The upcoming update delivered to all Tesla cars sold in the EU
will definitely not be very welcome. Tesla announced to limit
some features of their autonomous driving features. Among
these is the “Summon” function which brings the car to you.

Usually the allowed distance to trigger the Summon function is about 60 metres. However in the EU you have to stand as close as 6 metres to the car.

Another limitation will be the automatic lane switching. This feature will only trigger if the road has separated directions and each side has at least two lanes. This means the feature will work in the EU only on highways as they’re the only roads that are physically separated between directions. Until today the feature would work also on regional roads with more than two lanes per direction (Bundesstrassen in Germany for example). And even in cities with main streets having two lanes per direction, this feature would’ve worked. All this will be gone now.

The next limitation that comes is the minimum radius for curves to be driven autonomously. even sharp turns were driven autonomously till now. that has an end. The speed will be dramatically limited and most likely the system will warn you to take over the steering now as the maximum steering azimuth will be limited the autopilot will be able to use.

Fast lane switching will also be limited. While the autopilot will switch almost instantly when you activate the turn signal, this is now enhanced to a waiting period of 1.5 seconds. Also a new “feature” will be that the turn assistant will wait 5 seconds before the action is cancelled. This will significantly limit autonomous driving in cities with dense traffic.

If you take your hands off the wheel while driving, the Tesla will warn you every 15 seconds. in earlier versions it was first 30 seconds then 20 seconds. If you don’t follow that instruction, the autopilot will turn off and let itself reactivate only after complete halt and “ignition”.

These changes have been maed necessary to comply with EU conformity laws and to have Tesla still sell cars in the EU. People in North America won’t face any of these limitations.

Tesla in Europe has stated that they feel sad that the EU regulation authority has set such strong limitations which limits the car’s possibilities to drive autonomously at Level 4. They will however try to convince the regulation authority to allow these features again in order to make the full potential of the car available to the customers.

Although autonomous driving is still a doubtful vision, Tesla has shown that it works and it works quite well. But with these limitations it’s simply not possible for Tesla to collect enough data to refine the autonomous driving features and make Level 4 autonomous driving in the EU possible.

This might also be a problem for other car manufacturers in the EU who also tend to go to autonomous driving or assisted-driving. Mercedes-Benz and BMW for example have plans to implement similar systems to their cars but will most likely face same limitations issued by the EU regulation authority.

So while Tesla NOA will become more advanced in autonomous driving and is already leading in assisted-driving, the EU will miss these chances to become one among the leading continents when it comes to assisted-driving/autonomous driving in general.