Watch Out: Lidar on Cars Can Damage Your Phone Camera

A now-viral video circulating on Reddit has sparked concern—and curiosity—after showing a Volvo EX90’s lidar sensor inadvertently damaging an iPhone 16 Pro Max’s telephoto camera. The clip, posted in the r/Volvo subreddit, captures the exact moment when the iPhone’s telephoto lens was exposed to the vehicle’s pulsing lidar system, causing visible sensor damage in real time.

For most people, lidar is the unsung hero of semi-autonomous driving—a near-invisible beacon that maps a car’s surroundings using bursts of infrared laser light. These pulses bounce off nearby objects to help the car understand its environment in three dimensions, all without a human ever noticing. But what our eyes can’t see, camera sensors can.

The issue lies in the very design of lidar. While the lasers used in these systems are classified as eye-safe, smartphone camera sensors—especially the tiny, high-resolution CMOS chips used in modern phones—are far more fragile than a human retina. When lidar beams are concentrated through the optics of a zoom lens, they can strike the image sensor with more intensity than it’s built to handle.

That’s precisely what happened in this case. The Reddit video shows the phone filming a Volvo EX90 equipped with lidar, with no issues—until the user zooms in. Things go south once the phone switches to its telephoto camera, which has a narrower field of view and more tightly focused optics. Bright flashes begin appearing on the screen as the sensor struggles, and soon, parts of the image become permanently distorted—classic signs of laser damage.

The visual glitches disappear when the user zooms back out and switches to the phone’s wide-angle camera. With its broader lens and shorter focal length, that module simply doesn’t concentrate the lidar’s beams similarly.

Most high-end smartphones now include multiple rear-facing cameras with different lens configurations for ultra-wide, standard, and zoom. While great for crisp detail, the telephoto modules have tighter apertures and longer focal lengths, meaning they focus incoming light more precisely onto a smaller sensor portion. Unfortunately, this makes them more vulnerable to intense light sources like laser pulses.

When a lidar beam enters such a lens, it’s channeled directly onto the sensitive pixel array of the sensor. A burst of near-infrared light at close range might not be visible to the user, but it can cause certain pixels to overheat or burn out, resulting in dead spots or permanent damage to the imaging hardware.

So, should you be worried? Not exactly—but you should be aware. While lidar won't cause your phone to explode or brick entirely, pointing a zoom lens directly at an active lidar system is now a proven way to damage your camera. It’s a rare edge case that will only become more common as lidar enters more consumer vehicles.

Volvo’s EX90 isn’t the only car with lidar on board, but this incident serves as a public service announcement for anyone hoping to snap close-up shots of futuristic tech. The best advice? Keep your zoom lens away from any roof-mounted spinning sensors—and stick to wide shots unless you want to risk turning your telephoto module into toast.

As lidar continues to roll out across the auto industry, this might just be the beginning of a new kind of “tech clash” between our phones and the cars of tomorrow.