Tesla Holiday Update Adds Grok, In Case Your Directions Weren't Racist Enough

Happy holidays! It's time for the annual Telsa holiday update, that wonderful time of year when your high-dollar car gets a few new Easter eggs to distract you from thinking about where all those dollars went. This year's update has all the requisite camera tricks, Christmas-themed light shows, and other assorted dumb key-jingling, but for 2025 Tesla added something truly novel to its cars: Grok, the AI assistant from Tesla's sibling company xAI. 

Tesla and xAI share a CEO in Elon Musk, who's put much of his recent focus into the Grok chatbot. He's meddled with the bot's code to make it spew racist and antisemitic drivel, bring up unfounded nonsense about "white genocide" in South Africa without prompting, tell everyone that Musk himself is in better shape than star athletes and smarter than history's greats, and release the home addresses of random people to anyone who asks. Most recently, it's even solved the famous trolley problem by saying that it would rather run over nearly one billion children than hurt its dear daddy Elon. Now, you can ask that very same chatbot for directions, according to the company's announcement on don't-call-it-Twitter. Neat!

Of course, cars have long had voice-activated navigation. That's not really a novel feature here, though the video Tesla posted of its car processing a natural-language request for multiple consecutive destinations is likely outside the realm of what most automakers' systems can handle. The example of setting multiple destinations within a single sightseeing trip is likely not really all that useful — you're probably going to want to step out of the car anyway at each stop in order to, you know, see the sights — but the tech might have better applications for things like food or charging stops on a route. 

Grok isn't exactly known for its accuracy, so take anything it says in your car with a grain of salt. But, it's in Teslas now, so we'll likely see in the coming days and weeks whether it has any ill effects on route-planning — and whether the AI's easy-to-overcome behavior walls pose any security risk. In the meantime, maybe Tesla owners can use it this coming holiday as conversation practice, before showing up to Christmas with that one uncle you really, really wish your family would just cut out.