iPhone Smart Summon bug: phone shows “more than 6m away” while I’m touching the car. 2+ years, no fix. Got a real solution?
Setup: 2022 Model 3 LR (USS), iPhone 14 Pro Max, iOS 26.4.2, Tesla app 4.56.5-4281, EU (Italy, Iliad carrier).
What happens: I open Summon. The app tells me my phone is "more than 6 meters from the vehicle." I'm leaning against the door. The Bluetooth phone key works fine. Location services on Always + Precise Location. Background refresh on. The car shows correctly on the map. Every standard troubleshooting box is ticked.
Camera feed is a separate issue — won't load without a VPN, which I'm 90% sure is Iliad CGNAT through France colliding with Tesla's servers, not the same bug. Different problem, different post.
What Tesla has said about the GPS bug:
On the SpeakEV "Summon suddenly stopped working" thread, a user got Tesla service to admit verbally: "the iPhone Tesla app doesn't read GPS location correctly from iOS, they don't know why." That was over a year ago.
Another user on the same thread got Tesla's official line through proper service tickets: "It's a beta function, you're on your own."
Public release notes from app version 4.34 through 4.56.x (June 2024 → today): not a single mention of an iOS GPS-reading fix. They added live camera feeds, rolled out ASS for vision-only cars, added the "without continuous press" mode — nothing for the iOS bug.
Workarounds that sometimes help:
\- Open the Location tab in the app FIRST, wait for the blue dot to lock onto your position, THEN go back to Summon
\- Force-close the Tesla app and reopen every time
\- Reboot the phone (works once, breaks again after the car sleeps)
\- Older iPhones with older Tesla app versions reportedly still work fine — some users keep an old phone in the glovebox just for Summon
\- Tessie has been cited as a workaround on European forums
What doesn't help:
\- Reinstalling the app
\- Toggling location permissions on/off
\- Updating iOS, the Tesla app, or the car firmware
\- A service ticket (closed as "beta feature")
Ask:
Anyone in the EU on iPhone got Smart Summon to work reliably in 2026? If yes, what's the trick? If no, has anyone managed to push past Tesla's "it's Apple's problem" deflection and get an actual engineering response?
This is part of EAP/FSD that we paid for. In the EU it's already half-disabled — phone must stay within 6m of the car (vs 65m in the US) and Bluetooth is required. When the iOS app can't even tell I'm next to the car, what's left of the feature is unusable.