Summon Your Tesla from Your Phone | Hacker News Reader

Summon Your Tesla from Your Phone

teslamotors.com

148 pointsnbaksalyar139 comments

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"Summon"

Great word - evokes both magic and privilege in one fell swoop.

They just nail the language in their communications.

Just seems like a straightforward use of language to me. What other word is even applicable?

Its easy to dismiss things as obvious when theyre done well.

It's also easy to praise things because you like the person saying them.

"Car Getter"

Consider some of the alternatives

Request car

Beg for car

Plead for car

edit:formatting

Why would you request, beg or plead when it is your personal car that is coming to you? Call maybe... but summon kind of rolls off the tongue better... never mind when you consider how gaming is developing and how you'd run into that particular word in pretty much any game that involves magic and 'calling' things to you.

Tesla Recall

Tesla Direct

Tesla Mobilize

Tesla Hail

Tesla Greet

Tesla Whistle

And that's just looking at synonymns of summon and hail without doing any thinking

Out of those, Direct, Mobilize, Greet, Recall and Whistle are far, far more ambiguous (with multiple meanings) than Summon. Hail is associated with taxis. If you put them all in a list it would take all of five seconds to realise that Summon is the best option.

That's assuming that someone would be looking at a list like that and not doing what Microsoft or other companies do where they make up their own term for features/products

Now introducing Nissan FetchDrive Plus Connect, a subfeature of CarWings ® Nissan Motor Corporation.

Tesla Recall would be a terrible name. Car recalls are associated with saftey failures. Meanwhile people need to be convinced this feature is safe. There's so much more to it than using a thesaurus!

My favorite comment I saw on Twitter about this was just "Accio Tesla!", but I suspect the licensing fees would be a bit outrageous. :)

"Eventually, your Tesla will be able to drive anywhere across the country to meet you, charging itself along the way."

In there lies perhaps a hint at a business opportunity/solution to the renter problem: Tesla charging garages and comes to pick you up when you are ready to go.

We certainly live in a Sci-fi movie.

Or, a platform for people to rent out their own driveways for migrant EVs to pull in and (pay for a) charge during the day.

Or simply a car club where you simply summon a Tesla (or any other brand) vehicle for transportation. I really don't even want to own a car. I would rather just call a car that will look like any of the other cars in the uniform fleet that will always be clean and smelling nice that I then get into and it takes me to my destination and then goes off to pick up someone else.

I think Uber and Lyft and the established industry will start gearing up for a war for your transportation needs. If the Auto industry is smart and has learned something (which I really still need to be convinced of), they will start/are working on such a shared use fleet model because one way or another, in the future no one is going to own their own car. it's simply far too inefficient if the vehicle can drive itself. Why would you want a vehicle that sits idle 90% of the day?

Some of us need to own cars. Those with children (unless you want to move carseats every day), those with special needs, the elderly and differently-abled to whom familiarity is extremely important. Those that live far away from paved roads and need trucks to get to town. Farmers and DIY enthusiasts that haul stuff every week.

Others want to own cars because they like to modify them, or restore old ones.

Personally I'm with you -- if I could pay a monthly fee and be able to summon a Tesla 3x/week, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I just can't see how we'd be a big slice of the market, which will keep innovation slow.

"Why would you want a vehicle that sits idle 90% of the day?"

Some reasons I want my own car (note - I don't currently own one but rent occasionally) :

- My kids' car seats are already installed and ready to go

- My phone is already connected to the sound system, and ready to take calls, with contacts and built-in SatNav already knowing my home and work.

- The car has the Accessories I prefer. Eg, the sound system I want with Bluetooth connectivity, built-in DVD player, seating (leather vs cloth vs vinyl) with the right amount of space and recline movement.

- I'm familiar with all controls. How to set all lighting, interval wipers, and know how to set the climate control, and quickly defog.

A uniform fleet addresses the 4th point only. Maybe the 3rd point if my preferences happen to align with the fleet's administrators.

As a user of ZipCar for quick trips and traditional car rentals for longer trips, these are general points of annoyance for me.

I imagine you'd be able to pick from a few options as far as car type goes and then get a driverless car of that type. Once you knew which cars you like, then you could set it as a default option or something. Driverless cars would eliminate your concern about most of the controls anyway.

It'd be easy enough to have a car seat option as Uber does: https://newsroom.uber.com/nyc/uberfamilyfor-parents-on-the-g...

Anyway, interesting to see your list of annoyances from real world usage of a car sharing service!

The issue then becomes this: "uberFAMILY provides one forward-facing car seat for a child who is at least (a) 12 months old AND (b) 22 lbs. AND (c) 31 inches. A child is too big at 48 lbs. or 52 inches."

What if you need two car seats, or if your kid is outside those parameters? You still need a seat. Likewise, adding these options can add significant delay to your getting a car. Most people are used to transportation being reliable. When you step out of your home or office, your car is there, ready to go. Having to wait an extra 15 minutes for the car to show up is not what most people want to do.

I think car-sharing services will change things, quite a lot, but I don't think it will eliminate private car ownership. Most families will own one "family car" for road trips, etc, etc.

> - My phone is already connected to the sound system, and ready to take calls, with contacts and built-in SatNav already knowing my home and work.

> - I'm familiar with all controls. How to set all lighting, interval wipers, and know how to set the climate control, and quickly defog.

These things can be synchronized with the cloud... you just authenticate at the car and it will download and apply your preferences. IIRC 7er BMWs have this, based on the key (e.g. one for the man, one for the wife and one for the son).

Forget about car seats - bring your own vests and don't worry about it: http://saferide4kids.com/product/ridesafer-travel-vest/

Disclaimer: I haven't tried them. But I'd be open to it, as someone with kids who would prefer not to own a car eventually.

"Why would you want a vehicle that sits idle 90% of the day?"

I don't, but I do want access to a cheap to operate vehicle that I can load my kayaks on top of and my camping gear inside of and then go drive to a river as far away from everyone else as I can get (9 hour drives are not uncommon). This is why an electric car will not meet my needs for the forseeable future. <30 min charging stations need to be as common as gas stations for me to even think about it.

I see crowds of confused teslas huddled together in the midwest after a town changes some road signs without first informing Google. Or owners booking flights to tiny airports after their tesla uses the last few electrons in its battery to call for help because some kid taped over one of its sensors.

Sounds like an opportunity to sell some roadside assistance (either from Tesla directly, or from a third party that will pick up the slack otherwise).

And I think this is where Musk's other venture, SolarCity, will likely come in to play. They'll have 'gas stations' across the US, where the Tesla charging tech will be installed for all EVs - though I'd assume Tesla to be a first-class citizen at these.

Tesla always struck me as taking the 'Apple' route of logistics - controlling the supply chain from start to finish. I'd be surprised if they'd support third-party enterprise, but I doubt they'd attempt to undermine it.

This network is already built out (and getting bigger) and is in fact powered with SolarCity panels, but I assume most power still comes from the grid.

https://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

What I want is my car to go park it self on the street. And then come back and pick me up. Parking is the main reason I hate driving in San Francisco.

Turning the car in to an Uber doesn't work for me. I don't want someone spilling something all over the seats.

You could just tell it to drive around the block a few times even if there isn't a parking space.

In all honesty, I don't care what it does, as long as it's back relatively quickly when I need it.

Dear God, I can see it now. The traffic becoming even more nightmarish as 280 is filled with cars aimlessly driving about for their masters. A child looks out into the now fume free parking lot that is the 101 merge and sees nothing but empty cars, bumper to bumper, for miles. She asks her mother, why are all the ghosts driving their cars today mummy? But her mother just left the girl, in lieu of a babysitter, in the car while she got her hair did.

You and I have similar ideas about the future. ;)

This is the Uber/Lyft/Taxi killer.

Imagine paying $2-4 for a ride in a Tesla for what used to cost you $25-$30 in an Uber or cab.

97% of the cost of an Uber ride goes towards paying the driver, fuel and Uber fees, 3% (or less) goes towards the lease costs.

A Tesla lease is only ~$0.73/hour ($~12,000/yr), including recharging.

Your math is a little off. it should be $1.37/hr, assuming 24 * 365 in a year.

But then the comparison is a little off as well, since you wouldn't ever have a Uber standing by for you 24/7.

I've been using Car2Go often for the past few weeks. That's $0.41/minute for me to driving myself. Granted, it would be more efficient if I could request a car wherever I happen to be, but I'm not we'd see such a tremendous reduction in cost like you've outlined.

Aside from the Tesla lease being ~$1.37/hr (as analyst74 points out), you would never be paying that amount per hour because that assumes 100% utilization of the car and absolutely zero cost for the person/business who owns the Tesla (and also provides no margin for the owner).

The cost would be no where near that per hour amount once you factor in everything needed for someone or some business owning a Tesla.

That's today, though. If Musk can actually get the model 3 down to $35k it should be cheaper.

But still, as the previous poster pointed out that rate is still zero overhead and zero profit.

Plus, if you did use that rate and could somehow achieve 24hr utilization, you'd presumably be putting on ~1000 miles per day on the car. At 365,000 miles per year, that's going to millions of miles during your "lease".

You'll probably go through quite a few batteries and quite a few cars during your "lease".

>This is the Uber/Lyft/Taxi killer.

Uh, what is?

This shows a car automatically backing in and out of a garage. I think it's a stretch to call it "summoning" your car, let alone an automated, self-driving taxi system. Yet you think this is the Uber killer?

I don't understand why people act like everything Tesla does is positively earth-shattering. Ford has had software to parallel park your car for, oh, about 5 years. That seems a lot more practical than standing outside and having your car pull out of the garage for you, but that's just me. I don't even understand the use case for this, unless your garage is so narrow you can't open the car door.

Eventually, your Tesla will be able to drive anywhere across the country to meet you, charging itself along the way.

While I applaud their ambition, that statement certainly escalated quickly from autonomously leaving a garage.

Oh...you don't accidentally leave your car in NY when you're in LA ...just me then?

This was a joke

It is a large step, let's just get it to drive me to and from work first!

Early demos of speech recognition software come to mind.

There's quite a big difference between a nice demo in controlled conditions and a serious replacement for a cumbersome, thought to be obsolete, but ultimately irreplaceable entity like a keyboard or a human driver.

As a driver, I really hope they make good on their claims. But they're not even close at the moment.

The faithful need periodic reminders of the vision of the future into which they are buying.

perhaps I missed the memo. Tesla's are now available on hourly lease? for cents per hour? in my reality a shitty zipcar compact will run you $25/hr (likely much more unless you return it exactly at the predicted time).

Uber/Lyft/etc...This has been the end game since the ride sharing economy started. Hail an autonomous car to take you wherever you want to go for a very low price. It will make owning and driving your own car obsolete. In fact, with the insurance companies, very few people will be able to afford their own car/drive it in populated areas. I can see some parts of large cities banning all non-autonomous cars altogether for traffic and safety reasons.

Uber is very much planning for this, it's the end game. Travis has even verbally told Elon that'd he'd buy $500 million worth of Tesla's if they are fully autonomous by 2020.

Apt username.

I'm sure many of you also dreamed of being Michael Knight, summoning KITT with his watch.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BxHbwy5CMAAk8eA.jpg

If you're looking for a cool novel with self-driving vehicles featured prominently in it, I highly recommend "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez. It's a techno-thriller written by an actual software security expert, where a computer virus takes over the world. Everyone I've recommended it to has enjoyed it. (EDITED for clarity.)

"Daemon" and its sequel "Freedom TM" were awesome, totally support the recommendation. Small nitpick, the software that took over the world (a form on narrow AI, think scripting on steroids) was developed by a genius game developer (in my head looking totally like John Carmack) not a security expert.

Sorry, I meant to say the author of the NOVEL is a security expert.

And I dare say, the developer of the Daemon virus proved he was a security expert, too.

SPOILERS:

I ended up thinking of the Daemon not so much as an AI, but as an OS, with very many sub-programs hard-coded into it... But for the most part, I thought what made Daemon so smart, and the novel so compelling, was how much it relied on humans to help it achieve its goals and make decisions. The depiction of how people banded together to make the Burning Man, for instance. The OS allowed that, and exposed APIs that made that possible, but the decision to actually make it and the morality encoded into it were created by humans, after Sobel had died. I guess I end up seeing the Daemon not so much as an AI, but as a sufficiently well-designed Chinese Box, with very capable humans inside. (Some willingly, some blackmailed.)

This use case seems very strange. Why would I want to get out in my driveway when it's more convenient to park it myself in my garage? I'm covered by any rain, and my front door is locked (whereas the door from my garage into my house is usually unlocked).

Not everyone lives in a building like this: http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/1212/file-482133303-jpg/images/o...

It's an early step towards more:

Your car has dropped you at work and returned home to avoid CBD parking fees. You then summon it to pick you up and drive you home.

You've arrived back from holiday and summon your car to the airport to pick you and the family up.

You are parking your car(s) in the garage so tightly that you can no longer open the doors while inside.

The car is parked a few blocks away and you want it to come and get you from the restaurant where you've just finished dining.

> Your car has dropped you at work and returned home to avoid CBD parking fees. You then summon it to pick you up and drive you home.

I sure hope this doesn't become the norm. That is double the number of trips clogging the roads.

If/when that happens, most likely there will be way less cars on the roads.

Only for people who insist on owning their own car and avoiding paid parking. For the majority, the car will drop you at work and re-join the pool of cars available for use by those going in the other direction or park in a cheaper place a suburb away, or be available for courier work or whatever else.

Your car can run away from carjackers trying to break in while waiting for you at a public parking, and then warn you and the police.

Two reasons why this works. Some of us have packed garages that we use as storage. A car that parks itself gives us more room. Secondly it's on private property and it allows people to get comfortable with self driving cars without the hassle of legal issues we'd have on the road. They're playing a long game.

If you have a big garage that allows you plenty of space to exit your vehicle, then this doesn't make sense. This feature is not for you.

My parking spot is a narrow spot in a covered carport. It's uncomfortable to exit the vehicle when you're in the spot, without risking bumping the door into the next car over.

The shared garage at my workplace is similar.

My brother's home has a parking spot so narrow that you can't exit from the driver's side in an SUV due to a wall, so you have to climb out the passenger side.

My parent's house has a garage used for storage, so there's lots of stuff piled around the car. And there's no direct entrance to the house (except via a ladder up to a hatch).

All of these use-cases would be easier to park if you could get out of the car, and have it pull in and out (drive straight by the length of the vehicle) automatically. It's basically driven by the fact that the space needed to store a car is much smaller than the space needed to store a car with a door open.

This is one of the best features I could ask for in a car, for me.

Have any of these cars ever gotten stuck? Accidents are one thing, but has a car ever been able to traverse a great distance (10+km of public roads) with the 99.9999% reliability such a product would require?

You call the car. It leaves the garage and starts heading to you. Then something comes up, something like a construction zone or other odd situation. Or perhaps the car breaks down. So the car is now stopped and alone. You're sitting by the road five miles away and the car is parked blocking traffic somewhere. Who comes to help? AAA? Wil it fight back if someone tries to tow it away? Or push it onto the shoulder to free up the lane? I doubt the general public would have much sympathy for the guy who's tesla is blocking an intersection because he didn't want to pay for parking and/or bother walking to the car himself.

I cannot see drivers using this garage/parking trick very often. It's just too slow.

Reading the article, it sounds like the car isn't expected to travel more than 10 meters or so right now.

>Using Summon, once you arrive home and exit Model S or Model X, you can prompt it to do the rest: open your garage door, enter your garage, park itself, and shut down. In the morning, you wake up, walk out the front door, and summon your car. It will open the garage door and come to greet you

So from your garage to the street, or from a parking spot to out of, but adjacent to, the parking spot. Not from your home to your workplace.

Today. But Tesla and Musk have every intention to expand the range. What we have now is just a gimmick, a trick that drivers will quickly bypass once the novelty wears off. people want/expect much more very soon.

Autonomous cars will be all over in a few years, I'm sure we'll survive an occasional breakdown or detour much like we do now.

I'm not seeing anything that would suggest they are that close. Automatic, assisted driving on motorways, or very very well mapped out cities - sure. But autonomous where you can go to sleep on the back seat or indeed summon a car to you? Probably 50 if not 100 years away. And not only because of technical problems.

> But autonomous where you can go to sleep on the back seat or indeed summon a car to you? Probably 50 if not 100 years away. And not only because of technical problems.

This capability literally exists today, there's no way it takes 50 years to make it to market.

The capability we have today is working on fully mapped, well lit, dry roads. No one has an automatic car that could navigate in heavy snow/rain or unmapped terrain. There's very few ideas how to tackle it, unless we equip every road in some sort of trackers. I fully believe that in short time we will have all sorts of very clever cruise control systems which are essentially like Tesla Autopilot, maybe a bit more versatile. But fully autonomous vehicles? I stand by my statement that they are very far away for commercial distribution, unless you plan on selling them in Florida only, or only for use on private land.

There's another HN post just today, on auto-driving in snow! So we are close.

I know, I actually read that article :-) It says that the car could navigate the snow-covered road based on the data it collected from the same street when it wasn't covered in snow. So.....I get the idea, but that's not really "working in snow".

But that's about how humans do it. I think it was completely legitimate, worked fine, and can continue to work in the field.

The wright brothers made the first heavier than air human flight 113 years ago. Look what we can do now! First mobile phone call was 43 years ago and now we have such advanced tech that making calls is almost an afterthought. Once tech gets a grip its momentum is huge.

40 years ago we thought(well,some of us did) that accurate image recognition is a matter of few months of work, at most. It's 2016, and our most advanced image recognition software can't tell a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print apart. It's an insanely difficult problem. We can't even do voice recognition completely right. Automatic cars rely on that exact type of challenge - recognising patters accurately. I'm sure in certain settings they work exceedingly well. Spectacularly even. But to be safe for human transportation, they need to be 100% accurate. Not 90% or 95% accurate. They need to work in snow, rain, when a huge sinkhole appears in the ground or an infant walks into the road. They need to consider legal, moral and ethical implications lest they be allowed on the road - is it allowed to hit a pedestrian to save 4 passengers? Is it allowed to hit 4 pedestrians to save 1 passenger? Can you at any time take manual control? If yes, how do you regulate insurance? If no, how do you tell the car that you want it in that particular spot and not any other, be it your garage or a middle of a clover field?

Yes, there already is software that can drive safely on lit, dry roads, while there is a human behind a steering wheel tracking its every move. But I still believe we are at the very least a few decades away from fully autonomous vehicles.

Its not at all clear that the bar is that high. Humans that fail to meet that bar spectacularly are let on the road every day by the millions.

Its more an economic issue than a moral/technical one.

I actually met plenty of people who say "oh, they just need to have less accidents than humans and we are good".

No, that's absolutely not true. For the most recent example - someone made a raspberry Pi controlled insulin pump. Insulin is actually incredibly dangerous to humans if you get the dose wrong, so making an insulin pump based on hardware that does not conform with highest safety standards is just not acceptable. You know what the person behind it said when it was pointed out to them? That it doesn't matter, because raspberry Pi is still going to kill less people than the number of those who die through incorrect injections due to tiredness or simple mistakes. That's absolutely incorrect - even if such machine lowered the overall number of deaths due to incorrect insulin injections, no one would ever allow it on any market ever. No company would ever get its way out of "poor hardware choice lead to death of Mr. Smith" by saying "hey, but actually, our machine kills less people than would die naturally due to similar causes each year, so you can't hold us accountable, right??".

To me, it's the same with automatic cars - they cannot merely "have less accidents than humans". They need to have 0 accidents or they won't be acceptable. That's why the bar is high. If you are in a situation where a choice is between hitting a pedestrian or running under a semi and possibly killing everyone in your car, no one is going to blame you for doing either - our primitive brains probably are going to go with whatever seems most logical at the moment, you can blame anything on adrenaline. Computers don't have that luxury. They need to make a calculated choice - and then whoever makes them(the computers) has to live with that choice. The computer chose to hit the pedestrian - now the company who wrote its code is being sued for millions - no matter how they frame it, that's not a situation anyone wants to be in. Of course I'm going off into theoreticals here, since we don't actually have this problem yet. But I am sure it will become an actual problem and it will need to be solved one way or another before widespread adoption.

And when those humans fail, we punish them. They pay fines or have their license suspended. When they are really bad, we lock them up.

I'd be all for Teslas if, should they every brake a law or hurt someone, the car was physically locked in a box for a year or two.

100 years ago, we were just getting around to inventing the light switch. I think you are seriously underestimating the pace at which this technology is advancing. It might take 10+ years for this technology to become mainstream in all likelihood. But 100 years? Not a chance.

I think you underestimate the role of the driver. The human does much more than operate the vehicle. When a car breaks down the human is there to communicate and negotiate the situation. When a human stops traffic, as one did to me this morning because her puppy had gotten off leash, she is communicating with a human driver. Or in a construction zone where a workman needs to stop traffic to allow a truck to turn. An autodrive car, lacking that eye-to-eye communication we are so good at, could be very dangerous in such situations.

How will an autodrive tesla deal with a police check?

As much as I love TSLA, they always time their announcements a bit cynically. Summon is great and awesome, but as a task itself is a very niche utility unless it can park itself lets say in malls or in public spaces. The real story is they want to be in News cycle esp. with Detroit Auto Show going on now and more and more mainstream Automakers getting the plugin religion.

The bigger news is the 2017 Chrysler Pacifica PHEV, which is more of a game changer from impact perspective.

edit: Also who is going to plugin the Car, if it self-parks?

> unless it can park itself lets say in malls or in public spaces

It can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic8T-kUbaRM&feature=youtu.be

I was talking about Ability to use Summon in Malls and Public spaces. Perpendicular parking has been around esp. in Luxury vehicles for a while.

Tesla is developing a snake like robot arm that creepily slithers into the charging port.

>>edit: Also who is going to plugin the Car, if it self-parks?

The snakebot will https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI

Can I ask why the 2017 Chrysler Pacifica PHEV is a game changer?

PS - This is a legitimate question, I know nothing about the Pacifica.

A plugin hybrid Minivan with about 30 miles AER/Electric range with capacity of 8 passengers. Now, to simplify it is Volt of Minivans.

That does sound pretty neat. I don't think I've seen an electric minivan before.

Thanks for the clarification.

How is a hybrid minivan (2017 Chrysler Pacifica) more exciting than a step forward toward self driving cars? I guess it is a matter of opinion...

Yeah, Tesla is _really_ good at marketing/PR. Also: Calling it just "Summon" and not "SmartUnparkAssist(TM)" or similar

When you miss a payment, the car will go back to motherbase.

And then you can just summon it by paying from your phone.

Very, very slowly. https://youtu.be/9yqDWVLx35I

And note how of course the car cannot anticipate the lip of the garage needing slightly more momentum to overcome like a human driver would.

But it is a start and I'd buy a Model X in a heartbeat if I won the powerball, lol

And note how of course the car cannot anticipate the lip of the garage needing slightly more momentum to overcome like a human driver would.

Terrain scanning, a software upgrade, and the instant torque available to electric motors could probably solve that.

I doubt the lip of the garage will be a permanent limitation. There is no reason the car can't learn to account for it.

This is really cool, and is obviously intended to be just the beginning of something that could be really amazing.

I suppose this is mostly just Tesla wanting to "beta" test the technology & collect some data to work with for future optimization...

I just don't see the practicality in this specific functionality that they're rolling out -- sure, it's neat, and I'm sure many of us would love to show it off to our friends for the wow factor.

But right now, you pull in the driveway, and tell your Tesla to park in the garage. It opens the garage & parks. Now what? You've got to follow the car into the garage & plug it in to your wall-attached charging cord.

Same thing when you leave the next day -- you've got to unplug the cord before you summon it to the driveway ~20 feet away...

Neat for sure, though. ;-)

They're also working on an automatic charger snake-bot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI

Hence the snakebot:

https://my.teslamotors.com/sv_SE/forum/forums/snakebot-autom...

'Without the snakebot, you can still summon your car from garage but it has to be unattached, unplugged.

With the snakebot, it will disconnect the charging cable automatically for you when you summon your car.'

> I just don't see the practicality in this specific functionality that they're rolling out

Not all of us live in mansions. My garage will barely fit the S or X. Not having to squeeze in there and get into the car in the driveway is a huge win.

The article states that it will soon be able to come pick you up from long distances and even stop and charge itself. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have to do that stuff.

Is this the first car that will now drive itself, however small a distance, without anyone sitting in the driver's seat?

What's what the OP says.

Well, via software. There have certainly been remote-controlled cars in the past.

No. I believe the new 7 series does the same thing.

Now we just need those automated snake arm chargers [1] or giant floor induction charging.

[1] http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/211865-check-out-this-sca...

I wonder how city congestion will be affected by thousands of empty cars driving around a few years from now.

A self-driving Uber-style limo/rideshare service might make sense and may result into less cars overall.

It would certainly free up a lot of land which is currently being wasted on parking lots. I wonder if there will be a time when most people don't own a car, but instead they use a rideshare like that.

Self-driving Ubers need cleaning and ensuring safety. Without cabbies to take care of that, I think that's a major reason owning a car still has value - it's a private space.

I wonder how long before New York City walkers realize they can safely cross in front of Teslas without worrying about getting hit.

Do you think dash cams + automated flagging of such incidents by the software could counter that?

Counter what? Should people not be allowed to cross the road?!

No, not that. The comment I replied to was implying that once people figured out car AI wouldn't kill them, they'd just halt cars for the fun of it or when they felt like it.

With a fallible human behind the wheel, you can't take chances like that.

(To be clear, I don't drive and am for pedestrianism. But I can see how it would be a problem if people can simply block autonomous cars. I'm also worried that a heavy handed response to that problem could harm pedestrianism.)

I've been wondering, when we get to the point that there is a mix of autonomous and human driven vehicles on the road, if we will see the human driven vehicles start to game the autonomous vehicles' collision avoidance systems? For example, the main reason not to cut off traffic is because the driver might not react quickly enough (ok, the other reason is no to be a jerk.) but with autonomous vehicles, human driver may be able to become significantly more aggressive, knowing that the autonomous vehicle will get out of the way.

(As a side note, I wonder how autonomous vehicles will handle lane splitting motorcycles? They get pretty close to the cars to either side.)

The autonomous car could automatically send the video and sensor data of illegal human driving behavior to the appropriate authorities. It seems pretty stupid to drive dangerously around a car that's recording so much information.

Google has a patent on algorithms for detecting dangerous drivers:

https://www.google.com/patents/US20110202305

Free idea I've kicked around: Give away free dashcams to drivers that upload their footage nightly to Google (with user's permission), have Google process the data to find high risk drivers, sell that information to their insurance companies to properly re-price their premiums. Take a cut, share said cut with dashcam drivers.

Drive the price of human driven vehicle insurance high enough to where self-driving vehicles are the logical choice.

For drunk driving and near accidents? Sure. For tattletale speeding tickets? No thank you.

Did you just suggest that these drones should be programmed to record our activities and report them to the police?

It would actually reduce congestion. When I had a car here in SF, in many cases, I spent more time driving around looking for parking than actually driving to and from my destination. This would prevent that since the car could drop you off and head back home or to a nearby area with more readily available parking.

Take this idea to the next level, and you can have services like Uber that are run completely by algorithm. These cars can be parked all around the city and as soon as someone requests an Uber, the car wakes up and picks the customer up, after dropoff it finds the most efficient place to repark itself and wait for the next customer. This would significantly reduce congestion in big cities.

How the heck would the car know where there is more readily available parking? It seems like parking is a whole other area of work that needs to be done. It would need to: - Know local parking lots - Know that if a sign says "full" it can't go in - If it's not full, somehow grab the ticket out of the machine - Know the difference between parallel parking and other types - Know if a meter is expired - Pay for a meter if it is, or not if it isn't - Tell how much time is left on a meter - Be able to read parking restriction signs (street sweeping, restricted time ranges) - Etc. etc.

Edit: tried hard to get the above to output as a bullet list, couldn't get it to work.

Cloud parking. If a car spots a parking spot (cities could encode these in Google Maps, too, for example) which is free, it notifies the cloud.

Cities may also take advantage of already ubiquitous CCTVs and optical recognition software to provide parking info.

parking garages/lots would be incentivized to work with manufacturers to come up with automated ways to check in and out because it directly leads to more revenue for them (and less hassle with accidents I'd bet)

Just availability is already available and popular in some cities, Seattle for instance http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/epark/default.htm

I think you're vastly overstating the complexity of figuring if a parking spot is available and paying for it.

a. You can use parking / traffic data to find neighborhoods most likely to have available street parking and look for parking there. As for solving the problem of when you're allowed to park somewhere, this is already being worked on [0][1] and I would put money on it being ready before autonomous cars.

b. Use parking garage app to find the best balance between distance and price of parking for the time needed. As far as determining if the garage is full, many garages have sensors now that count how many open spaces there are. It would not be stretch to assume that by the time autonomous cars are ready, this data will be available within the parking apps.

c. One of the cool things about having a computer make these decisions is that it can factor in a limitless amount of data to make the most efficient decision. Kind of how Google Maps gives you different transportation options when you ask for directions, you could do the same with parking. The car can ask you, which of these options would you like:

1. Drive 30 minutes in this direction and you can park for free. Cost for power to drive there: $1.12 - Time to summon: 30 minutes - Cost for parking: $0.00

2. Park in a parking lot around the block: Cost for power to drive there: $0.08 - Time to summon: 5 minutes - Cost for parking: $10.00

etc...

I agree with you though, parking is a huge issue in the city and I really can't believe it hasn't been fixed yet. We are getting there, but very slowly.

[0] http://sfpark.org [1] http://spotangels.com

I've read estimates that 30% of city traffic is made up of people looking for a parking spot close to their destination.

Really cool, but it's worrying the increasing capabilities that bad actors will have at their disposal if they get access to your mobile device... Why not use a single purpose device instead of a phone for this?

1. I don't want a single purpose device for every connected device I own.

2. I don't want my phone to be the single point of failure for every connected device I own.

Both alternatives get worse as you connect more devices. Somebody will need to think of a high-level solution to this problem (most likely Apple) for more granular access control of connected devices from your phone.

I could see having multiple single-use devices becoming a problem though too, and it doesn't seem to solve the "access" problem; the single purpose device could have its own vulnerabilities (hardware or software), so it just moves the target from one device to another, while (admittedly) limiting its scope of impact.

I'm also not sure the market would like it either, considering that the smartphone has wholly replaced many single-purpose devices (camera, GPS, calculator, etc.). The convenience factor may outweigh the security factor for many.

Just the ability to have it pull out or back into tight parking spaces is worthy all by itself.

I thought it was still a far-fetched concept when I saw this video 3 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt20UnkmkLI

am I the only one thinking about the old tv show "Knight Rider" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083437/

You are not alone. Was about time that somebody invented a legitimate reason to wear a smartwatch.

I feel like Elon is Amazing. He is taking our boyhood dream (at least mine) and making them a reality. How many of us wanted a Knight Rider car and to goto space and enjoyed racing our matchbox cars as fast as possible.

Now, if he would just answer my e-mail on if he is planning a USS Enterprise style existence for us. I'd volunteer to empty the trash just to be on board.

If/When Tesla achieves a full self-driving car, I feel like the Uber's of the world would go bankrupt (perhaps a little drastic). Tesla can just as easily cut out the middleman and create the complete experience.

Can anyone speak to the limitations for the tight spot the car will park into? Could there be a situation where the spot is tight enough that you can't get into the driver's seat?

And are people really going to park their $130k car in a spot that tight?

Wouldn't this be true of all self-driving cars eventually? I mean, no one has fully contemplated all of the possible applications of self-driving cars, this being one of them.

Wait until someone else will summon your Tesla from their phone!

How strong will the security be for this?

The iPhone and Android app has been out for many years. It currently relies on a password (1FA), but I haven't heard about it being exploited.

Accio Tesla

What happens when this runs over somebody's dog? (Or worse...) Sure, they have safeguards in place, but systems fail. It's like they have never heard the term "liability" before.

Their entire job, every business hour, is dedicated to pushing the future of driverless cars. Do you seriously think they've not considered liability implications and safeguards, something you commented on in your spare time? Do you honestly think that they haven't considered these sorts of things in great depth?

The fact that no startup has failed, ever, clearly illustrates your point that thinking about things in great depth, during every business hour, is a perfect safeguard against failure. For my part, I think the hype surrounding driverless cars has gotten way ahead of where the technology actually is. Also, there is a strong undercurrent of "laws which interfere with my product launch are stupid" (cf. Uber, AirBnb) suffusing the valley, and this move by Tesla definitely has an element of that.

You've missed my point. I'm pitting their vast team of dedicated professionals against you as an armchair pundit who doesn't think they've considered liability or accidents.

Drivers fail, too. Automated driving doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be safer than people.

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