Tesla's Actually Smart Summon has been crippled in Europe since the day it arrived. The car will creep to you across a car park, but only if you are standing within six metres of it — close enough that walking would usually have been quicker. That limit is not Tesla's. It is written into UN Regulation No. 79, and the body that wrote it has now proposed changing it.
What the rule says today, and what the amendment proposes
Regulation No. 79 governs steering equipment, and its Remote Control Parking (RCP) clause is blunt: "The specified maximum RCP operating range shall not exceed 6 m." Every carmaker selling a remote-parking feature in a UNECE market builds to that number.
The proposed amendment raises the ceiling to 10 metres as standard, and to 15 metres where the vehicle stays within the driver's direct line of sight. UNECE's reasoning is that at 15 metres the car is "still reasonably within sight", which is the safety principle the six-metre figure was a crude proxy for. The proposal also argues the longer distance reduces the blind area behind the vehicle and makes it easier, not harder, for the driver to watch what the car is doing.
The push came from industry rather than from a regulator acting alone: OICA, which represents carmakers, and CLEPA, which represents suppliers, asked the UN working party responsible for these rules to lift the ceiling.
The gap this would close
| Europe today | Europe if adopted | North America | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maximum operating range | 6 m | 10 m, or 15 m in line of sight | 65 m |
| Maximum distance moved | — | — | 145 m |
| Maximum speed | walking pace, now 13 km/h | unchanged by this proposal | 13 km/h |
Even at 15 metres, Europe would still be at less than a quarter of the North American figure. The gap narrows from unusable to merely restrictive.
Why the speed already moved and the range did not
The two limits come from different places, which is why one changed this month and the other did not. Smart Summon's maximum speed rose to 8 mph — 13 km/h — in FSD v14.3.9, which also unified the driving model across Summon, FSD and Robotaxi. That was Tesla's own software decision.
Range is a type-approval parameter. Tesla capped it at six metres when it launched Actually Smart Summon in Europe in update 2024.44.3, because shipping anything longer would have put the feature outside the regulation. No amount of neural-network improvement moves that number; only the regulation does.
What a European owner should actually expect
Nothing yet. This is a proposal, not an adopted amendment. UNECE has published no adoption date and no date for the change to take effect, and a proposal at this stage can be revised or dropped.
There is also a sequencing problem worth naming. European cars have been running a branch behind North America — the EU fleet was on 2026.27.200 with FSD 14.2.2.6 while North America moved on — and FSD (Supervised) itself is still only approved in six European countries. A regulator lifting a cap is not the same as the feature reaching cars.
What would be different this time is the delivery. If the amendment is adopted, the change is a number in software, not new hardware, and it arrives the way Tesla changes any other parameter: over the air, to cars already on the road.