The 2025 Holiday Update included big headline features such as Grok with Navigation Commands, Paint Shop, Tesla Photobooth, and more, but it also placed a huge focus on Tesla’s Dashcam Viewer.
The Dashcam Viewer saw a new UI for HW3 vehicles, several undocumented features, and vehicle telemetry baked into every clip.
Undocumented Features
One of the undocumented features included the ability to view the amount of storage space available on your USB drive. You could finally see the amount of free space available without removing the USB drive and plugging it into your computer. Furthermore, you can tap the information (i) icon and see which features are consuming the most space, such as Dashcam, Sentry Mode, or USB music.
Another undocumented feature is just as useful. The Dashcam Viewer now lets you filter Sentry Mode clips by type, letting you easily find videos that were triggered by someone touching the vehicle’s door handles, a manual save, or by honking the horn.
Zoom and Pan Video
However, the latest undocumented feature found is just as useful. For owners of AMD Ryzen vehicles, you can now pinch-to-zoom in the Dashcam Viewer to zoom in on areas of the video.
Before this update, if you needed to see a specific detail in a video, such as a license plate or face in the distance, you were out of luck.
You would have to remove your glovebox USB and take it to a computer, where you could then zoom in on the video. Now you can easily zoom in on the video, just like on a phone. You also pan around the video while zoomed in, letting you see any part of the zoomed-in video. Zooming works on all camera views, including the grid view.
It all works naturally and smoothly, but unfortunately, Intel Atom cars are not receiving the feature at this point.
Tesla cooked with the latest dashcam viewer! I love how you can zoom in. pic.twitter.com/1ULTTPlDtD
— Gareth Blake Hall (@gbhall) January 1, 2026
AMD Ryzen Exclusive
Currently, this feature appears to be restricted to vehicles with the current generation AMD Ryzen hardware. While Tesla didn’t specify anything in the release notes, there are likely some technical reasons behind this.
The camera sensors capture much fewer pixels on HW3, about a quarter of the number of pixels available on HW4. There simply isn’t much to zoom in on for HW3 vehicles, as most of the pixels are already shown on screen. However, Tesla is making the feature available on all AMD Ryzen vehicles, even those with HW3.
Update: We initially reported this feature was limited to HW4 vehicles, but vehicles with AMD and HW3 are also receiving the feature.
Practical Benefit
This is more than just some simple UI polish. Having pinch-to-zoom helps quite a bit, as Tesla’s fish-eye lenses on the various vehicle cameras tend to push objects away from the viewer on-screen, making them appear smaller than they actually are.
This feature should allow owners to identify license plates or other identifying details when needed — and in a much simpler fashion than everyone is used to.
