I am a relatively new owner of a Model S and love the car. One question that I have is with the summon feature and its limitations. It seems that while the garage door automatically closes after the summon feature is activated and the car is parked, the garage door automatically closes. However, I have to make sure the garage door is open first before I use the feature. Is this accurate or have I not programmed or used the feature correctly?
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murphyS90D
Member
Make sure that you can manually operate the garage door with the car sitting outside of the closed door and with the car sitting inside of the closed door. Summon should open the door, if it is closed, re-position the car and then close the door. It uses the ultrasonic sensors to determine if the door is open or closed. If the door is already open it skips the open door step.
Be careful too, those first few times pulling it into the garage. It only happened to me once, out of many successful summons, but once the car was inside, it wasn't quite far enough to clear the garage door and the door began closing. If I hadn't stopped the garage door from closing (by jumping in front of the garage door sensors at ground-level), it would have closed the door on the car. To be sure this didn't happen again, it was just a matter of adjusting the stopping distance to bring the car in closer to the front of the garage.
Total side note: I somehow missed this feature for the first month or two - auto-open and auto-close of the garage door. You'l find two checkboxes on the Homelink screen in Settings. With a homelink-compatible garage door that's connected with the car, you can have it automatically open and close your door which is super useful. Auto-open works like a charm and gives a nice distance countdown as you approach. We haven't gotten auto-close to work yet, but it's better anyway because we like to manually trigger and wait until the door has fully closed just to be safe.
Total side note: I somehow missed this feature for the first month or two - auto-open and auto-close of the garage door. You'l find two checkboxes on the Homelink screen in Settings. With a homelink-compatible garage door that's connected with the car, you can have it automatically open and close your door which is super useful. Auto-open works like a charm and gives a nice distance countdown as you approach. We haven't gotten auto-close to work yet, but it's better anyway because we like to manually trigger and wait until the door has fully closed just to be safe.
So one thing to be aware of...the Homelink protocol (between your car/remote and opener) doesn't have the concept for "open" and "close", just "change to the opposite state". So if you have auto-open and auto-close enabled, when you're departing or arriving at your house, the car will try to make the garage door open if it was closed before, and close if it was open before. It's assumed that on departure the door is open and should be closed, and that on arrival the door is closed and should open.
One day soon after this feature appeared in the software (and I'd turned it on), I drove home from work. My kid had the garage door open and was riding his bike in and out of the garage as I was approaching the driveway, and auto-open started to close the door on him! (Remember that the car doesn't know whether the door is up or down, it just knows to tell the opener to change its state.) Fortunately he reacted quickly enough to not run into the closing door, no harm done. But that was when I decided that we didn't want auto-open or auto-close and I'd never again enable either feature, at least not using Homelink technology. YMMV.
Bruce.
Ah - good to know! No kiddos yet to consider, though I'll absolutely keep that in mind in the future. It's crazy that the Homelink folks didn't think to add that check into the spec. I'm assuming there's some good justification for it, though as an end-user, it seems like a huge hole (and safety hazard) in the protocol.
finallybuying
Member
murphyS90D
Member
The maximum distance for summon is something like 39 feet.
I have not tried backing in but I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work.
I have not tried backing in but I can't think of a reason it wouldn't work.
In some other threads owners have had incidents with the car hitting the door and/or the door hitting the car.
It may have been fixed with software updates, but I would be very careful with the open/close garage door summon feature and monitor it extra carefully.
GSP
It may have been fixed with software updates, but I would be very careful with the open/close garage door summon feature and monitor it extra carefully.
GSP
cdhowe
Member
I can say from experience that summoning your Tesla to back into your garage does work. You may have to train it a few times if your garage is tight or has an uneven lip, but my model S is happy to back into my garage under summon mode.
I think it's just because garage door remotes are in general pretty stupid devices...there's not any two-way communication for the opener to be able to tell the remote what state it's currently in.
The myQ system (proprietary to the Liftmaster / Chamberlain family of brands) is a little different in that it's possible to find out if the door is up or down, at least from the myQ iOS app. But that protocol isn't supported by the Tesla.
By the way I'm not implying that auto-Homelink isn't useful, just that I'm not comfortable with it in my use case.
Bruce.
RogerHScott
Active Member
Oh, we get it, Bruce. You value your kids' safety over convenience with your Tesla. We'll let that slide this time, but from now on
watch where your loyalties are!
GlmnAlyAirCar
Active Member
Here is an interesting observation regarding homelink and summon. If homelink is enabled, summon assumes the garage door is initially closed. This has an impact on the stopping distance setting (i.e., stop n inches from the front obstacle).
Consider this example (#1): stop distance set to 30". Garage door closed. Car located outside of garage (summoning into garage). The car will move forward (or backward) until it approaches what it believes is the closed garage door. This will typically be around 12" or less from the door. Once it detects an obstacle ahead, it activated home link. When it detects the obstacle has moved, it continues forward until it is 30" from the wall. All is good. Summon closes garage door.
Example #2:Same conditions, except garage door is opened. Car moves forward until it approaches what it believes is the closed garage door. However, in this case what it thinks is the closed garage door is actually the wall. It pulls up to within 12" of the wall (not the 30" it is set to). At this point, it triggers homelink, closing the door. The obstacle it thinks is the garage door doesn't move, so eventually it gives up.
In both cases, the car ends up in the garage with the door closed (good). However, in the 2nd example, the car ends up *much* closer to the wall than desired. This is a problem for me as I have a step off to the side which the ultrasonic sensors don't detect. If I allow the car to come within 12" of the wall it hits the step - not good.
The behavior perplexed me for a while until I finally did a set of tests and the behavior is very consistent with door closed vice door open.
Since the garage door is most typically open when I approach, I have disabled homelink within the summon settings.
Smart - you're absolutely right. I use the MyQ app regularly though I didn't make the connection between that knowing the state, Tesla not supporting that protocol, and the garage door opener being dumb as a rock. Maybe there are some Homelink-related goodies in 8.0?
AZ Desert Driver
Rare combination
How do you tell the car "this is where I want you to park"..I want to put he car in Precisely the right place, and have Summon always park it front/back/left/right in that location. I can get it to go forward, but have no control over steering. I can get it to back up, and it avoids the garage wall - but again I seem to have not steerage...so assume I must put it in its place and then tell it to "learn"... How do I do this?
You can't. See manual:
Before activating Summon, you need to
"Position the Vehicle for Parking"
Before operating Summon, align Model X laterally with the parking space so Model X can move straight into the space in either Drive or Reverse.....
n2mb_racing
Active Member
I've noticed summon steering the car. What is it doing? Will it try to align itself into a space with lines?
hmmm
Member
A follow up re. Homelink vs Summon. I seem to recall that in Summon mode the garage door can automatically close when the car is done parking. Can this be done also when the car is not in summon mode? my homelink set-up is working fine (ie opening the door when I arrive and closing the door after I leave) but the door won't close automatically once the car is parked. Is that the expected behavior?
RogerHScott
Active Member
I had a lengthy "discussion" (argument) about summon-parking on another thread a few months ago. Some people incorrectly
believe that the car somehow "knows" where it is supposed to go and steers itself there. The truth is the car has no notion of a
"destination"; it simply goes forward or backward, avoiding obstacles that its sensors detect. If it detects no obstacles, it will just
travel the specified distance in a straight line. It doesn't know what a garage is, it doesn't know what a parking spot is, it has no
concept of "between" or "in the middle of". If there are obstacles on both sides with just the right spacing between them it will happen
to wind up between them, but that's not because it is "trying" to do so.
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