Tesla’s Full Self-Driving and Summon features are back in the spotlight—and not in a good way.
Let’s get into what exactly happened, why it matters, and what Elon Musk himself recently admitted about Tesla’s autonomous future.
Imagine this: you’re sitting in a parking lot, minding your own business, when suddenly—BAM—another car smacks into yours.
You look up and there’s no one in the driver’s seat of that other car.
That’s exactly what happened to a woman named Tamara Meyer in Maryland recently.
A driverless Tesla Model Y, using the Summon feature, decided it was time to “make an entrance”—right into her parked car.
Tamara says she saw an empty car just rolling straight into her vehicle.
Can you imagine the confusion and shock?
The owner of that Model Y was trying out Tesla’s Summon feature for the first time.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work as planned.
The Tesla scraped her car and “kept going after impact,” even though there was obviously an accident.
The Tesla owner, just as surprised as Tamara, said, “It’s not supposed to do this!”
And it’s not just Summon mode causing issues.
Just the other day, a viral video showed a Tesla in Full Self-Driving mode hitting a deer at full speed without slowing down or stopping.
That deer didn’t stand a chance, and it raises some pretty big questions about Tesla’s promise of “safer driving.”
Even more baffling? The Tesla owner who captured the footage said he still thinks FSD is “awesome”—he called it an edge case.
But here’s the thing: hitting a deer isn’t exactly rare.
There are over two million deer-related collisions in the US every year, so calling it an “edge case” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Oh, and let’s not forget that Tesla’s Summon feature has been causing headaches for a while now.
The News4 Team even went to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to test out the Summon feature themselves.
And guess what? The Tesla made all kinds of blunders—getting confused between cars, and even hitting a curb.
Clearly, this tech is still very much in the “beta” stage, despite being available to paying customers.
But—there’s more.
Tesla’s autopilot system has also been involved in two eerily similar crashes with motorcycles.
Both crashes are under investigation because artificial intelligence is suspected to be a link.
Both incidents happened on straight highways at night.
Tesla’s narrow forward-facing camera, with its 250-meter range, didn’t seem to identify the motorcycles.
With an estimated reaction time of around 37 seconds, the AI had ample time to respond, but it didn’t.
Instead, it seems the autopilot system simply decided, “This is not a problem”—until it very much was.
Experts believe that Tesla’s computer vision mistook the two glaring orbs of the motorcycles’ taillights as something else, potentially a distant car, causing the autopilot to ignore the imminent danger.
This brings up another issue.
In 2021, Tesla started removing the radar sensors from its vehicles, relying solely on camera-based vision.
The idea, according to Elon Musk, was that vision alone would provide better precision.
But without radar, the cars have lost an important tool for gauging distances, which may have even caused these accidents, or at least, contributed.
And while Musk claims it’s a step toward making the AI smarter, the reality is that this choice may have made Tesla’s driver-assistance features even less reliable,
especially in challenging conditions like nighttime driving.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get more absurd, Tesla decided to release the ‘Actually Smart Summon’—because apparently, the previous one wasn’t quite ‘actual’ enough.
Now, why is this important? If you don’t own a Tesla, what do you care?
Well, all these incidents point to a larger issue: is Tesla really ready for autonomous driving?
Even Elon Musk himself is starting to admit that maybe they’re not.
During a recent investor call, Musk said that the hardware in most Teslas on the road today, called HW3, might not be enough to get the cars to fully self-drive.
And that’s a big deal—especially for anyone who shelled out up to 15,000 dollars for the Full Self-Driving package, believing their car would eventually drive itself.
Fred Lambert from Electrek also weighed in on this issue—pointing out how frustrating it is that Tesla customers, who already paid for what they thought was future-proof hardware, now need upgrades to even attempt full autonomy.
Fred has been vocal about his own experience with Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD).
In a recent article, he noted how inconsistent and unpredictable the system can be,
often requiring human intervention even in relatively straightforward situations.
For Lambert, it’s been a mix of excitement and constant frustration
one moment, the car seems to navigate flawlessly, and the next, it needs immediate correction to avoid making a mistake.
This inconsistency makes it hard to trust the FSD system, especially when safety is at stake.
Here’s his conclusion:
I fear that Elon Musk’s attitude and repeated claim that FSD is incredible, combined with the fact that it’s actually getting better and his minions are raving about it, could lead to dangerous complacency.
Let’s be honest. Accidents with FSD are inevitable, but I think Tesla could do more to reduce the risk – mainly by being more realistic about what it is accomplishing here.
It is developing a really impressive vision-based ADAS system, but it is nowhere near the verge of becoming unsupervised self-driving.
Musk claims the upgrade will be free, but even he admits it’s not clear if it’s as simple as just swapping out some parts.
This means Tesla may be asking customers to stick around for yet another hardware upgrade, another promise, and probably another disappointment.
The stakes are huge here—not just for Tesla owners, but for everyone else on the road.
If these “beta” features are hitting deer, motorcycles, parking lot cars, and emergency vehicles, how can we expect them to be safe on highways or in busy neighborhoods?
And yet, Tesla continues to market these features, often with a wink and a nod to their “unfinished” state.
At the end of the day, the real question is:
Are we rushing into this whole self-driving future too quickly?
Shouldn’t safety be the number one priority, instead of trying to be the first to market these ambitious, but clearly flawed, features?
So what do you think? Is Tesla biting off more than it can chew, or is this just part of the growing pains of creating a fully autonomous vehicle?
And now, go watch this video where California police chiefs give their honest opinions on the Teslas they had to buy for their officers.