Tesla is now integrating Grok, the AI chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, into its latest vehicles. You see, Grok is now available to use from the touchscreen or steering wheel voice button. But if you drive an older Tesla, chances are you will not have access to it.
Grok has been active on X for a while now, known for its edgy tone and offbeat humor. Now it is showing up inside Tesla vehicles, but this version is limited and still in beta. It does not handle driving commands or navigation. It is more of a conversational companion that you can talk to while sitting in traffic or cruising on the highway.
To use Grok in your car, you need a Tesla with an AMD processor, software version 2025.26, and either Premium Connectivity or a stable WiFi connection. That means plenty of existing Tesla owners are being left out, at least for now. Tesla says more vehicles might get support through future updates, but there is no promise.
The timing of this rollout is a bit awkward. Grok has been criticized for tweets that some have described as racist, and that controversy has extended to xAI and now to Tesla itself. As Grok becomes more visible, so do the concerns about how its personality and content are managed. And since Elon Musk is behind both companies, those issues are becoming harder to separate.
There is also growing frustration around Tesla in general. Some customers are walking away from the brand altogether, not because of the hardware, but because of how Musk presents himself and his companies. For some buyers, it is no longer just about range or charging networks. It is about where their money is going.
That said, I do not think it is right to shame people who drive Teslas. I understand the frustration with Musk, and I get why people are fed up, but owning a Tesla does not mean you agree with every word the CEO or a chatbot says on Twitter. People buy cars for all kinds of reasons, and personal values are not always one of them.
What does sting, though, is that this Grok integration is limited to newer cars. Tesla owners who paid a premium not long ago are being left behind again. That has been a pattern with Tesla, sadly, rewarding new buyers while pushing longtime customers to upgrade for features that could probably work on existing hardware.
Right now, Grok in Tesla is more of a novelty than anything essential. It cannot do anything your current voice controls cannot already handle in a practical sense. But it is another sign of where Tesla is heading, tying its cars more closely to Musk’s other ventures. Whether that excites or repels customers is very much up in the air.
