Here’s a viral TikTok video from last week of a man acting as if the cameras mounted on his Tesla allow him to see ghosts on his infotainment screen:
Happy Halloween to him, and to you. The video has been watched about 11 million times so far.
If you’re 17 and you want to scare your younger sibling this week by driving around a cemetery in your parents’ Tesla and pointing out the “ghosts” on the onscreen display, I cannot and would not stop you from doing that. I would caution you, however, that it doesn’t make sense, even according to spooky story logic. Reconstituted dead bodies? Ghouls? Skeletons? These makes sense in cemeteries. Ghosts, however, are the often vengeful spirits of the once living, and they dwell in important places from their lives, or the places where they died, such as houses, hospitals, or the sites of grisly car accidents, including… well, never mind.
Anyway, in 2021, a Tesla driver who had visited a cemetery pointed out 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 what I mean is the user posted a spooky video on TikTok and racked up 23 million views. That particular object detection system might have glitched out, but since Teslas stubbornly lack sensory equipment that can use lasers to form 3D images of their surroundings, mistaking inanimate objects for people is a very plausible error, if in fact that’s what it was.
“Collision Avoidance features cannot always detect all objects, vehicles, bikes, or pedestrians, and you may experience unnecessary, inaccurate, invalid, or missed warnings for many reasons,” the Tesla Model 3 owner’s manual says.
So the system was likely just being cautious with flawed data back in 2021. That’s a better kind of digital hallucination than the alternative: mistaking people for inanimate objects. But it’s still a false positive, which is a little troubling considering in 2021, around the time of the original “ghost” video, Tesla voluntarily recalled almost 12,000 cars because they had the potential to suddenly brake due to false positives in their object-detection system during assisted driving, or “Full Self-Driving Beta” as Tesla called it at the time.
The phenomenon came to be known by the seasonally appropriate term “phantom braking,” and was investigated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Users on the Tesla Motors Club message board claimed to have experienced phantom braking, including one who wrote “The car is frequently fooled by illusions of a threat that a human would ignore.” One example they described was the shadow of a bird flying over the road—perhaps a talking raven, but the user left out this detail.
More than four years later, the object detection system has changed. It no longer includes its ultrasonic sensors, for instance. The new system “gives Autopilot high-definition spatial positioning, longer range visibility and the ability to identify and differentiate between objects,” according to a page on the Tesla website last updated last month.
And along with those changes, we get a whole new kind of spine-tingling Tesla video. Instead of mixing up flowers and pedestrians during the day, the latest ghost-busting Tesla apparently mixes up headstones and pedestrians at night. The influencer who made the TikTok video, by the way, had attempted the same basic premise for a video earlier this Halloween season, but in the form of sponsored content advertising some Halloween decorations, which the Tesla also allegedly mistook for real people.
Gizmodo reached out to Tesla for any relevant information about changes and improvements in its object detection system, and will update if we hear back.