A video appearing to show a Tesla vehicle's collision avoidance system "seeing" people wandering around an empty cemetery gained attention online in April. The figures are seen on the viewscreen that provides details of the vehicle's surroundings. The claim is false. Collision avoidance systems are only able to provide rudimentary information on the screen and can mistake static objects for pedestrians. Also, the car featured in the video isn't a Tesla.
The , which was published on April 20 and has more than a million views, includes the caption, "Tesla radar SEEING the dead in the cemeteries like people in a park."
A voice-over on the video, which also claims the vehicle is a Tesla, links the phenomenon to the debunked COVID-19 vaccine conspiracy involving injectable electronic identification: "Is this the cov IDs on the dead bodies that didn't get cremated?"
The video cuts to a screenshot of a U.S. patent document, with overlaid text claiming Pfizer applied for the patent in 2021 "for the purpose of remote contact tracing of all vaccinated humans worldwide."
Rating: False
The video appears to have originated from China, and has been shared on Chinese social media, according to .
An earlier version of the video appeared on on April 1, with Chinese text claiming the vehicle could see people surrounding it in the cemetery through its radar. However, the post correctly identifies the automaker as Li Auto, also known as Li Xiang.
The vehicle appears to be Li Auto's L9 SUV. do not have air vents below the viewscreen, nor do they have speakers in the dashboard above the viewscreen. The viewscreen itself uses a different configuration than those found in Tesla vehicles. The features in the video do, however, match with of the L9 SUV.
Lidar limitations
In an on , Li Auto responded to the reports of their vehicles seeing "phantoms."
According to a machine translation of the report, the company says the use of lidar and visual cameras are combined, and due to limitations of sensor recognition capabilities in the current market the vehicle will display abnormally in certain scenarios.
Li Auto did not respond to a request for comment from ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø.
Lidar is an acronym for "light detection and ranging." It is a technology used for measuring relative distance. An object is targeted with a laser and the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver is measured, which determines the distance.
Previous claims of ghost-detecting cars
The claim that vehicles can see ghosts is not a new one. There have been multiple over the past few years that have circulated on social media.
In one from July 2021, a Tesla driver claims to see a ghost on a motorcycle and even people walking their dogs while driving through a cemetery with no visible pedestrians.
Collision avoidance systems can use a combination of sensors and cameras to figure out what is around the vehicle. That information is relayed to the viewscreen in the vehicle's cabin, showing representations of the data it received, but not actual photos of it. So it can easily mistake something like a static tombstone for a pedestrian.
 includes a section on its collision avoidance system that says "several factors can reduce or impair performance, causing either unnecessary, invalid, inaccurate, or missed warnings."
As a key function of the autonomous driving feature, when properly working the collision avoidance system is an important part of the vehicle's safety features. But false-positive results can create serious issues for drivers, causing in some cases the emergency vehicle breaks to be engaged. Tesla is facing a in Illinois over claims that a serious defect has caused false forward-collision alerts, posing a safety risk.
COVID-19 conspiracy
The voice-over on the viral video references another popular conspiracy theory that has already been shown to be .
The theory claims vaccine-maker Pfizer applied for a patent for the purpose of tracking all recipients of vaccines worldwide.
The narrator questions whether the sensors are picking up bodies buried with "IDs," referring to microchips or other electronic tracking devices supposedly implanted with the COVID-19 vaccination.
was applied for by two individuals who do not work for Pfizer.
The patent was for technology using Bluetooth on cellphones to track social interactions. It proposed offering vaccines to those people with the most social interactions first in the event of vaccine scarcity.
Sources
Claim can be found on Twitter (, )
Tweet with Chinese version of the video can be found (, )
Interior images of Li Auto's L9 SUV can be seen () and ()
Interior images of Tesla's Model 3 can be found ()
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