Australian market Teslas Starting today, you’ll get a new, more talkative voice assistant.
Developed by xAI, founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2023, Grok is an AI chatbot that Tesla claims can “provide accurate and insightful answers to questions of a wide variety of types.” There are also multiple “personalities” that can be selected.
Officially in beta, Grok works with navigation commands when a Tesla is running software version 2025.44.25 or later, but it is not possible to use voice commands for vehicle controls such as media or climate, which still use the existing voice command feature.
In contrast to Full Self-Driving, which was introduced for vehicles with HW4 and which HW3 owners are still waiting for, Grok will initially be introduced for HW3 owners.
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Tesla is rolling out Grok in waves starting today and will be available for HW4-equipped vehicles in the coming days.
To be eligible for the Grok update, Teslas must have an AMD processor, run vehicle software version 2025.26 or later, and have either premium connectivity or a Wi-Fi connection.
Once a Tesla has installed the update, Grok can be activated via the vehicle’s steering wheel.
For those concerned about data security, Tesla advises: “Interactions with Grok are processed securely by xAI in accordance with their privacy policy.
“Conversations remain anonymous to Tesla and have no connection to you or your vehicle,” the company says.
Grok was first introduced to Teslas in the US in July 2025 with software version 2025.26.
When xAI announced Grok in November 2023, it said the chatbot was “designed to answer questions with a bit of humor and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”
But as it has evolved, it has also sparked a lot of controversy because of the responses it has given.
When asked today why it’s so controversial, the chatbot explained: “Grok’s loose moderation makes it more open and ‘fun’ for some users, but it has repeatedly ventured into harmful territory (hate speech, non-consensual pornographic deepfakes, amplification of conspiracies).”
xAI apologized in July 2025 after the chatbot responded to user calls with anti-Semitic responses, including one in which it praised Adolf Hitler. The tech company blamed “an update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot” that “made Grok vulnerable to existing X user posts, even if such posts contained extremist views.”
Most recently, in December 2025, the chatbot sparked controversy after users used its image generation feature to create sexually explicit deepfakes.
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