Your Tesla Can't See Ghosts, It Just Doesn't Recognize Tomb Stones

Your Tesla can do a lot of stuff these days: it can play games, work as a karaoke machine on wheels and, if it's a Cybertruck, let everyone around know that you're fine with whatever company boss Elon Musk is saying this week. One thing a Tesla definitely can't do, however, is spot ghosts.

Tesla owners around the world claim that their cars have picked up phantoms around them when they drive around town. Reports shared across social media show figures popping up on the dashboard in Tesla cars, which would normally show obstacles and hazards around the car. However, the people displayed on the dash aren't always real.

The phantom figures popping up on the dash led some owners to claim that their cars could see ghosts on the paths around them, reports Snopes. That's not the case, as I'm sure you're shocked to hear, and instead the spooky specters are merely a result of Tesla's camera systems having several flaws.

Whenever a Tesla drives around town, the car scans the area around it with a whole suite of cameras festooned in all manner of body panels. The cameras are there to spot hazards in the road around the car, and project those onto the screen so the driver is even more aware of their surroundings.

These cameras can't see ghosts, mostly because ghosts don't exist, but also because the figures that pop up on Tesla dashes are actually just the system getting confused by various objects around the car, as Snopes explains:

Collision avoidance systems use sensors and cameras to determine obstacles surrounding a vehicle, which are then relayed to the viewscreen inside the vehicle. This information is shown to the driver in representations of items but not actual live video footage.

For example, a tombstone in a cemetery might be interpreted by the system as a person who is not present – or a "ghost."

It sounds, then, like the ghosts some drivers are reporting are merely a case of mistaken identity, with people-sized objects being registered by the cars as actual people. It's a bit like how the cars also struggle with flashing emergency lights, which previously led to crashes between Teslas running "Full-Self Driving" and first responders.

To put it bluntly, no they aren't. The results appear to have been spotted by a small but vocal group of Tesla owners. In fact, to try and get to the bottom of the spooky scenes Snopes sent a Tesla driver out to drive through a graveyard to see if it would spot any ghosts.

Tesla owner Brandon Baxley drove his car through a cemetery in Long Beach, California, to see if it would pick anything up. Over the course of a two-minute drive, Snopes claims that "the detection system did not pick up any pedestrians," visible or otherwise.

Whether they're seen by one driver or a hundred Tesla owners, the phantom figures on Tesla dashes show of the shortcomings of Tesla's reliance on cameras to monitor the streets around its cars. The decision to cut tech like lidar was criticized by other automakers, who warn that relying on visual metrics alone can lead to discrepancies and issues with autonomous driving tech.

Personally, I'd rather my car could pick up the very real danger of a rail crossing or parked police car, rather than the fictitious threat posed by a ghost, but I guess that's just one of the reasons I won't be buying a Tesla anytime soon.