I see a lot of comments about safety here. Note that Tesla's Summon mode limits the car to 1MPH and 39ft of movement. It also is very sensitive to resistance, to the point that I actually had to construct ramps for my car to climb the 1-inch lip at the entrance to my garage, otherwise it would stop at that point and refuse to go further. Using this feature to kill somebody is going to take a lot of effort. There are many interesting discussions to be had here about software, UX, corporate responsibility in the face of user error with bad UX, etc., but I don't think there's much room to discuss safety here. This is a risk to property, not life.
> It also is very sensitive to resistance, to the point that I actually had to construct ramps for my car to climb the 1-inch lip at the entrance to my garage, otherwise it would stop at that point and refuse to go further.
The pictures of the car in a article linked elsewhere in this discussion (https://www.ksl.com/?sid=39727592&nid=148&title=utah-man-say...) show that the windshield was smashed. I'm finding it challenging to reconcile your personal example with the images of the smashed windshield; in my own experience, it takes some effort to break laminated safety glass. I would think (perhaps wrongly) that it would take more effort to break safety glass than would be stopped by a 1in. step.
> but I don't think there's much room to discuss safety here.
I couldn't disagree more. I don't understand why it should be possible to disable any safety interlock (at least, that's how I'm interpreting the feature description) in a consumer product, especially persistently.
> I'm finding it challenging to reconcile your personal example with the images of the smashed windshield
Really? It seems fairly obvious to me. The sensors are in the front of the car, lower down. So anything on the ground in front of the car registers as an obstacle and the car stops. Such as a small step.
The front of this trailer (they keep referring to it as the back, but it's clearly the front) was too high off the ground to register as an obstacle. You'll note that the front of the car has plenty room - there's nothing blocking it - but the windscreen doesn't!
So it needs to be fixed; you could imagine a Tesla running into, say, a small truck with timber sticking out the back when the speed was low enough that the safe distance between vehicles was small. But it hardly seems life-threatening in any way.
The lip isn't detected by the sensors. The car stops on it when the tires hit it because of the physical obstacle it presents and the extra force needed to climb it.
It's weird, usually the car actually passed over the lip with the front tires, but then stopped when the rear tires got to it. The threshold for stopping must be very close to what it actually encounters there.
Someone on Youtube had what I thought was a clever solution: a piece of trim (looked like shoe molding) to bridge the 1" step. Cheap, and they claimed 100% effective.
