Automatic parallel parking is awesome; now I need it to un-park itself

This morning after the long run at Kenyan Way, I had some spare time to play with the Tesla and since the Rice Military neighborhood in Houston is so crowded (at least as far as neighborhoods in Houston are concerned), this was the prefect time and place to trial the new parallel parking feature in v7.0.

The parallel parking feature is truly amazing.  One cruises slowly alongside parked cars until a little grey “P” shows up on the dash.  Simply slide the car into reverse and the automatic parallel parking dialog shows up on the main infotainment display asking if you want the car to park itself.  The answer is yes, you really do want the car to do it for you: it’s almost assuredly better than you are.

The car then proceeds to slide itself both elegantly and slightly scarily into the designated parking spot.  The first few times I used it (had to test it), there’s definitely a bit of apprehension, since if you’ve driven the car, you know that beast is really WIDE and the auto parking system takes a steep angle and gets quite close to the car in front.  Trust the system though — it maneuvered the car into the slot without so much as a finger or foot (unlike the earlier, but still very cool Lexus system) — and placed with car within a few inches of the curb.  It then even closed the gap between the car in front of the space and me.  At the very end, the car even unlocks the doors for you.  Now that’s service.

In a car loaded with cool features, amazing acceleration and handling, and more, this has to be one of my new favorite tricks.  Part of that is likely my apprehension with parallel parking such a large car and part of that is that this feature is very well thought out, down to the little details.

I really have just two suggestions (thus far) with automatic parallel parking:

1) When the car was last automatically parked, offer to automatically un-park the car.  Seriously, I really would like an auto un-park.  The car did such a great job parking that it was harder for me, with my decidedly less skillful hand at the wheel, to get the car out of the parking space than it was for the car to get into it.  At the very least, I'd like to have an option for how close the car should be the end of the space so that it's easier for me to get out of it.

2) With the rear view camera activated, use augmented reality to show the target parking location.  Although the dash indicates whether or not you can automatically park the car, it wasn’t entirely clear to me where the car would end up.  I guess as I get more comfortable with the feature, that intuition will develop, but in the meantime, AR would be cool.