Videos of owners trying Tesla's new Smart Summon feature, which show Teslas autonomously driving to owners with varying degrees of success, go viral
new Smart Summon feature Fred Lambert / Electrek : Tesla owners are already doing dumb things with ‘Smart Summon’ Tweets: Daniel Tunkelang / @dtunkelang : Summoning spells are not for the faint of heart. https://www.theverge.com/... Artem Russakovskii / @artemr : I saw this coming a mile away. Tesla's self-driving ambitions are ahead of reality and its real-world implementation. Smart Summon is easily the most underbaked feature of v10 and the whole car in general. https://jalopnik.com/... Daniel Brim / @danielbrim : Cars are one of the most dangerous things people are allowed to own and I don't think we're talking enough about how irresponsible it is to release car features like they're phone software https://twitter.com/... @drinkslinger321 : Lol I can't wait till your $70k douchemobile hits my 17yr old minivan in a parking lot https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @herne : @Techmeme @andyjayhawk Or you could just WALK to your car... @chrismessina : Watching this Tesla struggle after getting summoned by its owner, I almost feel compassion for it. It's so confused and overwhelmed, like a tiny dog being yanked by its owner while a bigger dog sniffs its butt AND OMG WHY AM I SYMPATHIZING WITH A CAR https://www.youtube.com/... Gideon Rosenblatt / @gideonro : The result will be a messy scrum of “smart” and “dumb” cars interacting with each other in ways that are both hilarious and potentially dangerous — especially when the smart cars aren't as smart as advertised. https://www.theverge.com/... @verge : Tesla's Smart Summon feature is already causing chaos in parking lots across America https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Smart Summon is not Tesla's first attempt to hand customers a half-finished autonomy feature: car logs showed an owner crashed his Model S from outside the vehicle back in 2016 after triggering the original beta Summon mode. What changed with v10 is scale — the feature shipped broadly enough that owners' parking-lot mishaps became a viral genre within days.
The reaction is split along a familiar line. Electrek's Fred Lambert documents owners 'doing dumb things' with the feature, while developers like Artem Russakovskii call Smart Summon the most underbaked part of v10 — evidence for the critique later formalized by Dan O'Dowd's campaign against FSD beta and by the whistleblower leak of 100GB of FSD complaint data covering 2015–2022.
First-order effects
- Tesla owners are now operating an autonomous-driving feature in public view, and every failure clip doubles as free negative advertising for the company's core self-driving pitch.
- Prominent technical voices — Russakovskii among them — publicly label the feature unfinished, giving early shape to the safety criticism Dan O'Dowd would later amplify.
Second-order effects
- Each viral incident builds the documented incident record that critics and eventually regulators can cite, raising the reputational cost of Tesla's strategy of validating autonomy through paying customers rather than closed testing.
- Rivals pursuing driverless services under stricter testing regimes — the path Waymo took before Tesla's limited Austin robotaxi launch with safety drivers — gain a contrast argument: ship slowly without public failures versus ship fast and absorb the clips.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer-facing betas become Tesla's de facto validation pipeline — but the accumulated incident record from Summon through FSD complaints is precisely what any future regulatory review of its driverless ambitions, including the Cybercab promise, will have to reckon with.
- The episode foreshadows a structural divide in autonomous vehicles between companies that treat public roads as a test environment and those that treat them as a deployment target — with trust, not technology, as the deciding variable.
The trend: Tesla's autonomy strategy consistently ships imperfect features to customers first and refines them in public, converting every viral failure into both marketing reach and a growing safety case against it.