Tesla has pushed version 4.61.6 of its phone app, and the headline features are seasonal: a Halloween voice for the car's external speaker and a smarter way to sort the video your car records while it's playing trick-or-treat host. According to TeslaBytes, which credits Not a Tesla App for the find, the additions are not listed in Tesla's official release notes.

What's new

With Halloween Mode turned on, owners can speak through the vehicle's external speaker from the app, with a robotic "spooky" effect applied to their voice. TeslaBytes describes it as similar to the voice effect already offered for talking to people near the car through Sentry Mode. Halloween Mode itself also plays sounds and on-screen animations when visitors approach. The feature is reported to be available worldwide.

The more practical change is in the app's Dashcam Viewer. A new "Spooky" tab at the top filters clips recorded while Trick or Treat Mode was active, and each clip is now labeled either "Sentry" or "Trick or Treat."

Why owners should care

Anyone who has left a car in a driveway on Halloween knows the problem: dozens of motion-triggered recordings of kids in costumes, mixed in with whatever actually matters. Labeling the two types means that if something does happen to the car that night, you can skip straight to genuine Sentry events instead of scrubbing through every doorbell-style clip.

A few practical notes:

  • You'll need app version 4.61.6. Check your phone's app store if it hasn't updated automatically.
  • The voice feature depends on Halloween Mode being enabled in the car, and on the car having an external speaker.
  • Recording clips while parked uses some battery, as Sentry Mode always does, so keep an eye on your state of charge if the car will sit for a while.

The bigger picture

This is a small update, but it fits a pattern of Tesla shipping playful, seasonal features through its app and software, often without formal documentation, which means owners frequently learn about them from community sites first. The same weekend also brought firmware 2026.38.5, which carries the FSD v14.3 Lite build for HW3 cars that we covered earlier.

We'll update this story if Tesla publishes official release notes for 4.61.6.