Tesla: Grok and Banish Set to Transform Autonomous Driving

Tesla: Grok and Banish Set to Transform Autonomous Driving

Recently, Elon Musk responded to a Tesla owner who wanted to control Full Self-Driving with voice commands, similar to instructing a driver. “Tesla will roll it out in about three months,” wrote the CEO of Tesla and founder of xAI. The message he was responding to also mentioned Banish, the autonomous parking feature after dropping off passengers, a capability Tesla has been promising since 2022.

Grok has been operating in Teslas since mid-2025. Tesla and xAI are working to connect Grok to Full Self-Driving. The owner had posted on X.com that she wanted to address Grok like an Uber driver: asking it to turn right here, drop her off at the entrance, and park far away. Elon Musk responded that this would be the case in about three months. Grok has been integrated into Teslas since mid-2025. The Spring update added the hands-free activation phrase “Hey Grok” and geolocation reminders. For now, Tesla has entrusted navigation to Grok, while FSD operates on its own algorithms.

Parking is the primary reason for driver intervention with FSD. Shortly before, Elon Musk had targeted parking in another message on X. Future versions of FSD will remember each driver’s preferences rather than taking the first available spot. “Destination management is by far the main reason drivers intervene with FSD,” he wrote.

With Grok integrated into FSD, a driver could verbally request a specific spot, reverse into the driveway, or park away from other vehicles. Version v14.1 had indeed introduced arrival options, such as Supercharger, parking, street, or garage, but for now, there are no instructions for real-time pre-defined locations.

Banish, Promised Since 2022, Still Awaits

The message to which Elon Musk responded also mentioned autonomous parking after dropping off passengers. Tesla had listed this feature on its Autopilot page as early as 2022 under the name “Park Seek”: drop off passengers at the entrance, then let the car find a spot on its own. In October 2025, after a video showed an FSD circling a parking lot for twenty minutes without parking, he promised Banish “in the near future.”

Additionally, in May, Yun-Ta Tsai, a senior engineer at Tesla AI, confirmed that Tesla is extensively using Grok Build in the development of FSD and the Cybercab. He is the first engineer to publicly state this.

FSD is a level 2 supervised system, priced at $99.99 (approximately €91) per month in the United States. The Netherlands approved it in April, being the first in Europe; Denmark recently followed suit. Elon Musk did not specify whether the three-month rollout would extend to these markets, where FSD operates in a more restrictive version than in the United States.