Tesla’s Vacation Replace Lets You Put Grok in Cost of Mapping Out Instructions

Tesla drivers will quickly have the ability to flip to Grok for instructions; whether or not that’s a fallacious flip stays to be seen.

The EV maker announced its 2025 Holiday update today on Elon Musk’s X, highlighting a number of new options coming quickly to Tesla autos. Probably the most instantly eye-catching replace is a brand new “Grok with Navigation Instructions” function, which permits customers so as to add and edit navigation through voice instructions.

In a video preview accompanying the announcement, a person asks Grok for a tour of San Francisco, together with stops on the Ferry Constructing, Pier 39, and Golden Gate Park. Inside seconds, Grok responds and pulls up a route for him.

Whereas the brand new function appears helpful, the chatbot’s monitor report for errors and controversies raises critical questions relating to its performance. Final yr, Grok’s AI-generated information summaries produced a series of bizarre false stories. One claimed New York Metropolis Mayor Eric Adams despatched 1,000 NYPD officers into the subway after an earthquake to cease future earthquakes. In July, Musk stated he would “repair” the chatbot after some customers complained it was too liberal. Quickly after, Grok began answering some questions with Nazi speaking factors and even praised Adolf Hitler. And simply final week, Grok stated it could select to kill the world’s 16 million Jews over vaporizing Musk’s mind.

So, it’s exhausting to say how properly Grok will really function a navigation information. Even conventional GPS techniques like Google Maps make errors. As only one instance, in 2019, dozens of drivers in Denver who had been on their approach to the airport adopted Google’s instructions onto a muddy dirt road and got stuck. Generally, the fallacious instructions will be fairly critical. Final yr, three males in India drove off an unfinished bridge and died after reportedly receiving the wrong directions from Google Maps.

So yeah, possibly don’t mix Grok navigation and “Full Self-Driving” this vacation season.

Extra vacation updates

Along with Grok’s new instructions function, Tesla introduced a mixture of helpful updates and a few extra lighthearted ones.

One of many extra sensible additions is a brand new live-activity Canine Mode. It lets customers monitor their pets which have been left inside a automobile with periodic snapshots, plus stay updates on the car’s inside temperature and battery stage.

Tesla can also be rolling out a festive Santa Mode. It turns the digital visualization of the Tesla automobile on its dashboard show right into a sleigh with reindeer, Christmas timber, snowmen, and falling snow results.

As for the brand new function that can probably get probably the most use, Tesla has added a automobile chime that sounds for a number of seconds after a door closes if a cellphone secret’s left inside, or if a cellphone is left on the wi-fi charger and no passengers are detected within the car.