Lifestyle
Tesla finds ‘Summon’ as cause of Utah man’s Model S crash
A Tesla Model S drove itself into the back of a large truck, breaking the windshield. The company says the owner initiated the Summon function. The owner denies he did any such thing.
Tesla has come out to refute Jared Overton’s claim his Model S went rogue at the end of April and crashed into the back of a large truck while he was inside a store.
This digital “he said, she said” has been playing out for more than a week. with each side claiming the other is wrong. “I think it behooves them to figure out what happened, what happened with the vehicle, address it,” Jared Overton telling KPL News. “Just fix it.”
Overton says he has a witness, a worker at the store he was parked in front, but Tesla remains unconvinced. The company sent Overton a detailed analysis of what the car’s data suggests.
A letter signed by a regional service manager for Tesla says, “Tesla has reviewed the vehicle’s logs, which show that the incident occurred as a result of the driver not being properly attentive to the vehicle’s surroundings while using the Summon feature or maintaining responsibility for safely controlling the vehicle at all times.”
The Summon feature “was initiated by a double-press of the gear selector stalk button, shifting from Drive to Park and requesting Summon activation,” according to Tesla. Three seconds after the driver’s door closed, the Summon function was initiated.
Overton says he put the vehicle in park. He has no recollection of initiating the Summon feature. He says the witness and he were talking about the car for 30 seconds to a full minute before they both went into the store. When he came out a few minutes later, his Tesla had impaled itself on the back end of a the truck parked in front of it.
Source: KSL News
“Even during that 15, 20 second walk right here, we would have easily heard the impact of the vehicle into the back of the trailer,” Overton said. “They can tell me what they want to tell me with the logs, but it doesn’t change what we know happened here.”
Even if he accidentally initiated the Summon feature, the vehicle should have started to park itself while he was still standing next to it, showing it off to the worker, he says. “They’re just assuming that I sat there and watched it happen, and I was OK with that,” Overton said.
A Tesla spokesman gave a statement to KSL News Tuesday night. It did not address Overton’s statement directly, but did point out that the Summon feature is currently “in beta.”
“Safety is a top priority at Tesla, and we remain committed to ensuring our cars are among the absolute safest vehicles on today’s roads,” the statement reads. “It is paramount that our customers also exercise safe behavior when using our vehicles — including remaining alert and present when using the car’s autonomous features, which can significantly improve our customers’ overall safety as well as enhance their driving experience.”
Each Tesla owner must agree to terms displayed on their touchscreen before the feature is enabled. “This feature will park Model S while the driver is outside the vehicle,” the statement continued. “Please note that the vehicle may not detect certain obstacles, including those that are very narrow (e.g., bikes), lower than the fascia, or hanging from the ceiling.
“As such, Summon requires that you continually monitor your vehicle’s movement and surroundings while it is in progress and that you remain prepared to stop the vehicle at any time using your key fob or mobile app or by pressing any door handle. You must maintain control and responsibility for your vehicle when using this feature and should only use it on private property.”
The company statement does not directly address Overton’s concerns. “Imagine if a child was right there — I guarantee that they would be responding to this a lot differently,” Overton said. “I will not feel safe with my little boy playing in the garage or the driveway if there’s the potential for a rogue vehicle.”
ALSO SEE:
- Video shows how the Tesla Summon accident may have happened
- Testing Tesla Autopilot Summon vs Small Child (Video)
Overton’s situation highlights a potential problem for all drivers of digitally connected cars. Owners are not permitted to access data collected from their vehicles citing it as property of the manufacturer. That makes it exceedingly difficult to ever dispute what the company says it finds.
In this case, the Tesla did not fail to detect a small object. It somehow managed to ignore the back end of a rather large truck. That fact alone should motivate Tesla to take a closer look at what happened to Overton’s Tesla.
Lifestyle
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
California just gave police power to ticket driverless cars, including Tesla’s Cybercab fleet.
California DMV formally adopted new rules on April 29, 2026 that allow law enforcement to issue “notices of noncompliance”, or in other words ticket autonomous vehicle companies when their cars commit moving violations. The rules take effect July 1, 2026 and officially closes a regulatory gap that previously let driverless cars operate on public roads with nearly no traffic enforcement consequences.
Until now, state traffic laws only applied to human “drivers,” which meant that when no person was behind the wheel, police had no mechanism to issue a ticket. Officers were limited to citing driverless vehicles for parking violations only. A well-known example came in September 2025, when a San Bruno officer watched a Waymo robotaxi execute an illegal U-turn and could do nothing but notify the company.
Under the new framework, when an officer observes a violation, the autonomous vehicle company is effectively treated as the driver. Companies must report each incident to the DMV within 72 hours, or 24 hours if a collision is involved. Repeated violations can result in fleet size restrictions, operational suspensions, or full permit revocation. Local officials also gained new authority to geofence driverless vehicles out of active emergency zones within two minutes and require a live emergency response line answered within 30 seconds.
Tesla Cybercab ramps Robotaxi public street testing as vehicle enters mass production queue
California’s new enforcement rules arrive at a pivotal moment for Tesla. The company is ramping Cybercab production at Giga Texas toward hundreds of units per week, targeting at least 2 million units annually at full capacity, while simultaneously pushing to expand its Robotaxi service to dozens of U.S. cities by end of 2026. Unsupervised FSD for consumer vehicles is currently targeted for Q4 2026, and when it arrives, Tesla’s fleet may not have a human to absorb legal accountability, under the July 1 rules.
Tesla has confirmed plans to expand its Robotaxi service to seven new cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas, with the service already running without safety drivers in Austin. Musk has said he expects robotaxis to cover between a quarter and half of the United States by end of year.
Elon Musk
The FCC just said ‘No’ to SpaceX for now
SpaceX is fighting the FCC for spectrum that could put satellites inside every smartphone.
SpaceX was dealt a new setback on April 23, 2006 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) after the U.S. government agency dismissed the company’s petition to access a Mobile Satellite Service spectrum that would allow direct-to-device (D2D) capabilities.
The FCC regulates communications by radio, television, wire, and cable, which also includes regulating D2D technology that lets your existing smartphone connect directly to a satellite orbiting Earth, the same way it would connect to a cell tower.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been building toward this through its Starlink Mobile service, formerly called Direct-to-Cell, in partnership with T-Mobile. The service officially launched on July 23, 2025, starting with messaging and expanding to broadband data in October of that year.
T-Mobile Starlink Pricing Announced – Early Adopters Get Exclusive Discount
It’s worth noting that SpaceX is not alone in this race. AT&T and Verizon have their own satellite texting deals with AST SpaceMobile, while Verizon separately offers free satellite texting through Skylo on newer phones.
The regulatory foundation for all of this dates to March 14, 2024, when the FCC adopted the world’s first framework for what it called Supplemental Coverage from Space, allowing satellite operators to lease spectrum from terrestrial carriers and fill gaps in their coverage. On November 26, 2024, the FCC granted SpaceX the first-ever authorization under that framework, approving its partnership with T-Mobile to provide service in specific frequency bands. SpaceX then went further, completing a roughly $17 billion acquisition of wireless spectrum from EchoStar, which gave it the ability to negotiate with global carriers more independently.
Starlink’s EchoStar spectrum deal could bring 5G coverage anywhere
This recent ruling by the FCC blocked SpaceX from going further, protecting incumbent spectrum holders like Globalstar and Iridium. But the market momentum is already in motion. As Teslarati reported, SpaceX is targeting peak speeds of 150 Mbps per user for its next generation Direct-to-Cell service, compared to roughly 4 Mbps today, which would bring satellite connectivity close to standard carrier performance.
With a reported IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation on the horizon, each spectrum fight, carrier deal, and regulatory win or loss now carries weight beyond just connectivity. SpaceX is quietly becoming the infrastructure layer underneath the phones of millions of people, and the FCC’s next move will help determine how much further that reach extends.
FCC Satellite Rule Makings can be found here.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks Tesla Roadster’s future
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Tesla Semi gets new product launch as mass manufacturing hits Plaid Mode
Tesla revises new Intervention Reporting system with Full Self-Driving
