A few days ago, a site called Pink Java claimed that one of its editors, Jeff Chiarelli, managed to get his Pokemon Go game to run on his Tesla Model S, claiming that he got it to work by using his laptop and an Ethernet cable. Upon seeing the GIF, I alerted one of our editors, Robert Moore, about the absurdity of the whole thing. I thought it was ridiculous to get Pokemon Go to run in a Model S and use the car for the purposes of catching those damned pokemons. For his part, Robert took it a step further. He examined the GIF himself and immediately called hoax on the whole thing. “If you look at the GIF on pink java it looks like the camera moves when he's playing the game,” he said.

Turns out, he was right on the money. A few days after publishing the story, the editorial team of Pink Java admitted that the whole thing was hogwash and was nothing more than satire described as an “experiment to start a discussion about a story’s validity.”

While I am prepared to give Pink Java the slip because of its reason, I don’t know if the site would have admitted to it if like-minded Internet sleuths like Robert didn’t debunk the story’s claims. A reader from Electrek, according to CNET’s Andrew Krok, pointed out something similar to Robert’s observation, explaining that the screen vibrates when Chiarelli tries to capture the Pokemon.

Even Krok himself got into the case, enlisting his Carfection colleague Drew Stearne to carefully examine the GIF. According to Krok, Stearne broke the whole GIF down by frame, and found one moment where part of Chiarelli’s finger disappears entirely from the screen.

In the end, Pink Java raised up its hands and copped on the social experiment of sorts. It was a good try, and who knows what the intent of the story really was. But for those who are thinking of jacking up their Model S units to make it possible to play Pokemon Go in it, don’t even bother trying. It’s not going to happen, or at least it hasn’t happened yet.

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Why it matters

At the end of the day, the story, or whatever Pink Java wants to call it, doesn’t really tell us anything other than what the site already said. If it created that whole hoax for the sole purpose of experimenting how the industry validates a story, then it accomplished that in some regard.

But here’s the thing. I don’t think it’s responsible to take something like that into their own hands. I saw other sites report on the story a few days ago, thinking it was real. I can’t speak for their process with matters like this, but I’m sure there was at least some discussion on why those stories were written without doing the proper fact-checking procedures. It’s as if Pink Java was trying to see which sites would get lured by the bait of its fake story into reporting it as fact. I think it’s irresponsible for Pink Java to do that.

The other reason I can think of is that the site intended it to be click bait meant to drive traffic to the site. It probably didn’t think it would get busted the way it did and, when it actually happened, the site hastily came up with an excuse to get itself out of being caught writing what it described as “satire” that was intended as a social experiment when it certainly didn’t look that way when the story first came out.

My musings on this is done, as is, apparently, any hope of jacking Pokemon Go into the Tesla Model S.