San Francisco (AFP)

Roddie Hasan loves his Tesla, but after a fright on a parking lot he is not about to reuse the new "Smart Summon" feature, which allows you to bring your car to yourself without anyone driving.

The manufacturer of high-end electric vehicles, which has promised fully autonomous cars for 2020, offers since September the possibility, using his smartphone as a remote control, to "summon" the car that comes to its owner as driven by an invisible valet.

Roddie Hasan tested the option one night, coming out of a pizzeria. His car went out of his own place, then came slowly to him. But at the intersection in an alley of the parking lot, an SUV had to pound net to avoid the collision.

"In the end, I do not know if my car stopped alone or if it was me who stopped it, when I removed the finger of the button in the application," says the computer scientist, stating that he had not left his car with his eyes, according to the manufacturer's instructions.

"I will try again in a month or two, for now I do not want to scare other people," he adds.

The video of the incident posted on Twitter was widely commented by Tesla critics and hardcore fans of the brand, who accuse Roddie of negligence. Not to mention Internet users who do not see the need to bring his car rather than walk.

- "Practice with children" -

"When you make a product of this nature available to the public, it should work without problems," said Dan Edmunds, director of automotive testing at Edmunds.com.

"It's like using members of the public as test engineers, but for a mobile phone app, it's okay, but for a car that's going to be in the middle of other vehicles and pedestrians ... it's unimaginable for me".

Tesla did not respond to AFP's requests to comment on this.

"More than 550,000 uses of Smart Summon!" Elon Musk congratulated on Twitter on October 2, less than a week after the update.

In April the group's founding boss announced "with a high degree of certainty" the launch in 2020 of a booking platform for "+ autonomous + robot-taxis". Like Uber, but without the drivers.

The "Smart Summon" feature is a breakthrough towards the "level 5" of autonomous driving (without the presence of a human). Currently, the Tesla reach "level 4" (the car drives alone but a human is present to take the hand if necessary) - only on the highway, thanks to the "Autopilot" mode.

"This option has changed my life every day," enthuses John Stringer, president of Silicon Valley's Tesla Owners Club. "After a long day at work, I can relax in the car, instead of getting stressed out at home."

Like many other drivers, he had no problem with the Smart Summon, "practice with the kids or when it's raining and we have bags".

- uncertain horizon -

"It's quite extraordinary that the update is installed on vehicles already on the market, no other brand can do," says Xavier Mosquet, automotive specialist consulting firm BCG. But the deadline of 2020 "does not leave much time to achieve complete autonomy".

According to the analyst, the industry has become cautious, after an optimistic phase, which predicted total autonomy for ... 2019.

Major manufacturers, competing with Uber or Waymo (Alphabet / Google), have almost all driverless cars in the pipes. But the commissioning horizon has been cut back to 2022-2023 or later.

"I remain convinced that the + 5+ complete level will be very long to reach, especially in case of bad weather," Xavier Mosquet analysis.

The equipment is very expensive, and the sensors (cameras, radars, lidars ...) still struggle to provide the vehicle with reliable and useful information when the weather conditions are not optimal.

"Even when the technology is ready, there will be the issue of regulation, because we do not have a federal law on autonomous vehicles," said David Whiston, a Morningstar analyst.

Tesla's Autopilot software has been involved in several accidents. A US federal agency recently found that a driver's over-reliance on the software caused his car to be stuck in January 2018 for a stationary fire truck.

He had received numerous software alerts to put his hands back on the wheel.

© 2019 AFP