Tesla’s New Automations Feature in Action [VIDEO]

We had an early look at Tesla’s automations feature last week, and that gave us a lot of insight into what we could expect.

Now, with the feature starting to roll out in China, we’ve our first hands-on look at Tesla’s new Automations feature.

For anyone familiar with Apple Shortcuts or Android’s Tasker, Tesla’s Automations feature will give you similar abilities for your car. Tesla provides a list of triggers and actions that you can chain together, however you’d like.

Do you want Bioweapon Defense Mode to automatically turn on when the air quality is poor? Done. Or maybe you want different cabin temperatures depending on whether it’s winter or summer. All of these can be solved with Tesla’s new automations feature.

How Automations Work

Automations provide an easy-to-understand “If This, Then That” logic that lets you automate certain actions in your car based on simple events.

The real power of this feature is that you can use any combination of the system's available conditions and actions, chaining them together to create truly personalized features.

Tesla has used these types of features internally for years - like turning on the dome lights when the doors are opened, or playing a fart sound when someone sits down. Now, that power is being passed into the hands of users for the first time.

Triggers

Triggers are the start of your automation flow. You can define multiple triggers to initiate an automation, and there’s a huge list to pick from (below), whether they are vehicle-internal, such as gear changes, seat status, or door openings, or vehicle-external, such as AQI, time of day, or light level.

You can also have user-defined voice commands, which means you could automate things with your voice, just like you could using Smart Assistant actions in your Apple or Google Home.

To make things easier, Tesla categorizes triggers and actions into categories such as Time, Environment, Voice, Seats, Seatbelt, and more.

Not a Tesla App

In the Automations App, you can select multiple triggers for your Automation. Once any or all of them are met, depending on your selection, your actions will execute. You’re also not limited to a single condition or action.

Below is a table of all the available triggers in the automations feature.

Actions

Actions are the results of your automation flow. Once your trigger conditions are met, your car executes your defined action or actions. Once again, there’s a huge batch of actions, over 50 in all.

Interestingly, you can also add time delays to your actions, so that they don’t happen instantly. That means if you want your car's dome lights to flash, you can turn them on, wait a second, then turn them off.

Actions also include voice alerts, so you can have your vehicle say something when a specific action is met, like ‘welcome home,’ or ‘car shifted to reverse’ when your vehicle shifts into reverse.

As with the Triggers, Tesla has provided a search for the Actions and categorized them into similar groups. A lot of the categories are similar, but some are specific to triggers or actions, like playing music, which is only available as an action.

Enabling & Disabling Automations

The Automations app shows all automations, including defaults, in a grid view that displays up to six at a time. Inside each one, you can see a short description. One nice feature is that you can simply disable an automation without deleting it.

When an automation fires, you’ll also be shown a card in your vehicle, similar to the Camera Visibility Alerts that Tesla introduced late last year. Tapping on the card will jump you to the Automations app, where you can enable or disable the automation quickly.

Guardrails

While the new Automations feature is quite powerful, Tesla isn’t handing you the keys to the kingdom quite yet. These automations are fantastic for both power users and anyone interested in automating items in their car. They have a ton of uses, automating parts of your car, accessibility, or just for fun. However, there are some limitations.

Tesla has left out certain actions that are easy to understand why, like enabling Autopilot, but there are other limitations as well. While Autopilot or FSD is active, automations cannot be triggered.

Automations in Action

Release Date

Tesla has begun rolling out this feature in China. Given that the feature leverages China’s smart assistant, it’ll likely require adaptations before it leverages Tesla’s voice commands and/or Grok. However, like other features that were rolled out in China first, we expect this to be released to other regions in a future update.

This could arrive as early as the 2026 Spring Update, which is expected in the next couple of months. Although it’s still early, this will likely be one of the biggest features of the year.

Tesla is also rolling out the “Hey, Tesla” wake word and longer recent footage in Dashcam with this Lunar New Year update.