Elon Musk has long envisioned a world where Tesla vehicles do much more than drive from point A to B. His recent statement captures that dream vividly: “In the near future, your Tesla will drop you off at the store entrance and then go find a parking spot. When you’re ready to exit the store, just tap Summon on your phone and the car will come to you.”
That future is no longer theoretical. A recent real-world test of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Version 14.1 at a Costco parking lot has demonstrated that Tesla’s autonomous driving system is closer than ever to fulfilling this vision, even if there’s still room for refinement.
FSD V14.1 Takes on a Real-World Challenge
A Tesla with FSD V14.1 that was equipped with FSD V14.1 searched for a parking space at a busy Costco, and took 20 minutes before finding one, as captured in a video which has since spread throughout the Tesla community. The video, which is accelerated by 35x, is an indication of the car going through lines of traffic, responding to the traffic, and making its own decisions without any input.
The driver added that, in the whole session, the car swerved in front of an empty parking space, but the difficulty was not the recognition, but the plan. It did not head too much into the lot or await shoppers. Nevertheless, the system dealt with complicated, real-life situations without any difficulties, and it did not lead to any inconveniences or curious looks from other people on the streets or roads.
As the uploader summarized, “We fit in the entire time very naturally.”
In the near future, your Tesla will drop you off at the store entrance and then go find a parking spot.
When you’re ready to exit the store, just tap Summon on your phone and the car will come to you. https://t.co/7oUEk9Bb0H
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 10, 2025
Smart Navigation With Room for Growth
Although the demonstration was not perfect, it was still impressive in what it achieved. FSD V14.1 was highly aware of its situation, followed the parking-lot traffic regulations, handled tight turns, and blended perfectly with other human-operated cars.
The watchers, however, spotted instances of what they termed inept movements – that is, instances where the logic of the car went round or stalled. Such behavior is anticipated in beta software that is making any effort to understand complex human surroundings, like crowded shopping malls, where decision-making is largely dependent on prediction and intuition.
The current advancements that Tesla makes to FSD, especially those related to the neural network training and real-time understanding of the surroundings, are likely to make this process of making a decision breathtakingly better in the future.
The Bigger Picture: Everyday Autonomy
The convenience of parking is not the only reason, as discussed by Elon Musk. The vision entails a change in the way human beings associate with their cars. You could get out of your car at a store, restaurant, or even airport terminal and leave your car doing all the usual boring parking locations for you. And when you have to drive away, all it takes is a single press of your Tesla app to activate Smart Summon, and the car finds its way back to you.
This driving experience without hands-free may also reinvent not only convenience but also efficiency in urban parking. Self-driving cars would be able to use smaller spaces, decrease the amount of traffic jams caused by drivers taking up space by circling the parking lots, and even create more innovative designs of future parking buildings that would be autonomously designed.
Conclusion
Tesla FSD V14.1 is currently under supervised beta, which implies that the driver is liable at any point in time. At the same time, this real-life Costco experiment demonstrates that the company has come a long way since the inception of simple lane-keeping support to actual environmental thinking, which constitutes significant progress toward Level 4 or 5 autonomy.
Musk has suggested that additional upgrades will not only improve these behaviors but that Teslas will be able to perform entire trips, such as drop-off and pick-up, with minimal or no human supervision.
