Tesla is imposing a price hike soon for its self-driving cars. Clients still have a few more weeks to order a Tesla with the Full Self-Driving upgrade at the old price though, which is at $1,000 lower.
According to Elon Musk on his Twitter, the company decided to postpone the $1000 increase to make way for the version 10 software, which will come with the feature "smart summon" already enabled. The feature can be enabled can happen within one to two months, depending on how successful the process of early access testing would go.
The smart summon feature is a novelty. It allows users to have their Tesla cars navigate toward them automatically in the parking lot. This means no longer blindly looking for their cars when they forgot it for the nth time. This means not needing to park in front of a store, so they don't need to take a long walk back to the parking area.
The idea is that if the car owners want Tesla to meet them at the curb while on the way out, they can go into the tesla app and click on something to summon the car. Tesla will then immediately make its way to the summoner.
Musk himself said something about the feature on his Twitter, apparently excited. "Yeah, we've been working on curbs a *lot*. Concrete seams too. So glamorous," Musk tweeted.
As of now, whether Tesla can enable the feature in the timeline it provided remains unclear. The company has already made some wrong release estimates with regard this feature in the past. It can be recalled that on November 2018, Musk already claimed that the "Enhanced Summon" feature would be coming in six weeks.
Is the V10 and smart summon worth waiting for though? Some insiders said yes. According to Inside EVS, with this upgrade, the cars will now be able to recognize stop signs and traffic signs. At present, the company is merely running this feature in a shadow mode only, so that the company can still analyze different driving situations and observe what the system would do compared to what the driver is likely to pull in a real traffic situation.
Musk himself stated that with the upgrade, cars "will recognize & read all signs for FSD. Focused on traffic lights & stop signs right now. Most are very easy. Difficulty is millions of corner cases."
Another feature is added for safety. Musk confirmed with the V10 software update, Tesla can read text messages read aloud, so the user doesn't have to anymore.
