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

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

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

If you’re 17 and want to scare your younger brother this week by driving around a cemetery in your parents’ Tesla and pointing at the “ghosts” on the screen, I can’t and won’t stop you from doing so. However, I would warn you that this does not make sense, even according to the logic of a scary story. Reconstruct corpses? Ogre? Skeletons? This makes sense in cemeteries. However, ghosts are the often vengeful spirits of those who were once alive, inhabiting important places of their lives, or places where they died, such as homes, hospitals, or the sites of horrific car accidents, including… well, it doesn’t matter.

Anyway, in 2021, a Tesla driver who visited a cemetery noted online that the car’s non-LIDAR object detection system appeared to mistook a graveside vase filled with flowers for a pedestrian. I say they pointed out the error when I mean the user posted a scary video on TikTok that got 23 million views. This object detection system may have been faulty, but since Teslas sorely lack sensory equipment that can use lasers to create 3D images of their surroundings, mistaking inanimate objects for people is a very plausible mistake, if that is indeed the case.

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

So the system will likely be wary of flawed data in 2021. This is a better kind of digital hallucination than the alternative: confusing people with inanimate objects. But it’s still a false positive, which is a bit concerning considering that in 2021, around the time of the original “Ghost” video, Tesla voluntarily recalled nearly 12,000 cars because they had the ability to brake suddenly due to false positives in its object detection system during assisted driving, or the “Full Self-Driving Beta” as Tesla called it at the time.

This phenomenon became known by the seasonal 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 person who wrote, “The car is often deceived by illusions of threat that humans ignore.” One example they described was the shadow of a bird flying over the road – perhaps a talking crow, but the user ignored this detail.

More than four years later, the object detection system has changed. For example, ultrasonic sensors are no longer included. The new system “gives Autopilot high-definition spatial localization, long-range vision, and the ability to identify and differentiate objects,” according to a page on Tesla’s website that was last updated last month.

Along with these changes, we get a whole new kind of spine-tingling Tesla video. Instead of confusing flowers with pedestrians during the day, Tesla’s latest ghost-busting car appears to be confusing tombstones with pedestrians at night. Incidentally, the influencer who made 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 allegedly mistook for real people.

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