With software update 2024.26, Tesla introduced Parental Controls, a long-awaited feature designed to give parents greater peace of mind while their teens are on the road.
This addition reinforces Tesla’s reputation for safety, offering more controls and monitoring for young drivers. Let’s explore what Parental Controls can do and how to enable them.
What They Do
Tesla’s Parental Controls lets you set restrictions in the vehicle, creating a safer driving experience—especially for young drivers. These controls not only limit certain vehicle functions but also keep parents or owners informed about the vehicle’s location and usage in real-time.
There are four main features of Parental Controls, including reduced speed and acceleration, enforced safety features, and late-night driving alerts. Each of these main features can be turned on or off individually.
Reduced Speed & Acceleration
The standout feature of Tesla’s Parental Controls is the ability to set a maximum speed limit and restrict acceleration to Chill Mode.
By limiting acceleration to Chill Mode, the vehicle reduces horsepower and torque output, making it an excellent safeguard for young or inexperienced drivers.
For Maximum Speed, you can set a limit starting from 50 mph (80 km/h)and up. However, keep in mind that certain driving situations, such as merging onto a highway or passing another vehicle, may require a temporary higher speed.
Additionally, performance-related features are restricted for Parental Control profiles:
• Track Mode is disabled on Performance models or any vehicle that supports it—so no late-night donuts in the parking lot.
• Launch Mode, which is only available on Plaid models is also greyed out, preventing high-powered acceleration.
Enforce Safety Features
Parental controls are enabled in this vehicle, enforcing certain safety features
Not a Tesla App
Tesla’s Parental Controls also enforce key safety features, ensuring they remain active while Parental Controls are enabled. These features include:
Speed Limit Warning
The speed limit warning warns the driver when they go 5 mph (8 kp/h) above the speed limit and can not be adjusted. Audio and visual alerts are enforced.
While most of these safety features should always be enabled for any driver, Tesla allows them to be turned off manually. However, Parental Controls lock these settings, preventing accidental or intentional deactivation.
Night Driving Alert
Parental Controls also allow you to set a curfew, allowing you to be notified if a restricted driver uses the vehicle late at night. Curfew hours are set between 11 pm and 4 am and can not be changed. You’ll receive a Tesla appnotification anytime the car is driven between these hours.
How to Enable Parental Controls
Not a Tesla App
Activating Parental Controls is simple and can be done either in-vehicle or through the Tesla app, making it easy to manage restrictions anytime, anywhere.
• In-Vehicle: Go to Vehicle Settings > Safety, then scroll down to Parental Controls and choose Enable. You can also enable parental controls by tapping on the profile icon at the top of the screen and choosing Parental Controls.
• In the Tesla App: Navigate to Security & Safety to access Parental Controls.
After enabling Parental Controls, you’ll be asked to enter a four-digit code that will be required when turning it off.
How to Turn Off Parental Controls
Parental Controls apply to the entire vehicle and affect all driver profiles. If you’re switching between a driver who needs parental controls and one who doesn't, then parental controls must be enabled or disabled after each driver uses the vehicle.
To turn off parental controls, tap the Profiles icon in the status bar, then tap parental controls and enter your PIN.
How to Tell If Parental Controls Are Enabled
There are a few ways to tell if parental controls are enabled in the vehicle. The easiest way is to tap the Profile icon in the status bar. If parental controls are enabled, you’ll see “Parental Controls Enabled” at the top of the list of profiles.
Which Models Are Supported
Like most Tesla software updates, new features apply to most features. This means that parental controls are available on most Teslas, including all Model 3s, all Model Ys, Cybertrucks, and 2021+ Model S and Model X vehicles.
Future Updates
Since introducing Parental Controls in 2024, Tesla has already added additional functionality, such as requiring Park Assist Chimes, Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance, Automatic 911 Calls, and other features.
There will likely be further improvements to parental controls that will introduce additional capabilities in the future. Such features could include letting guardians customize the curfew hours and locking parental controls to specific profiles.
Parental Controls are an immensely valuable feature if you have a young driver in the house. Similar to Valet Mode, they restrict access to several features, but while Valet Mode focuses on privacy, Parental Controls focuses on safety.
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With Tesla’s first major expansion of the Robotaxi Geofence now complete and operational, they’ve been hard at work with validation in new locations - and some are quite the drive from the current Austin Geofence.
Validation fleet vehicles have been spotted operating in a wider perimeter around the city, from rural roads in the west end to the more complex area closer to the airport. Tesla mentioned during their earnings call that the Robotaxi has already completed 7,000 miles in Austin, and it will expand its area of operation to roughly 10 times what it is now. This lines up with the validation vehicles we’ve been tracking around Austin.
Based on the spread of the new sightings, the potential next geofence could cover a staggering 450 square miles - a tenfold increase from the current service area of roughly 42 square miles. You can check this out in our map below with the sightings we’re tracking.
If Tesla decides to expand into these new areas, it would represent a tenfold increase over their current geofence, matching Tesla’s statement. The new area would cover approximately 10% of the 4,500-square-mile Austin metropolitan area. If Tesla can offer Robotaxi services in that entire area, it would prove they can tackle just about any city in the United States.
From Urban Core to Rural Roads
The locations of the validation vehicles show a clear intent to move beyond the initial urban and suburban core and prepare the Robotaxi service for a much wider range of uses.
In the west, validation fleet vehicles have been spotted as far as Marble Falls - a much more rural environment that features different road types, higher speed limits, and potentially different challenges.
In the south, Tesla has been expanding towards Kyle, which is part of the growing Austin-San Antonio suburban corridor spanning Highway 35. San Antonio is only 80 miles (roughly a 90-minute drive) away, and could easily become part of the existing Robotaxi area if Tesla obtains regulatory approval there.
In the East, we haven’t spotted any new validation vehicles. This is likely because Tesla’s validation vehicles originate from Giga Texas, which is located East of Austin. We won’t really know if Tesla is expanding in this direction until they start pushing past Giga Texas and toward Houston.
Finally, there have been some validation vehicles spotted just North of the new expanded boundaries, meaning that Tesla isn’t done in that direction either. This direction consists of the largest suburban areas of Austin, which have so far not been serviced by any form of autonomous vehicle.
Rapid Scaling
This new, widespread validation effort confirms what we already know. Tesla is pushing for an intensive period of public data gathering and system testing in a new area, right before conducting geofence expansions. The sheer scale of this new validation zone tells us that Tesla isn’t taking this slowly - the next step is going to be a great leap instead, and they essentially confirmed this during this Q&A session on the recent call. The goal is clearly to bring the entire Austin Metropolitan area into the Robotaxi Network.
While the previous expansion showed off just how Tesla can scale the network, this new phase of validation testing is a demonstration of just how fast they can validate and expand their network. The move to validate across rural, suburban, and urban areas simultaneously shows their confidence in these new Robotaxi FSD builds.
Eventually, all these improvements from Robotaxi will make their way to customer FSD builds sometime in Q3 2025, so there is a lot to look forward to.
For years, the progress of Tesla’s FSD has been measured by smoother turns, better lane centering, and more confident unprotected left turns. But as the system matures, a new, more subtle form of intelligence is emerging - one that shifts its attention to the human nuances of navigating roads. A new video posted to X shows the most recent FSD build, V13.2.9, demonstrating this in a remarkable real-world scenario.
Toll Booth Magic
In the video, a Model Y running FSD pulls up to a toll booth and smoothly comes to a stop, allowing the driver to handle payment. The car waits patiently as the driver interacts with the attendant. Then, at the precise moment the toll booth operator finishes the transaction and says “Have a great day”, the vehicle starts moving, proceeding through the booth - all without any input from the driver.
If you notice, there’s no gate here at this toll booth. This interaction all happened naturally with FSD.
While the timing was perfect, the FSD wasn’t listening to the conversation for clues (maybe one day, with Grok?) The reality, as explained by Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI, is even more impressive.
It can see the transaction happening using the repeater & pillar cameras. Hence FSD proceeds on its own when the transaction is complete 😎
FSD is simply using the cameras on the side of the vehicle to watch the exchange between the driver and attendant. The neural network has been trained on enough data that it can visually recognize the conclusion of a transaction - the exchange of money or a card and the hands pulling away - and understands that this is the trigger to proceed.
The Bigger Picture
This capability is far more significant than just a simple party trick. FSD is gaining the ability to perceive and navigate a world built for humans in the most human-like fashion possible.
If FSD can learn what a completed toll transaction looks like, it’s an example of the countless other complex scenarios it’ll be able to handle in the future. This same visual understanding could be applied to navigating a fast-food drive-thru, interacting with a parking garage attendant, passing through a security checkpoint, or boarding a ferry or vehicle train — all things we thought that would come much later.
These human-focused interactions will eventually become even more useful, as FSD becomes ever more confident in responding to humans on the road, like when a police officer tells a vehicle to go a certain direction, or a construction worker flags you through a site. These are real-world events that happen every day, and it isn’t surprising to see FSD picking up on the subtleties and nuances of human interaction.
This isn’t a pre-programmed feature for a specific toll booth. It is an emergent capability of the end-to-end AI neural nets. By learning from millions of videos across billions of miles, FSD is beginning to build a true contextual understanding of the world. The best part - with a 10x context increase on its way, this understanding will grow rapidly and become far more powerful.
These small, subtle moments of intelligence are the necessary steps to a truly robust autonomous system that can handle the messy, unpredictable nature of human society.
