Apparently Some of You Need a Halloween Reminder that Teslas Can’t Detect Ghosts

Here’s a viral TikTok video from last week of a man acting as if the camera on his Tesla lets him see ghosts on his infotainment screen:

Happy Halloween to him, and to you. The video has been viewed nearly 11 million times so far.

If you’re 17 and you want to scare your little brother by driving around your parents’ Tesla graveyard this week and pointing out the “ghosts” on the onscreen display, I can’t and won’t stop you from doing it. I will warn you, however, that It doesn’t make any senseEven ghost stories are logical. Reconstructed bodies? Ghouls? Skeleton? These are understood in cemeteries. Ghosts, however, are often vengeful spirits of the once-living, and inhabit important places in their lives, or where they died, such as homes, hospitals, or the scene of horrific car accidents, in which… well, never mind.

anyway, In 2021A Tesla driver who visited a cemetery noted online that the car’s non-LIDAR object detection system seemed to mistake a graveside vase full of flowers for a pedestrian. I say they pointed out the mistake when I mean the user posted a spooky video on TikTok and got 23 million views. That particular object detection system may glitch out, but from Teslas stubborn Lacking sensitive equipment that can use lasers to create 3D images of their surroundings, it is a very plausible error for humans to mistake inanimate objects, if that was indeed the case.

“Collision avoidance features may not always detect all objects, vehicles, bikes, or pedestrians, and you may experience unnecessary, inaccurate, invalid, or missed warnings for many reasons,” says the Tesla Model 3 owner’s manual.

So the system was probably alerted to faulty data in 2021. It’s a better kind of digital hallucination than the alternative: mistaking people for inanimate objects. But that’s still a false positive, which is a bit troubling considering in 2021, during the original “Ghost” video, Tesla voluntarily recalled about 12,000 cars because they were prone to sudden braking. false positives in their object-detection systems during assisted driving, Or “full self-driving beta” as Tesla called it at the time.

The phenomenon was and is known by the seasonally appropriate term “phantom breaking”. investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Users on the Tesla Motors Club message board claimed There are experiences with phantom braking, of which one wrote that “the car is often fooled by the illusion of a threat that a human would ignore.” One example they describe is the shadow of a bird flying over the road—perhaps a talking raven, but the user omitted this detail.

More than four years later, the object detection system has changed. it is Its ultrasonic sensor is no longer includedFor example. The new system “offers autopilot high-definition spatial positioning, long-range visibility, and the ability to detect and distinguish between objects.” page on the Tesla website Last updated last month.

And with those changes, we get a whole new kind of spine-tingling Tesla video. Instead of mixing flowers and pedestrians during the day, the latest ghostbuster Tesla apparently mixes headstones and pedestrians at night. The influencer who created the TikTok video tried the same basic premise for a video earlier this Halloween season, but in the form of sponsored content advertising some Halloween decorations, which Tesla also False for supposedly real people.

Gizmodo has reached out to Tesla for any relevant information about changes and improvements to its object detection system, and will update when we hear back.