Tesla Europe announced plans to add xAI’s Grok, an AI chatbot, to its vehicle infotainment systems in the UK and eight other markets across Europe.
It remains to be seen if the addition of this technology will revitalize Europeans’ interest in buying Teslas.
Elon Musk’s automaker saw EV sales in Europe decline by 27%, according to data from ACEA (the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association). The decline for Tesla came as Europeans’ continued strong adoption of battery electric vehicles. BEVs, the only kind that Tesla makes, represented 17.4% of the market across Europe in 2025 according to ACEA. China’s BYD gained marketshare across the continent with innovative, and more affordable, EV models.
Tesla’s lack of affordable new models last year, and an ongoing consumer backlash in response to Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, and endorsements of anti-immigrant extremists including Tommy Robinson and Germany’s AfD party weighed on the appeal of the Tesla brand last year, according to Brand Finance.
Tesla is not the only automaker integrating chatbot features into its infotainment systems. For example, Volvo has announced plans to add a Google Gemini-based conversational AI assistant to its EX60 electric vehicles.
During a fourth-quarter earnings update, Tesla revealed that it had invested $2 billion into Musk’s xAI.
After that, Musk’s aerospace and defense juggernaut, SpaceX, acquired xAI in an all stock transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion.
Before those deals, xAI had merged with social network X (formerly Twitter) and its Grok product had become the subject of a myriad regulatory probes in Asia, Australia, and throughout Europe including by regulators in Ireland, the UK, France and the European Commission.
As CNBC previously reported, Grok enabled users to easily create and share deepfake explicit images based on photos or clips of real people without their consent, including deepfake images depicting child sexual abuse.
Last summer, Grok generated and spread antisemitic hate speech across social network X, and praised Adolf Hitler, drawing earlier regulatory probes by the European Commission.
A Tesla owner in Canada raised the alarm about Grok’s lack of safeguards after it was added to her vehicle. As CBC reported, her son used Grok to generate entertaining comments about soccer athletes, and Grok responded by telling the minor to send nudes.
Tesla and xAI have not said whether they can limit minors’ access to Grok in Tesla vehicles, or moderate outputs of the chatbot to be appropriate for minors by default.
Besides criticism of Grok’s lax safety guardrails, driver distractibility remains a point of concern.
Mike Nelson, who is a partner at Nelson Law and an automotive safety researcher, said his own Tesla Model Y features Grok in the U.S., and he has enjoyed using it. However, the addition of chatbot technology to vehicles’ infotainment systems, he said, introduces a new “distraction layer” for drivers.
“Research shows that even in hands-free mode, you are more distracted when you are talking on the phone and driving,” Nelson said. “Adding Grok introduces more stimuli.”
A professor of machine learning and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Rayid Ghani, told CNBC that researchers and regulators, and insurance companies especially, should hasten to conduct “practical evaluations” of chatbots.
With a lack of benchmarking and standards across the industry, he said, “We do not yet understand the information needs of drivers, how well Grok or other chatbots fulfill those needs compared to other options, and whether chatbots may change driving behavior and exactly how.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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