 6 months definitely?
<….>
So not sure where that leave us.

IMO, it "leaves us" with potentially just another parlor trick/gimmick.... Buy hey, what did you expect for fronting that $6000 (or whatever was paid up front to support the Charlatan's vision)?

 

[Az_Rael]

Jul 13 : Parking lots are a remarkably hard problem. Doing an in-depth engineering review of Enhanced Summon later today

This one really made me laugh when he posted it. It reminded me of the President saying "no one knew healthcare could be so complicated". No, everyone knew healthcare is hard, that is why we have been arguing about it for decades.

Maybe Elon never drives in retail parking lots anymore? So he honestly didnt know how hard of a problem the average Costco parking lot is?