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Man pretends to hack Tesla to play Pokemon Go, true nerds disapprove

Published Aug 2nd, 2016 5:14PM EDT
Pokemon Go Tesla Hack
Image: PinkJava

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Hacking the touchscreen in a Tesla to play Pokemon Go would come with some obvious downsides, if you could even get it to work. The Tesla purists would scream bloody murder over desecrating Elon Musk’s design icon, traditional car enthusiasts would continue to believe the Tesla is just a faddish gadget, and the cops would probably want to have a word. Plus, it’s a lot harder to aim a camera that’s attached to a car.

So if that’s the downside, why would you possibly go to the effort of making a bad fake of a Tesla Pokemon Go hack?

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Yesterday, lifestyle site PinkJava put up a post in which one of its writers ostensibly used an Ethernet cable and a laptop to hack Pokemon Go onto a Tesla’s built-in console. The post was notably short on details, but it did include one GIF of a Pokemon being captured.

Of course, it was all a fake. There’s a decent chance that the console could be hacked to display video-out from an Android phone, and a tiny (tiny!) chance that you could mirror the Tesla’s screen, touch sensor and all, onto an Android phone. But without tens of thousands of lines of code, there’s no way to actually get the game running natively on a Tesla.

As you might imagine, this didn’t go down well with Tesla fans on Facebook or Reddit, who spotted the fake almost instantly. It only took two hours before PinkJava owned up to the fakery. Apparently, it was just a joke, although the line between The Onion and straight trolling seems to have been blurred here:

August 1, 2016, 9:50 am Editors Note: This was an experiment to see if we could start a discussion about a story’s validity. Writing in the style of  The Onion, we left a few clues along the way that this was a parody. Although we would love to play Pokemon GO with a Tesla, sadly, we cannot.

Chris Mills
Chris Mills News Editor

Chris Mills has been a news editor and writer for over 15 years, starting at Future Publishing, Gawker Media, and then BGR. He studied at McGill University in Quebec, Canada.