Australian-market Teslas are getting a new, more conversational voice assistant, starting from today.
Developed by xAI, which was founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2023, Grok is an AI chatbot that Tesla claims can “deliver accurate and insightful responses to questions of a wide range”. It also has multiple “personalities” that can be selected.
Officially in Beta, Grok will work with navigation commands if a Tesla is running software version 2025.44.25 or later, but it won’t allow voice commands to be used for vehicle controls such as media or climate, for which the existing voice command feature will continue to be used.
Unlike Full Self-Driving, which rolled out to vehicles running HW4 and for which HW3 owners are still waiting, Grok will first be rolled out to HW3 owners.
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Tesla is rolling Grok out in waves from today, and in the coming days it will start becoming available for HW4-equipped vehicles, too.
To be eligible for the Grok update, Teslas need to have an AMD processor and be running vehicle software version 2025.26 or later, and have either Premium Connectivity or a Wi-Fi connection.
Once a Tesla has the update applied, Grok can be enabled from the vehicle’s steering wheel.
For those concerned about data security, Tesla advises: “Interactions with Grok are securely processed by xAI in line with their privacy notice.
“Conversations remain anonymous to Tesla and are not linked to you or your vehicle,” the company says.
Grok was first rolled out to Teslas in the US in July 2025 with software version 2025.26.
When xAI announced Grok back in November 2023, it said the chatbot was “designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”
However, while it has continued to evolve, it has also generated plenty of controversy for answers it has given.
When asked today why it’s so controversial, the chatbot explained: “Grok’s lighter moderation makes it more open and ‘fun’ for some users, but it has repeatedly crossed into harmful territory (hate speech, nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes, conspiracy amplification).”
xAI issued an apology in July 2025 after the chatbot responded to user prompts with antisemitic answers, including one praising Adolf Hitler. The tech company blamed “an update to a code path upstream of the Grok bot”, which “made Grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views”.
More recently, in December 2025, the chatbot sparked controversy after users took advantage of its image generation capability to create sexually explicit deepfakes.