Teslas summon feature calls your car from a parking space to pick you up. Its fairly slow and not without challenges, but it can be incredibly helpful for disabled people or those times when you just dont want to get soaked by a rainstorm.

But Elon Musk just hinted at something much more useful coming soon:

Reverse smart summon.

A close-up of a Tesla

Smart summon gets your car from its parking spot. Reverse smart summon drops you off where you want to go, then parks your car for you. Thats potentially extremely helpful and a massive time saver.

Weve all had the scenario: youre going somewhere for lunch, and its busy. You only have limited time, so you need to find a parking spot quickly, get in the restaurant, and get seated. But ... it takes 10 minutes to find a parking spot.

Now, potentially, you can offload that tiresome task onto your car.

Screen shot of Elon Musk's tweet about reverse smart summon.

There are a few caveats to mention, of course.

Currently, smart summon requires that you have line-of-sight of your car, and you need to continually confirm that the car is operating safely by pressing and holding a button in the Tesla app. Releasing that button stops the car. And, even with this limitation, the car isnt always perfectly aware of its circumstances.

Clearly, having to watch your car find its own parking space doesnt save you any time at all ... especially if the car is slower than you.

However, Musk says Teslas cars are getting smarter, faster: its working on a rewrite of its Autopilot software that reportedly involves significantly more AI, which will then help Teslas learn faster and become more capable. As that happens, as autonomous drivings safety record improves and as legislation catches up we likely be able to have our cars drop us off and pick us up.

And that will eventually be much more than just at a restaurant.

Eventually, your Tesla will be able to drive anywhere across the country to meet you, charging itself along the way. It will sync with your calendar to know exactly when to arrive.

But the timetable might be a little longer than we like. Musk does have a history of over-promising when it comes to timelines, so take it with a grain of salt.

That quote above is from Teslas blog in 2016.

Obviously, were not even close to that yet in 2020.

The rest is here:

Elon Musk Just Teased A New Tesla Feature Thats Way More Useful Than Smart Summon - Forbes