Watch: Tesla’s latest Autopilot update nails perpendicular parking

For Tesla owners, this week marks a new milestone: perpendicular parking. From Tesla:

To make it easier to park in a variety of situations, Model S can now also back up into perpendicular spaces using Autopark. Drive completely past the space at no more than 10 mph until the ‘P’ appears in the instrument panel. Then use the same Autopark functions as in parallel Autopark – starting canceling, pausing, resuming, and so on.

As Vimeo user James Hansbert shows us (at about 7:06), the feature works flawlessly.

After a failed first attempt — his fault, not the car’s — the Tesla manages to pull off a three-point parking maneuver. Initially the car reverses into the space, calculates the distance between cars and obstacles, pulls forward in an attempt to straighten itself, and then pulls back into the spot dead-center.  If we’re being nitpicky, the Tesla seems to have failed at backing all the way into the space, but lacking peripheral vision in the video, we could certainly be wrong.

Tesla models equipped with second generation Autopilot hardware should soon see (if they haven’t already) a software update that brings the updated Autopark feature, along with Automatic Emergency Breaking (AEB) at full speed and an auto-adjusting Display Brightness on the in-dash control panel.