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No kidding!

The ability to use the phone or remote to move the car forward or back in a straight line is super useful and a cool, novel feature by itself. It’s also a buggy piece of shit that a few engineers could probably greatly improve in a month. Doesn’t seem like Tesla cares, it’s been stagnant for years.

Meanwhile Tesla is still charging people $10,000 for an FSD function that doesn’t exist.




> The ability to use the phone or remote to move the car forward or back in a straight line is super useful and a cool, novel feature by itself.

Is it? It’s hard to think of a situation where moving a car I’m at most a couple of hundred feet from backward or forwards in a straight line by fiddling with my phone is superior to just getting into the car and moving it myself. Maybe I’m not finding myself and my car on opposite sides of a gorge often enough?


I found it useful in a variety of circumstances.

Someone parked too close to your driver's door? Just back the car out remotely and get in.

Parallel parked, then walked away from your car and noticed you didn't leave the car behind enough space to exit without scraping your bumper? Pull it forward a little without getting back in.

Parked in your driveway and need to move it three feet so you have space to get the lawnmower out of the garage? Use the remote.

All of these use cases depend on the functionality being fast and hassle-free to use. It works that well about 60% of the time - the other 40% the phone fails to connect to the car, or seems to connect but the car inexplicably doesn't move, or gives a useless "Something went wrong" error message, etc.


Of all the scenarios you describe, they happen to me once in 5 years, even then, I can’t help but feel it’s just being lazy using a remote instead of just moving the car ?


It's not even lazy, it's just plain gimmicky. Aside from the door being blocked in scenario, it would take longer to get your phone out, open the app and tap through the interface than it would to just get in the car and move it. It's just a toy feature with very few genuinely valuable uses.


Not disputing the overall point here, but also not passing up an opportunity to bring up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvGKxDlXgvQ


8 months out of the year I either have no doors or a soft door I can remove without opening very far. Sometimes analog is the best technology.


Yeah, it’s being lazy - just like using a dishwasher, a vacuum cleaner, a microwave, a blender, a calculator. What’s your point?


Being physically lazy is the point? Your examples all describe things that help with daily routines by doing things faster, efficiently (for the users perspective) and often perform the task better.


Some people (me) have tandem parking spaces, where you have to move one car to get the other out. Super useful feature for me on a daily basis. But as stated earlier, it's buggy and frustrating to use and could be a whole lot better without much work. Tesla doesn't care about it, they are focused solely on FSD.


The charge isn't really for the FSD functionality. It's a charge to cut the line. There is a long waitlist if you don't pay for FSD.


That doesn’t appear to be true; on Tesla’s site, the delivery estimate doesn’t change if you add the FSD option. Unless you’re saying it’s an undocumented policy?


A waitlist...for a firmware update?


They're claiming that the FSD equipped Tesla waitlist is resolved before the non-FSD waitlist. It seems trivial to verify, but it is possible that FSD cars are shipped faster without It being noticed. Maybe by shipping FSD cars at something like twice the rate they are ordered.



What happens if the phone UI thread / touch screen hangs?


By default you have to continuously press a button to move the car. Also the car has cameras and ultrasonic sensors. You can set thresholds for how close you want the car to get to obstacles. I think the default is 2 feet. The car will refuse to move if it thinks it's too close to an obstacle. I think the top speed is 1 or 2 mph, and the car emits a warning sound as it moves.

I mostly use the summon feature for annoyances such as someone parking too close to me or rain causing a puddle to form around the car.




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