It’s that wonderful time of the year once again! Every year, Tesla releases a jam-packed Holiday Update to celebrate the season and wrap up the year with a bang (history of holiday updates).
The 2024 Holiday Update was packed with features, from a new Energy App and Precipitation Map to quality-of-life features like Arrival Energy and Nearby Parking. Just like last year, we expect this year to be chock full of fun new features and changes that people have been eagerly awaiting.
The Nice List
We’ve created a list of some items that may be included in this year’s holiday update. First up is the nice list, which is our pick of some of the features most likely to be included in this year’s holiday update.
Put on your Santa hat and let’s get right into it.
New Santa Mode
This one has a high chance of making it in this holiday’s update. Owners of the refreshed Model S and Model X have been missing the classic Santa Mode in their vehicles since delivery earlier this year. If you try to use a voice command to enable it, your vehicle notes that the feature is “Coming Soon”. Tesla recently added ambient lighting features to Santa Mode, but after we’ve all experienced Tron Mode, we realize there’s so much more that can be done — from improved animations and visuals to taking advantage of the rear screen. This one could turn out to be pretty special.
Grok Wake Word
Today, if you want to use Grok in your vehicle, you need to long-press the voice command button. If you’re changing topics or need to refresh Grok’s context window, you’ll find yourself having to do this often. Previously, Elon Musk confirmed that Grok would be getting a wake word - likely “Hey, Grok” or “Hey, Tesla” (which already works in China for the Smart Assistant).
This seems like an easy addition to port over from the existing Chinese feature, so we hope it’ll make the list as it’ll make Grok even more usable, especially for passengers in the vehicle.
Grok for Intel Vehicles
When Grok arrived, it was only made available for vehicles with AMD MCUs. Owners of older Intel vehicles were left out and still haven’t received xAI’s truth-seeking AI in their vehicles. Given that all of Grok’s processing is handled in the cloud by xAI, the only challenge here is simplifying the UI elements to run on the older Intel hardware.
It seems like this is already in progress, so we expect to hear some good news on this one.
Grok for More Regions
Grok is already in thousands of vehicles in the United States, and was most recently added to Canada in software update 2025.38. Tesla and xAI haven’t mentioned much about expanding Grok’s footprint, but we expect that as xAI and Tesla ramp up processing capacity, it’ll eventually reach Europe and Asia-Pacific markets.
Custom Wraps & License Plates
In the 2024 Holiday Update, Tesla introduced custom wraps and license plates in the visualization for the Cybertruck. This included designing your own wraps and plates, and having them show in-vehicle. It’s a lot of fun and adds a touch of customization to your vehicle, much like custom lock sounds.
Tesla has already confirmed that the feature will eventually arrive on other models, so we expect it’ll arrive with this Holiday Update - just in time to package your car up with some holiday wrapping.
More FSD Visualizations
Tesla recently added more visualizations for FSD, including a lot of new vehicles and objects. We expect that as FSD becomes more capable of recognizing unique individual objects, we’ll receive even more visualization models.
This will hopefully include models for all of Tesla’s vehicles, starting with the Cybertruck.
Lumbar Support in Driver Profiles
One of the few items that doesn’t sync with your Tesla Profile is your lumbar support settings. Those are currently kept in-vehicle, and if you share a vehicle with a family member, you’ll often find yourself adjusting it for prime comfort.
Lars Moravvy recently confirmed that Tesla is working to add Lumbar Support to driver profiles. This feature sounded like it would be challenging to add due to engineering complexities, but we imagine Tesla will work their magic and hopefully bring some back relief to drivers this holiday season.
Expanded Charging Visualizations
Tesla’s charging UI - in the vehicle and in the app is relatively simplistic. In fact, it is one of the major items that didn’t receive an overhaul in the massive 2024 Spring Update UI overhaul. This year, Tesla’s been working on just this item - and they hired a new UI engineer to take on this challenge.
We most recently received new charging visualizations that show which type of charging equipment you are connected to - whether it be a Mobile or Wall Connector, Supercharger, or third-party charger. Hopefully, we see some fancy visuals in the Charging menu soon.
Unreal Engine
We know that the 2026 Model S and Model X are running different visuals compared to the 2025 models and Greentheonly recently found out that Tesla is preparing to switch to Unreal Engine in the future.
Unreal Engine will allow Tesla to produce better visuals and improved animations. While these 2026 are maintaining the status quo in terms of models rendered, Tesla could rip off the band-aid and enable new visualizations with the holiday update.
If these end up being anything like Tron Mode, we’re in for a treat. However, keep in mind that Tron Mode was limited to AMD vehicles, so Intel users may not be able to take advantage of these new visuals.
Grok Vehicle Controls
Today, as it stands, Grok cannot control your vehicle. The next step for Grok is to give it some eyes and ears by integrating it with vehicle controls. Instead of falling back to the dated Voice Commands, you’ll be able to ask Grok to turn up your vehicle heat, turn off the wipers, or change your navigation destination to the nearest sushi joint.
This one is a bit more far-fetched, as LLMs and AI like Grok aren’t necessarily the most reliable partners, and in a vehicle, having your A/C set to full chill by accident could be distracting enough to cause a disaster. Grok will have to be closely reined in, and some safety protocols will have to be implemented for this to happen.
Boombox V2
In a code decompilation from 2023, there were nods to Boombox V2, featured as part of the Mobile App. This could bring further customization for vehicle horns, driving sounds, lock sounds, and more - all available and editable from the official Tesla App.
Imagine not needing to pull your glove box USB drive to change your lock sound, or being able to play music remotely from your vehicle. This is a feature we’d love to see improved.
Apple CarPlay Support
Most recently, Apple CarPlay has hit the news as a potential feature coming to Tesla. While there are lots of advantages to integrating CarPlay, as well as just as many disadvantages, seeing this integrated could be a big sales advantage for Tesla.
Many people swear by CarPlay and won’t buy a car without it - but there are plenty that try and get used to the Tesla UI and never go back. Perhaps CarPlay is just destined for Robotaxi integration for streaming services.
Naughty List
On our naughty list, we have some features that we’ve been waiting for, but are very unlikely to make the holiday update.
Smart Summon Improvements
Actually Smart Summon is one of the coolest, yet least reliable features on a Tesla with FSD. The number of times it actually works versus doesn’t work isn’t the greatest ratio.
In addition, Actually Smart Summon relies on an older version of the FSD stack, and doesn’t integrate the pile of improvements from FSD V13 and V14. With Robotaxi already roaming the streets of Austin and the Bay Area, we imagine Tesla’s AI teams are hard at work on a new version of this feature.
Elon has already mentioned there are improvements for the feature on the way - but we haven’t seen them quite yet.
Summon for Cybertruck
While the Cybertruck finally caught up to the rest of the fleet in FSD updates and features with FSD V14.1.7, it is still missing the two big features - dumb Summon (forward/back only) and Smart Summon.
Getting both of these features for the Holiday Update would be a fantastic bonus for owners of Tesla’s halo vehicle.
Banish and Reduced Driver Monitoring
The two absolute moonshot features for the holiday update are Banish and Reduced Driver Monitoring for FSD, as Tesla typically does not roll out any FSD-related features with the holiday update.
Banish is the opposite of Actually Smart Summon - you send your vehicle to go park itself. Elon teased this recently as a major upcoming feature for later FSD V14 builds - either V14.2 or V14.3.
Reduced Driver Monitoring was mentioned at the 2025 Shareholder Meeting, with the words “text-and-drive”. This was a feature for V14.3 and is supposed to be the culmination of Tesla’s current efforts in enabling semi-complete autonomy for owner vehicles, while they continue working on Unsupervised FSD for Robotaxi.
Other Features
As always, the final list of features in Tesla’s 2025 Holiday Update will be a surprise until we see the change logs ourselves. These are not the only features that may be included in Tesla’s holiday update. We’re sure they have some surprises up their sleeves, but these are some of the features we expect to see.
Tesla also has a habit of including a lot of undocumented features and Easter Eggs, so we’ll be on the lookout for whatever is buried under the snow.
Tesla recently rolled out update 2025.44, which is the update that the holiday features will eventually roll out on. Tesla typically releases holiday update features on xxxx.44.25, so keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.
If you’re looking for more, check out our article on the history of the holiday update and all the features Tesla included over the years.
If you’ve got some ideas on what could be in the holiday update, let us know.
