‘If I slow down’: Man drives through empty woods at sunset. His dashboard shows people surrounding the truck but no one is there

A Rivian R1T owner got creeped out while driving through dark woods at sunset. His truck’s dashboard showed multiple people walking around his vehicle. The weird part? No one was actually there. Dominic Armand posted a video on TikTok showing what happened, and it quickly went viral. People started talking about the problems with car safety systems that are supposed to help drivers.

In the TikTok video, Armand drives slowly between trees as the sun starts to set. The screen above his steering wheel shows blue human shapes walking around his car. But when he points his camera at the road and out his windows, the forest is totally empty. “Just going through the dark woods and everything, right? About to be sunset. Spooky thing, though. My truck is saying there’s people around me,” he says in the clip.

As Armand keeps driving, more figures show up on his dashboard. He shows how these fake people seem to follow his truck. “My truck says people. Watch, if I slow down, they’ll catch up. See? Right next to my,” he says before quickly pointing his camera out the driver’s side window. There’s still no one there. Another invisible figure then pops up walking toward the side of the truck before the video ends.

So what’s actually happening here?

This isn’t the first time car safety tech has spotted invisible people. Tesla drivers have seen the same thing happen, especially when driving through cemeteries. A report from the University of Nebraska Medical Center says Tesla drivers near the Arnold Estate, which inspired the movie The Conjuring, saw human shapes on their dashboards while driving through a nearby cemetery.

The real answer is way less scary than it looks. These car systems use sensors, cameras, and radar to watch what’s around the vehicle. But sometimes they get things wrong and think regular objects are people. Jalopnik reports that these figures aren’t ghosts. The system just gets confused by different objects around the car. Tombstones in cemeteries, for example, can look like people to these systems because they’re about the same height as humans. In fact, Tesla recalled over 2 million cars because of safety problems with the autopilot.

In Armand’s case, the Rivian’s system probably thought trees, branches, or other tall objects in the forest were human figures. CarWale explains that this technology works by watching a vehicle’s surroundings, but lots of things can mess it up and cause wrong warnings. The Tesla Model 3 Owner’s Manual even says that its crash warning system can give false warnings or miss real dangers because of different problems.

Camera systems make these mistakes more often because they depend too much on what they see without really understanding it. Tesla’s choice to use mostly cameras instead of other tech like lidar has gotten criticism from other car makers. They warn that using only cameras can cause problems. While these fake detections might scare drivers, they show that making fully reliable self-driving car technology is still really hard.