Tesla AI day was last night and most of the event was an in-depth look at how Tesla is solving FSD and all the problems their solving and methods they're using. It definitely wasn't aimed at at the casual consumer.
There was some interesting video where they showed how the integration of all the cameras could predict where other traffic is located, and do it better than the combination of a few cameras combined with radar. We had to take their word for it that the camera integration did a better job. It did look that way on the computer views. Elon also pointed out that they use the Autopilot software not only to drive the car but to predict where the other cars on the road are likely to be in the next few seconds.
Later in the show, things got more interesting. They brought out a person dressed like a robot who danced around a bit. Elon came out again and showed a plan for a human-shaped Tesla robot. He admitted that the one that had danced around the stage wasn't the actual robot, but said that's what the Tesla robot would look like. The purpose of the robot is to perform chores that humans might find boring, repetitive, or dangerous.
Elon mentioned that Teslas are basically semi-sentient robots on wheels. He said that the human-shaped Tesla bot would come out next year. The robots will be friendly and will be able to navigate a world built for humans. They will be five feet eight inches tall and weigh 125 pounds, The face will be a computer screen. The hands will look like human hands and have five fingers. The Tesla bot will be able to walk at five miles/hour. That's faster than normal human walking speed, but most people can run faster than that.
Elon casually mentioned that most people could run away from it and most likely overpower it. He hoped it wouldn't be necessary, but, he said, “You never know.”
So then, he said that the robots would be able to shop for people, do chores around the house, and do repetitive jobs in the workplace. He admitted that having robots available to do jobs in the workplace would be a problem unless there was a universal basic income. That got a cheer from the audience. So I guess there were lots of Andrew Yang fans in the audience.
Then the question period started. The first question was asked of Musk, did he plan to make any of his software open-source? He said that creating it cost too much to just give it away, but he'd be willing to license it to other car companies.
Another interesting question was about whether audible cues would be incorporated into the FSD computer. Elon admitted that it would be important for a fully autonomous car to hear sirens from emergency vehicles, and he said that if someone was yelling at the car from the outside, a fully autonomous car should be able to understand what was being said. It'll be interesting how Tesla plans to tackle this problem for vehicles without external microphones.
Later, someone asked if FSD would work in other countries. Elon said that they were focusing first on the US, but the point was made that driving is very similar in other countries. Elon mentioned that they use training data from fifty countries and that the prime directive of FSD is, “Don't crash.” And that's true in every country. He says that right now, the car is pretty good at not crashing. Clearly, pretty good is not good enough since the drivers still need to pay attention, but the FSD is programmed to not crash into anything on the highway even if it's something it doesn't recognize like a UFO that just crashed on the highway.
I have to mention, here, an experience I had while FSD was engaged. I was driving along a road at night, and I saw a rock in the middle of the road. It was clear that the car didn't see it, and I had to quickly steer around it because it was too late to stop by the time the rock appeared in my headlights. Now I don't have the beta version of FSD, but it's clear Tesla still has some work to do here.
Later, someone asked what will happen with FSD once hardware 4 gets into production. Elon said that hardware 3 will be able to drive much better than any human driver once the software is finished. He says that hardware 4 will come out with the Cybertruck, and it will be able to drive better than hardware 3, but that doesn't mean that hardware 3 is unable to drive. He pointed out that not every regular human driver is the best driver on the road, but that doesn't mean that the regular driver isn't allowed to drive.
An amusing question got asked about whether the car could be spoofed by a picture. Elon suggested that he doesn't see many paintings of tunnels on rock walls as in Wiley E. Coyote cartoons. He mentioned that he has a T-shirt with a stop sign on the front. He says that if someone flashes a Tesla with such a T-shirt, the car will stop, but that Tesla will soon train edge cases like these and the car will learn what is a real stop sign versus a fake one.
Toward the end, someone asked whether we should worry that AI will have its own priorities that might be different from the priorities of the owners of the artificially intelligent robots. Elon said that right now, we're not anywhere near the kind of self-aware super-intelligent robots that people worry about. A car may be able to drive better than most humans. A robot may be able to do boring, repetitive or dangerous activities. That doesn't mean that cars and robots might rise up and rebel against humans. He's going to program his cars and his robots to be “Unequivocally good.”
Elon's final comment about cars was that eventually, cars will drive themselves just like elevators now drive themselves. You get in an elevator, press a button, and it takes you where you want to go. There aren't elevator operators anymore. Eventually, self-driving cars will be the norm. He says that there will still be a few gasoline cars and cars that need to be driven by a human being, just like now, there are still a few horses. But non-self-driving cars will be rare.
You can view the full Tesla AI Day event below:
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Last night on X, Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla will be expanding the service area for its Robotaxi Network pilot in Austin, Texas, this coming weekend. This is the first official confirmation we’ve had of a date for expansion, following news that Tesla is hiring more Vehicle Operators and plans to expand the Robotaxi supervisor ratio in the coming months.
This is a sign of Tesla’s confidence in the Robotaxi pilot program and its current FSD builds.
Expanding to a larger service area in Austin this weekend
The announcement confirms the sights we’ve been seeing of Tesla’s engineering validation vehicles focusing on areas outside the initial geofence. This public test shows that Tesla was likely finalizing FSD builds and gathering the necessary safety data to push the boundaries for the service, and this upcoming weekend’s expansion will be the first direct result of that work.
Given the increase in service zone size, this expansion will also likely include the addition of more vehicles to the initial Robotaxi fleet of approximately 20 vehicles. We expect the new number to be anywhere from 30-50 vehicles serving both the original and new areas, combined, based on Tesla’s previously expected rollout schedule.
What to Expect
While the exact new boundaries haven’t been released, it is almost certain that the expansion will include the South Congress Bridge and the downtown core areas of Austin. Expanding into a dense urban zone will include more complex intersections, heavy pedestrian traffic, and a unique road layout. That is a major vote of confidence for Robotaxi FSD’s capabilities.
The expansion will also help Tesla to close the service area gap with Waymo, its primary autonomous competitor in the city. This quick expansion is a sign of just how scalable Tesla’s vision-only approach is, versus Waymo’s arduous and drawn-out mapping processes.
We also expect that with this first service zone expansion, Tesla will continue to invite more people to its Robotaxi Network in the coming weeks. Tesla has already sent out various rounds of events, as they’ll need users to continue using the system. If you’re waiting for an invite, it may be time to start getting excited about the next rollout.
We’ve been hearing about Grok, xAI’s AI assistant, coming to Teslas for almost two years now, but this is finally coming to fruition soon. XAI unveiled Grok 4 last night, but the entire stream didn’t mention Teslas. However, Musk later posted on X that Grok will arrive in Tesla vehicles “by next week.”
Between leaks and the Grok mobile app, there’s a lot we already know about Grok, but there are a few missing pieces that will be cleared when it finally arrives.
Next Week, or Next Next Week?
Musk said that Grok would arrive by next week, meaning it could arrive before then. However, based on how Musk typically states Tesla timelines, there are a few things to consider that give us a better idea of what to expect.
First, whenever Musk posts a Tesla timeline on X, he typically means when it’ll be released to employees and not a public release. Expect this to be the same thing.
Tesla releases software updates to employees first for a final round of testing before starting a gradual release to the public. Sometimes issues are found, especially with FSD updates, and the update needs some fixes before being released publicly. So expect employees to get it by next week, and not necessarily normal Tesla owners.
The second part to this is that Tesla always rolls out their updates gradually, so when it does finally arrive, it’ll only be available on a small percentage of vehicles. Tesla will gradually monitor issues and logs, continuing the rollout as long as no major issues are found.
Which Software Update?
The entire Grok UI was already included in software update 2025.20, but it’s not exposed to users. Typically, a new feature like Grok requires a vehicle update to be added; however, this version may be different, as it’s locked behind a server-side configuration.
Tesla likely has the ability to enable it for all supported vehicles with a simple switch. However, we feel more confident in it being rolled out in Tesla’s next major update, which is likely to be 2025.24 or 2025.26. Rolling it out in a new update aligns with how Tesla has historically introduced features.
If they turned it on for everyone at the same time, they could be exposing everyone to potential new issues, rather than only a smaller segment of users. While Grok is now well-tested through X and the Grok app, there are several elements that are new in Teslas, likely including the ability to control various vehicle functions, such as opening the glove box or other capabilities that voice commands are currently capable of. The Grok interface in the vehicle is also entirely new and may have some bugs associated with it that will need to be addressed, especially if they impact other features.
What we can likely expect is that Tesla will make some tweaks or bug fixes to Grok with the next major update that weren’t included in update 2025.20 and they’ll begin rolling it out to employees and then customers.
Supported Vehicles
Speaking of supported vehicles, thanks to the behind-the-scenes look at Grok, we have a good idea of the vehicles that will be supported. Tesla uses the same code for most of its vehicles, but then it’s compiled for each type of hardware. However, only the needed code is compiled for each vehicle, meaning that some pieces are left out entirely. Unfortunately, Grok code is not included in Intel software builds, meaning that only AMD Ryzen-based vehicles will receive Grok, at least initially.
We’ve seen Tesla go back and add support for Intel vehicles after it initially released a feature for AMD vehicles. We saw this with the weather radar overlay and several other features in the past. However, Tesla has been developing code with web technologies lately. While this makes development easier, it just doesn’t perform as well on the slower Intel hardware, causing it to be left out. We saw this with the new Dashcam Viewer, which is entirely coded in HTML, CSS, and JS. The new viewer was available on HW3 and HW4 vehicles, but only those that included the Ryzen infotainment processor.
Grok is coming to Tesla vehicles very soon. Next week at the latest.
There’s a lot we’re expecting in Grok for Teslas. Some people will absolutely love it because it’ll completely transform their drives from a singular experience to feeling like they have a knowledgeable person sitting right next to them. Given the recent controversies surrounding Grok, some people will strongly oppose it. Hopefully, Tesla makes it easy for those users to turn off Grok.
The voice command system, which is activated through the steering wheel, is expected to be replaced with Grok. This will mean that you’ll be able to talk to your vehicle much more naturally, rather than having to remember specific syntax and commands, which should be a major improvement.
We’re personally looking forward to just being able to ask questions that pop into our heads while driving, such as What’s the date of Tesla’s next event, or How many miles away is Mars? Knowledge will be available at the touch of a finger and more accessible than ever.
Grok is also expected to support continuous conversations, meaning that you’ll be able to hold a conversation with it and go back and forth about a certain topic. While there are hints of a wake word in the code, for now, it seems like you’ll press the steering wheel button once to activate it, and then again to turn it off.
For those excited about AI and Grok, this will be one of the biggest additions to Tesla’s software in years, possibly only rivaled by the Dashcam / Sentry Mode feature and FSD Beta.
It shouldn’t be long now before we all have a chance to try it out for ourselves.
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