Counterpoint: I like my Tesla, and I find the AI assistant diverting and useful. I have very little doubt the functionality of the limited on-board voice assistant will be merged into Grok (it's literally on the coming features).

Whether you like this or not, who cares? The pace of improvement in Tesla software compared to any other manufacturer is astonishing, and astonishingly good.

I have no love for the CEO, but my Model Y is a very interesting (and intuitive) car.

Diverting?

In Italian divertente is entertaining. Parent probably speaks a Romance language and got hit by a "false friend".

That's actually a valid (of old fashioned) usage in English too, it's just a bit weird to value in a voice assistant for your car.

I have it set to the "Gork" personality, which is occasionally correct and useful, but is very often genuinely funny. It's like a Spicoli-with-a-PhD that answers your query when it "feels like it".

I have a RULES file for my coding agent which I invoke when I get bored. It basically simulates a real office environment saying things like "while the queue is full our worker is sitting in the corner with its thumb up its ass looking at the wrong queue".

Which is hilarious, but when I'm driving on the freeway and trying to add milk to my grocery list or add a navigation stop at the hardware store (no idea if these are things you can actually do, I'm just using what feel like plausible use cases for a car voice assistant) I wouldn't want the additipnal distraction of the voice assistant being funny.

This is part of the reason why I believe cars should delegate as much software functionality to your phone as possible. Phones have good voice assistants and they will get better, same with GPS and music. Just let the phone do it. Plus, when the software is out of support you don't have to buy a new car.

What if I don't have my phone, or if someone else drives the car?

These are niche enough use cases I don't think they're worth bothering about.

I wouldn't dump millions into a custom GPS solution for that 1 time out of 1 million someone drives a car without a smartphone. Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.

If someone else drives your car they can connect their phone. Which is an improvement, because now they have THEIR music and navigation. See, it comes with personalization out of the box and automatically!

It should be impossible to drive a car without a phone?

No it should definitely be possible, I just don't think it's worth while creating a subpar and poorly-supported GPS system when phones exist. Especially when said system is forced over phones, which often happens because companies want to promote their own shit. As if their shit don't stink, when really it's the smelliest.

We don't need 1 million different applications that we have to try to integrate together. Just let me connect my messages, my GPS, my music player, even my calendar. Personally, I could give a rat's ass how fancy Tesla's interface is or GM's. It will always, always be second best to what's available on modern smartphones.

> Especially when that GPS system is guaranteed to be worse than Google maps and not as well supported.

I use my car's GPS nav over my phone's because I don't notice being appreciably worse for navigating, but I do notice the ads on Google Maps being appreciably worse than the lack of ads on my car's nav system.

Also doing nav on my phone thrashes my phone battery.

Whoa, did Tesla pull an Apple? Siri used to work okay on the iPhone, but once it got LLMed it frequently sits there indefinitely while failing to make any progress on even the simplest commands.

Apple did an even worse job than you think: they didn't even LLM Siri so I guess it just broke.

I have an older X, and I'm kind of happy that the AP and Infotainment hardware in it is largely deprecated, and they are unlikely to be able to shove Grok crap into it. It will stay largely the same for the life of the car.

Do a quick press of the voice button and the old voice control activate; if you hold it down or press too long, it uses the grok AI which can't do anything (and I never use).