Tesla Roadster
tesla.com
tesla.com
It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
It's being sold in two modes. One with cold gas (no combustion) seemingly just for extra forwards acceleration (no flying) and one with real combustion rocket engines, the latter was in the video and is "invite only".
Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
Even just the cold gas variant seems like a nightmare for production, there's a high pressure COPV in that thing and that's gonna make crashes much more.. exciting, and Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways. But very few of these are ever getting sold anyways.
Watch Ford v Ferrari for an idea of what auto companies are willing to invest for bragging rights.
The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies
SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed
Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc
These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.
I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)
Of course it’s still early days for all these companies and they’re not exactly fiscally solid, but if Tesla had not made all those cars, someone else would have.
Three sucesses.
Not so successful: Solar City, Neuralink, TBC, X.
(X exists, but before it was valued-and-bought by one of Musk's other companies, it appeared to have lost about half its value).
Richard Branson he aint.
They put out this video of a patient with ALS regaining the ability to communicate.
Hard to see that not being successful, once it passes the FDA, assuming it's real.
The main problem isn't even the tech, though the tech isn't as good as it seems either.
Their main advance hasn't been the BCI: other teams also do this, main limiting factor is product lifetime rather than electrode count (though yes their count is higher).
The surgical robot is a much more interesting thing than the BCI. But even with the robot, "interesting" rather than "amazing" because (1) what else can that robot do? (2) what does it cost to use? (3) was it reliable enough for humans, or the reason for all the animal welfare issues? (4) some other BCI teams working on delivery via blood vessel and less invasive is better.
Main thing though for any sucessful medical tech is cost. Even with FDA (or non-US equivalents, somehow I don't even know the name of my local equivalent), medical interventions are famously expensive enough in the US to bankrupt and insurance in the US is famously reluctant to pay the full costs.
And up a level, the problem with Neuralink is their output suggests a lack of care to detail, of emphasis on speed over quality, and of having inherited Musk's personal attitude problem when faced with criticism.
Hyperloop was a tech not a company and if I listed every tech he's done wrong I'd be rightly accused of misunderstanding how R&D investments are necessarily gambles.
I'm interested to meet someone online who's short both on-shore US silicon fabs and the market for humanoid robots. Can you say more about your thinking?
Musk is similar to Zuck in that they get some credit for sheer courage to turn the wheel on their massive businesses, but they also have to be right. Aside from his anticompetitive behavior, Zuck continues to miss. Musk's pattern has been that the more Musk is personally involved, the worse the outcomes. Cybertruck was his baby. Optimus is his baby.
If Tesla is doing so well as an automotive business, then why doesn't he just continue making it a great automotive business?
Maybe a mid length answer is if you agree with his assessment on say humanoid robots in terms of market and you believe they might have a geometric growth factor in production (eg robots can make more robots) then you’d want that business build out done by a team that can scale rapidly.
For fabs spacex and Tesla are significant consumers of the output- vertical integration is preferred by lots of companies.
Correct, and I think having a CEO who's totally unaccountable to a board and is temperamentally unable to focus on his core business is not good.
SpaceX and Tesla are nowhere near large enough consumers to justify vertically integrating a fab. The demand is predicated on Optimus producing millions of units per year.
This circularity will probably end up being seen in retrospect as so transparently absurd that it'll beggar belief that anyone accepted it.
That said I think these bets will pay off. Let’s check in in five years!
Do you have particular predictions we can evaluate in five years?
2) more than 1mm optimus produced and sold in the US
Happy for any counters :)
1MM Optimus sold in the US is hilarious too.
Want to make bets on these?
My prediction is Musk will become less and less stable, more and more flamboyant and performative, and less and less effective.
He's already saying he suffers from occasional AI psychosis, and there is no chance that's going to get better on its own.
Terafab profitability is really tough to get right, I'm open to ideas -- there's operating profit, operating profit net of amortization / depreciation, there's like six phases of the terafab specced out running through 203X (and as you say, slippage is inevitable there). I'd want to be considered a winner if the value of the EUV machines is up significantly, e.g. it was a balance sheet winner.
Send proposals.
I'd bet that in 5 years time Optimus total sales are in the 10's of thousands at best, with few to no large scale industrial users (other than self-use by Musk). Customers will be similar to what AgiBot and Unitree currently have - entertainment, hospitality, academic, small scale trials, plus a few Tesla fanboy sales that don't do anything actually productive.
If Optimus is in use at factories in 2029 then it will absolutely be able to produce more than a thousand robots a month by the end of 2031, just using any sort of geometric production curve as a swag.
As to users, I think if it can provide home services, they're going to sell a ton of them.
As to Elon's forecasts, yes, double them at least. And, also, he's mostly right historically, if delayed substantially. I think there's near infinite demand for $1/hr robot labor in the US.
And yet… when it’s Elon Musk’s company, we are suddenly all numbers and figures, and we waggle our fingers disapprovingly that he doesn’t have board approval. Yes, with Musk you have a childish huckster asshole. And increasingly it does appear he’s gone off the deep end, buying into his own self mythology. But the one redeeming quality he still demonstrates is refusal to settle for doing the same thing over and over. He continually and unreasonably pushes the envelope.
Tesla has definitively become a successful company. They defied all the naysayers in reaching that success, and it has turned into a global behemoth. They have oodles of money. The fact that Musk tirelessly insists on trying new moonshots that seem ridiculous is a GOOD thing - it’s the thing we _lack_. Inventive, audacious risk-taking is exactly what our stupid extractive scam economy lacks. Compared to you and me, yes, Musk is a cringey edgelord with the energy of a weird kid at the sleepover who tells bragging lies. But compared to his cohort who run large businesses, he is a goal oriented doer who attracts great talent and then relentlessly pushes them to achieve the impossible. And they actually succeed some non-zero amount of the time. It doesn’t matter that not every idea is a winner. That’s not how moonshots work. The point is that _some_ moonshot ideas do work though and actually move us up the tech tree. And the probable reality is that the delusional unrealistic asshole _helps_ push you there, precisely because they cannot be reasoned with. No, you cannot build moonshot companies without grandiosity, because the people working on it need to have a mission that is bigger than dollars and cents or common sense. If the only thing pushing you is good financials, you will quit as soon as “projections” start to look bad. In the area of moonshots, projections are just the opinions of uninformed non-believers who will ALWAYS mount until the world convinces you to stop working on the “stupid” thing.
All that said, the flying car is the dumbest thing I’ve seen him push and I don’t find it remotely exciting. Self-driving and robots are way cooler.
However, the root of this conversation is not about Musk at all but about whether Tesla's core business (automotive) is in trouble. The answer to that, as Musk is demonstrably convinced as well as I am, is "yes."
Then we get into Musk's own personal idiosyncrasies and to what degree they're a liability or an asset to pull Tesla away from doom. For the reasons you mention, they're an asset. Not many leaders are willing to throw the wheel like he is (Zuck being another example). For other reasons, his idiosyncrasies are a liability. Like the fact that he personally was single-handedly responsible for destroying huge amounts of Tesla's brand power and that his personal project (the Cybertruck) inflicted such gargantuan direct and indirect cost on Tesla at such a critical moment.
Again, the question is whether Tesla's core business is in trouble. The answer is yes. Nobody remarks that it's such an incredible thing that a CEO of an unambiguously crushing-it company is willing to yolo the company into new directions.
Point being: phrases like 'rationalization' and 'wishful thinking' exist for a reason. You should be extremely skeptical of how fairly you are assessing the prospects of a company run by people you hate. You are almost definitely interpreting the outlook uncharitably.
Late stage capitalism was coined over a century ago. It still hasn't happened.
What does happen, however, is a company will grow until it strangles itself with committees and bureaucracy. And then gets replaced with a younger company. A good book on this is "The Innovator's Dilemma".
Why exactly do you think he keeps repositioning them as a robotics oh wait no I mean an AI company? Why is he clearly positioning Tesla to be acquired by SpaceX? Why is Tesla investing into xAI to be converted into SpaceX shares?
Tesla’s actual business, making cars, continues to degrade. The Roadster (obviously) is not going to help.
They have a huge balance sheet so it’ll take a while but Musk obviously sees the writing on the wall. The sheen is wearing off their shitty products and he doesn’t know how to add the sheen back or make the products less shitty.
No it's not.
>Tesla’s actual business, making cars, continues to degrade.
False. Revenue and deliveries beat so far this year, Q3 also a beat.
Don't let your Elon Derangement Syndrome cloud your ability to think rationally.
TSLA is down 18% YTD. That's because their business is doing so well?
You're aware that the "expectations" are they run a profitable company, right?
>You're aware that expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is struggling?
You're aware that the expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is stable, and showed record deliveries and backlog in Q2?
>TSLA is down 18% YTD. That's because their business is doing so well?
Auto manufacturing sector (DJUSAU) is down 16% YTD, and Tesla's stock is overpriced to begin with. Tesla's most direct competitor in the US, Rivian, is down 34% YTD. Stop getting your business/economic news from BlueSky/reddit.
That's why Musk is trying to claim Tesla isn't an automotive company (except when comparisons to such suit him and his cultists, of course).
And where should they get them? From Twitter?
Credible business/economic news outlets.
>From Twitter?
No.
October 2: Tesla deliveries fall 2% as US consumers buy fewer EVs
July 23: Tesla shares tumble 11% as discounts hit profits
April 2: Tesla reports weaker than expected 6% rise in global deliveries
January 29: Tesla scraps models in pivot to AI as annual revenue falls for the first time
Tesla growth is slowing, margins are getting crunched, competition is heating up. Tesla knows they're fucked so they're pivoting into AI. The pivot into AI might work, but Musk himself unambiguously thinks Tesla is fucked as an automotive company.
You've also cherry-picked an instance where Tesla reported weaker than expected growth but you've omitted the times where it reported stronger than expected growth.
As for shrinking margins, that's largely due to growing R&D spending. That's not necessarily or even normally a negative thing.
The growing investment into AI and autonomy is part of a very long standing trend that has been declared for about decade. It's not an indication of desperation (beyond the ever-present desperation that companies always feel with the heat of competitive fires under their feet) or some failure of some previous plan.
I want to add one final point, and that is that every company's position is precarious, including Tesla's. So if that is what you're saying about Tesla, I would agree.
Where I would disagree is in the insinuation that its position is any more tenuous or precarious than any other company's.
Markets can change. Consumer tastes can change. Research and development efforts can fail. competitors can emerge. All these things hold true for every company all the time. And it holds true for Tesla. So, being a cynic when it comes to the prospects of a specific company is very likely to prove prescient. The only point I would disagree with you on is the idea that Tesla's position has recently degraded. Its position has always been precarious, and it has succeeded despite that, not because of some comparatively superior past position.
Yes, a site the corroborates:
>October 2: Tesla deliveries fall 2% as US consumers buy fewer EVs
Tesla outperformed expectations and the overall US EV market by a landslide. [US EV] sales in Q3 2026 were down 39.5% from a year ago whereas Tesla was only down 2%.
>July 23: Tesla shares tumble 11% as discounts hit profits
The stock is up 19% since then.
>April 2: Tesla reports weaker than expected 6% rise in global deliveries
Subsequently crushed the next quarters, breaking previous records as stated above.
>Tesla growth is slowing
The EV market is slowing, yet Tesla outperforms.
>margins are getting crunched
This is true for every automaker.
>competition is heating up
LOL! Competition is getting crushed, some of it leaving the EV market entirely.
>Tesla knows they're fucked so they're pivoting into AI. The pivot into AI might work, but Musk himself unambiguously thinks Tesla is fucked as an automotive company.
Peak Elon Derangement Syndrome. Take the L, you're out of your league and your own sources proved you wrong.
> [US EV] sales in Q3 2026 were down 39.5% from a year ago whereas Tesla was only down 2%.
Tesla's global sales were down 2%. Their US sales were down 20%. Tesla's decline itself constitutes 1/5th of the overall US decline.
While Tesla's US EV sales fell 20%, Rivian's grew 45%, and Toyota climbed 328%.
You're aware that "they're in a cooling sector" is not a good rebuttal to "their core business is endangered," right?
> Peak Elon Derangement Syndrome. Take the L, you're out of your league and your own sources proved you wrong.
You're so right, king. Elon is pivoting out of cars because they're just crushing it tooooo hard in the car business. Excellent response. The [X] Derangement Syndrome formulation is just shorthand for "I've decided to shut my brain off."
My god, he's replyguying over taking the L.
>Tesla's global sales were down 2%. Their US sales were down 20%. Tesla's decline itself constitutes 1/5th of the overall US decline.
The slump in EV sales has Tesla's increasing it's share of the US EV market. Market share increased even though its US sales were down for the eighth straight month in September. US sales were down 16 percent compared to the same period last year, and just blew out the quarter.
Tesla gained market share while just delivering a record quarter.
>While Tesla's US EV sales fell 20%, Rivian's grew 45%, and Toyota climbed 328%.
GMC’s U.S. EV sales fell about 57%, Ford fell 80%, Volkswagen is down 90% nearly out of the market, Kia/Hyundai (one of the best non-Tesla EV sales) down 50%.
Of course Rivian grew, they're ramping their factory, but the stock just hit a 52-week low, did not give great guidance for Q4.
>You're aware that "they're in a cooling sector" is not a good rebuttal to "their core business is endangered," right?
You're aware that a "cooling sector" that ebbs and flows != "core business is endangered," right? No, you're not aware, you're oblivious.
>You're so right, king.
At least you admit your EDS.
>Elon is pivoting out of cars because they're just crushing it tooooo hard in the car business.
Pivoting out so hard they had a record quarter for deliveries and gained market share LOLOL, delusional.
>The [X] Derangement Syndrome formulation is just shorthand for "I've decided to shut my brain off."
Yes, you have shut your brain off, thank you for admitting it.
We haven't even touched on Tesla Power, up 10%.
You’re literally bragging about a company losing less slowly than (some) of its competitors?
And yes actually being in a cooling sector does mean your business is endangered lmao. That’s literally why Elon is pivoting!
What’s your explanation for the pivot?
I am not sure you can detach these two concepts. Tesla is currently valued around 3x the next top 5 auto companies combined, so to an extent you need to judge the company on these expectations. I happen to think they do have a pretty good business selling cars, and maybe a very good business selling autonomous cars, but there's so much uncertainty I think it is hard to see the current market cap as anything other than hugely inflated.
This is historical artefact: HK with its short distances is very suitable to EVs, and the government initially supported EVs with tax breaks. In other words, people bought a lot of Teslas when it was the only game in town.
For new registrations, BYD overtook Tesla back in 2025 with a yoy growth of 67.8% vs Tesla -3.8%, and in the latest available month (June) had more than 4x as many registrations as Tesla.
It's not exactly market-dominating growth justifying a 300+ P/E ratio.
https://www.thestandard.com.hk/news/article/319010/EVs-make-...
https://kr-asia.com/pulses/155906
https://hkcarrank.com/jan-2026-private-car-registration-data...
https://www.td.gov.hk/en/transport_in_hong_kong/transport_fi... -> check table 4.1(e)
Musk keeps it running as a mouthpiece/propaganda and vanity project, but it's not a viable business anymore due to all the $13B Musk borrowed to acquire it, as well as loss of advertizers. It's estimated to break even on an operational basis, but loses about $1B/yr when you include interest on the debt.
I'm looking at the same post on a players status for this weekend from 2 hours ago on 3 platforms:
- Threads: 5 likes, 2 comments, 15 shares
- BlueSky: 19 likes, 3 comments, 3 shares
- Twitter: 1500 likes, 105 comments, 281 shares
Doesn't really seem like twitter is the one that's almost dead...
For anything politics related the activity is almost all bots.
Turns out you just love Trump.
That isn't even snark, it's plain cold hard on-the-record facts.
Anyway, here are Elon's emails to Epstein. Where is he begging for access to the island?
All that can be definitively proven by Musk’s own statements is that the Epstein files convinced him that Trump is a child rapist and Musk has nonetheless chosen to defend Trump, work with him, fund him, and according to Musk single-handedly get him re-elected.
Thank god Musk is not a scam artist though. That’d be a real indictment of his character. And you know, it might even be an indictment of the character of his valiant supporters.
So the publicity is arguably priceless.
A regular Tesla that sucks, you mean?
Even the base model has “active aerodynamics and a multi-mode suction system that maximizes downforce for next-level performance on and off the track.”
It's compressed air RCS. The compressor, regulators and a ton of hardware take up the entire space from the seats back to literally the very last inch of the car. Hard pipes run along the door frame for the forward RCS, meaning only one person (driver) can sit in it and enter from the drivers side. Huge carbon RCS tanks fill every other space.
No idea how long it would take to recharge the tanks after venting them.
There's no room for 'car' stuff in it.
Interestingly there is a big... sleeve of wizard... that extends down under the car to assist the ground effect fan. Packaging that and the RCS stuff into it is a real engineering feat.
But it didn't look to have crash structures, or any other production ready hardware.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/13/nasa-releases-summary-...
So I got no idea how you can even compare these two completely different systems and go from a launch failure to an explosive car accident?
Including boring old nitrogen blowing up a Starship: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
> "Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing," the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19).
If you SCUBA, your tanks need regular checks (https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/inspecting-and-testing-s...), because pressurized air can indeed kill (https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/diver-killed-in-s...) if the tank fails. The gas for these thrusters will happily accelerate you with the same force they're using to make a car fly given the chance.
Just for reference this is 50% more pressure than the pressure that crushed that submarine at the titanic.
1. Why don't they show a driver entering or exiting? 2. How much do that particular "car" weigh?
Aku: You can fly?!
Jack: No, jump good.
Okay, so I guess it doesn’t fly in the same way a rocket doesn’t fly? Distinction without meaning in this case.
The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."
I can imagine the lateral thrusters helping it turn faster on the track. Although I wonder if the extra weight is going to net out positive for lap times.
But really, a few very rich people will buy the full-rocket version to impress their friends. They'll play with them on private property.
---
Whoa, was just watching the video (great link btw). People have been debating the specs, but they're shown unambiguously right here. [1] It has 95 kn peak thrust, 6g peak acceleration, pressure of 5500 PSI, and a min operating temp of -200F.
Not easily achieved in a tunnel, but much more easily achieved in a garage.
To create a dangerous scenario you've gotta do something like somehow gas out your entire tank in a garage and then just stand around for a while breathing it in. Kind of an improbable scenario unless somebody is trying a really weird suicide attempt.
You wouldn't need to dump nearly an entire tank of nitrogen to reach levels that are immediately dangerous. And oxygen deprivation makes you stupid well before it makes you pass out, with no "lack of air" panic since that is based on CO2 levels, so even when it would be survivable for a couple minutes you might not even think to escape.
Like leaded gazoline, whose effects can still be seen presently...
No. That's the road safety mind speaking.
Swipes are not allowed on HN, and comments that invoke national/regional/cultural stereotypes are particularly out of line here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
1) Base model with a fan for downforce - no gas thrusters at all. This is the one that may actually ship (but bear in mind the last Roadster prototype he announced was 10 years ago, and that one never did ship)
2) One with a smaller compressed air tank in the trunk and rear facing thrusters that would give you a 0-60 < 1 sec launch mode. This will obviously never be street legal (you can't lay down a "smoke" screen on a public road), but conceivably he may build it if there is enough demand (but read the fine print - it says no guarantee it will ever ship)
3) The on-stage stunt version that can hover and flip, which consumes the entire passenger area with another much larger compressed air tank, and adds bottom and side thrusters to give you ~3 seconds of "flight". "Invite only". Maybe he'll sell one to SpaceX - unmanned operation only - just to say that he did.
Yes, the thruster versions both operate on compressed air, which is why you only get a few seconds of operation.
Can't help but think of the not-a-flamethrower
(friend bought one for $500, now they seem to be worth $1500-$2000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Merchandise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_B_Meyer_Inc.
that sounds quite amazing, and it looks like something out of ghostbusters.
And that makes a big difference, right? Right?
Example RC toy car that drives on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
Even if it is, they show interior, wheels & a distance shot of the rear opening showing a large air tank - very little can be seen of the actual chassis or engine.
Whatever tricks were done for the demo - whether the car is real or fake - it's highly unlikely what was shown today will ever be like-for-like accessible to consumers in the production model.
Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value. There is a huge economy revolving around people annoying other people just for a glimpse of their attention. This captures the attention and pleases people. Other car companies should start getting creative too.
The power to shape governments to his liking is worth a lot more than what he paid for Twitter.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/how-the-military-will-hack...
The twitter purchase likely did little either way
Hopefully there will also be a warning siren while it is pressurized. "Dangerous enough to need a warning siren" seems like a plus for the target market, honestly.
If that is what they have done. That may just be a large drone looking like a car.
I don't think they'll sell these, at all in the future. No way they'll hound out actual rocket engines to en users. Too much IP in there.
Teslas evaluation is based on hype. This is as hype as it gets for a car. To me it looks like they were in need for "the coolest thing". To me, this has the smell of desperation implying the beginning of the end of their high evaluation.
Guess it is for advertising mainly.
You could say the same thing about the Cybertruck.
It's staggering to consider how many resources we've diverted from people who could use them into building this novelty.
If ever there was a sign of a society of decadence in decline, it's that the most powerful person on earth is free to create toys like this exclusively for others in the ruling class.
"Crazy new thing also crazy expensive" is the norm, not a regression.
If this ships, it will deliver a fraction of what's promised here. My money is on the "flying" version being delayed repeatedly until it's quietly cancelled. Anyone remember the fast battery change stations[1]?
It's only wild if you ignore Musk's role in this. Not even trying to bash him or anything, but he's a trillionaire. This is the kind of shit you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly waste.
I mean, if this is how he wants to spend his money, then I guess that's his prerogative. But I think it's a bit misleading to suggest this is a decision made by "Tesla" when this is clearly an irrational decision for a company to make. This is a decision made by Musk based on satisfying his own personal goals.
In terms of net worth, you are closer to Jeff Bezos than Bezos is to Musk.
If you offer 0.0000001% of your LLC for sale and I purchase one share for $1, the value of your company becomes $1 billion dollars.
That’s exactly what SpaceX did. But with 5% shares for sale.
This is explained in the deep dive video with Lars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts
Sorry, I'll start it from the app!
chug chug chug chug
Or an easier way to escape rioters blocking the road and threatening your life.
Add it to the list, boys! "Inflatable Rescue Submersible", FSD, Bulletproof windows, Mars any day now, Hyperloop... am I missing anything?
Not if it ruptures.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
SpaceX lost four spacecraft this way.
A large amount of air that wants to go somewhere fast causes humans serious troubles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin
"Investigation by forensic pathologists determined that Hellevik, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient and in the process of moving to secure the inner door, was forced through the crescent-shaped opening measuring 60 centimetres (24 in) long created by the jammed interior trunk door. With the escaping air and pressure, gross dismemberment ensued; it included bisection of his thoracoabdominal cavity, which resulted in fragmentation of his body, followed by expulsion of all of the internal organs of his chest and abdomen, except the trachea and a section of small intestine. These were projected some distance from the bell, with one section being found 10 metres (30 ft) vertically above the exterior pressure door."
It will yeet you, and you weigh a lot less than the flying car does.
You could only pressurize it right before your jumping stunt.
They can’t even build a proper Mini anymore because the hood was so low it elked pedestrians face first into the windshield.
It’s cool tech demo. I’m not expecting to see one fly in private hands ever.
However, those assuming it will never be sold or even legal to be sold may not be aware there already exist astronomically expensive, completely impractical, quite unsafe, track-only hypercars which are not legal to drive on any street.
As for the technical legality of the 'flying' features ask your LLM about: the Ground-Effect & "Sustained Flight" Jurisdictional Boundary in FAA / NHTSA regs, Off-Road Track-Only exemptions from Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, and PHMSA / DOT-SP (Special Permit) authorization for consumer COPV pressure vessels. Making the "hopping" version for sale is a wildly impractical marketing stunt but they can probably do it, although it'll cost far more and ship much later than whatever they promise and will sell at most a few dozen.
And supercars are typically not submitted for NCAP testing, so It'll likely be less safe than a Model Y for example (to be determined, no reports out yet)
> Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways.
That things which are good for an individual but bad for everyone else deserve scrutiny?
Go back to times past and think about electricity for instance. Can you even imagine? 'Yeah we'd uh like to set up these poles all around the countryside and string some wires between them. And yeah if anybody touches those wire, they die and all the electricity gets screwed up. If lightning strikes them or a tree falls on them, yeah they're gonna fall and start fires. And there will be live wires - and uh yeah again, touch 'em and you die. Anyhow, we good to go? In exchange for this totally-safe-tech we'll be able to have electric lights! I mean how cool is that? Err and in full disclosure about those lights, uh don't touch the sockets or well.. you know, yeah - you die. Okay, so we good to go?'
People, in the short term, don't like the cognitive dissonance being rattled, but I think in the longrun that's what has the biggest impact on our ideological direction shifting.
Perhaps just look at a few ancient European towns with cobbled streets with no pavements, no wider than 2.5M and hairpin turns at many junctions. Perhaps it's just a product that doesn't suit the market.
I can and so can anyone else, but what fantasy scenario is this? Which specific rules of this "regulatory bureaucracy" would stop it?
Similarly for cars themselves. You're speaking of machines which operate on the basis of hundreds of small explosions per second hopefully contained within a metal chassis under a hood to let a person drive tons of metal around which can trivially be weaponized to cause mass deaths, as has already happened multiple times in Europe. Even when not behaving maliciously, the number of deaths caused by crashes is in the millions per year. And again that's also after a century of safety improvements.
What was the lethality of gas lighting in terms of intoxication or fires? How many people died per year per household served?
"A car with sharp metal edges that slices up pedestrians" is not a technical development.
I personally saw one in Krakow, Poland.
Cybertruck does not have EU homologation so Tesla can't sell it in EU. Because at the moment they don't want to.
You can buy it, import it and certify for legal use. It requires minor modifications but is perfectly legal.
Its not allowed to be sold to the mass market in Europe. The import law is something different.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws.... Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well....
> “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities”....
The more rigorous data is the IIHS driver death rates, which use real registration data and adjust for driver age and gender (iihs.org/topics/driver-death-rates). It shows the RWD Model 3 is about half its class average (15 vs 29 deaths per million vehicle-years) and the Model S is about average. The AWD Model 3 is above average (39 vs 29), which points more to how fast cars get driven than to the car itself. IIHS hasn’t published a Model Y rate yet.
So Teslas aren’t the deadliest brand. The faster versions show more risk, which is the same pattern IIHS sees with muscle cars.
Perhaps some billionaires will buy it, good for them.
Why do you guys contort yourselves into knots trying to find any and every conceivable problem with something that doesn't affect you ... get over it already. Go ahead and flag me.
I mean yes, they do. But we don't think of them as birds.
and if you've been in Teslas that are a few years old, you might have experienced phantom braking. random hard braking for no apparent reason. i try to avoid being behind Teslas on the road if i can help it.
I would say the quality might be high for an american car but here in europe it's absolute dogshit tier.
i remember reading about the first cobra in the 60's, where a huge percentage of the owners didn't live to make the second payment.
Working backwards from their stats & FARS data, I calculated that for their claims to be true, each Model Y would need to accumulate only 4,300 miles per year. This is far below Tesla's reports of 13,000-14,000 miles per year. Also iSeeCars claimed that an average of 2.8 vehicles were involved in fatal accidents for every billion miles traveled. But at the time the US had 13.3 deaths per billion miles traveled. So for their data to be correct, the average fatal accident would need to have five fatalities.
https://www.lendingtree.com/insurance/brand-incidents-study/
Lastly, are you admitting that your first link was incorrect since you didn’t respond to my points at all?
[1]Lots of other cars have technically faster times than Teslas, but most of them require launch control, good tires, and sound like the engine's about to explode. You can floor the Tesla at any time and the software will deliver however much power it can without slipping.
https://vsp.virginia.gov/virginia-state-police-trooper-rescu...
And 14 others - that I'm aware of - to date.
It's also a conversation maker (sometimes you're not party to that conversation) and gets you labeled at the office.
> Every Tesla ever made has a door release that doesn't require any electricity.
Was a valid response to the comment you replied to:
> Like the people who get trapped in case of accident when the electricity fail and is burned inside?
Implying others are making untrue statements by making intentionally deceptive statements is very rude.
BTW, the emergency release procedure should always be the same as the normal release process. All systems should fail to a safe state on a power loss. It’s easy to design a door lever that engages the powered open on pull and a mechanic mechanism when pulling harder or further.
I looked up the owner's manual description of the opening mechanism (posted by (ammar2, above) [0], and found it was an insanely dangerous design, literally worthy of an escape room as other sibling posters have described.
It is hidden below a mat, which must be removed, then a red tab pressed (not pulled), and there is a big caution AGAINST using it when the car has any power as it may damage the car.
So, you are in a rapidly expanding lithium fire, you must first determine if the car has power or not, and then you must fumble and root around to find which trim mat to pull, and then whether to pull (wrong) or push the red tab.
If you fail to do these steps quickly enough, you will die a horrible death in a fire (as many have).
If you use this lever at an inopportune time, you will damage the car.
In what other automobile does using a manual door-opening mechanism damage the vehicle?
This is one of the most insanely user- and owner-hostile designs I have ever encountered or heard of in life.
And it has actually unnecessarily cause at least a dozen people to be burned alive and conscious.
And here you are defending it in multiple posts like some idiotic fanboy. Seriously, rethink your priorities and your life. It is truly sad your identity so much depends on someone else's massively flawed personality and product designs.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/2020_2024_modely/en_us/GU...
At least on the newer ones it looks like it at least has signage and is less obstructed: https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_us/GUID-A7A60DC...
[has X]
[has X designed, built, and visible in the car such that it can be easily found and operated whilst panicking for your life, or rushing from outside while trying to save a trapped passenger's life]
There are people who would tell you that while Tesla may have the first, it does not have the latter, but they cannot because they are dead, and should not be.
I could just punch a hole in the door and route it, as many have done, but it has no child lock integration which could be problematic.
Life is balancing risks. Do you drive an S-class? Why did you risk driving a less safe car?
This lock issue is not regulated and many electric cars have this and/or other issues. It's not like I have great choices if I want to drive an electric sedan.
In addition, most brands I'm aware of will unlock the car when the airbags are deployed (Kia/Hyundai, Renault, Volkswagen, Mercedes, BMW). Because these cars still have door handles, they can be opened by a bystander after a crash.
The issue is not that the doors are locked. The issue is that unlocked doors without door handles are still useless.
Most cars that have self un/lock functionality, also unlock all doors when the car detects an accident.
Billionaires drive Teslas? I must be in good company.
As for US safety standards, that seems a lower bar...
Quite ironic.
> EU safety regs are pass/fail - there's no sources stating Tesla have exceeded anything there, they need to pass in order to be sold in Europe, so they've done whatever the minimum required is for that.
Yup I wasn't making out that your statement was technically incorrect, just irrelevant.
https://autoedgeview.com/ev-reviews/europe-cybertruck-ban-ex...
This just says vehicles in the US have lower safety requirements than other countries, which is need to nobody.
They engineer to robustly pass tests, seemingly without a lot of consideration of "beyond" the test. It's not uncommon for most OEMs to target the test metrics, but you can still make design choices along the way where you may recognize with EJ when there is a "design cliff" and you may avoid it.. if desired.
They're bang-bang functions, which aren't very smart.
My first comment was just meant to highlight why* a certain car might pass all tests but have more injuries in real life. Another reason could be the nature of Tesla accidents, with people either driving silly or people sleeping in the car while it drives itself into a wall, e.g.
In reality, when you're getting close to 99ppm you start getting "borderline" notices on your MoT that you should look into this before your car ends up in the failure zone.
If you are ok to pay twice the value of the car for 101 ppm, then fine. Or four times for 102, eight for 103 and so on. There will be a point where no manufacturer will make a car with those numbers.
The manual override is not obvious and people have burned to death in crashes because they could not get the door open after the power went down.
I'm going to quote Buzz Lightyear: this is falling... with style.
On a serious note, this was unexpected. You can't deny, he has style
Those SS uniforms were snappy.
But what is the point of this? Did Musk think everyone would forgive him, turn to white-supremacy and re-vote in his patsy's associates if only they saw a weird car demo?
"Integrating SpaceX thruster tech is absolutely essential to Tesla in the future!"
Impressive engineering but utterly impractical. There are semi-practical flying car designs around folding wings or quad rotors (basically a big car sized drone) and the reason we don’t see them has more to do with safety, traffic control, and energy cost. Aircraft, like rockets, tend to get more energy efficient with size, so tiny flying machines are power wasters.
This is just going to make it even more desirable to a certain market segment.
No, both versions use cold gas thrusters. There are no combustion rocket engines involved here.
The difference between the “thrust” and “rocket” versions is the number of thrusters: “rocket” has additional thrusters that enable it to fly. The “thrust” version just has them at the back for acceleration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JATO_Rocket_Car
The famous JATO Rocket Car story was one of the original Darwin Awards winners. I remember reading it out loud to my buddies and us all rolling withlaughter when it was published in News of the Weird. pre-Internet.
For a 1000 kg car and with 200 m/s nozzle exit velocity, to hover the car you need (with m_0 g = m_a v/t) about 50 kg of air per second, so we're talking about roughly 2.5 seconds of flight (from those 400 litres).
[1] https://youtu.be/6D5MlPZQFOw?si=5x7x96SqdW3Z7OzJ&t=769 [2] https://youtu.be/22rvpUecLts?si=pq6EuQnDWdH9tgBf&t=264
Of what, being the safest production car on the road that you can buy?
It's not a high performance car. It's a shell of a car.
It’s an Apple Vision Pro.
They’ll do fine over the decade.
Ferrari sells a few of each models in a production run and it does exceptionally well financially.
It made for a great marketing stunt, it is absolutely useless for a production car. And you can tell the designers realize it but were at the whims of Elon in their interview.
We were promised an awd, 620 mile range monster almost a decade ago, and then again 6 years ago. We were delivered a “maybe 310 mile” range, rwd doorstop.
I’m not sure who this car is for, but it’s definitely not car guys. It is the cybertruck of sports cars, and that’s not a good thing…
Bonus: use cars!
Also if it was just a demo for space mining, why is it marketed as a car for consumers and why can I buy a $250K reservation to maybe (!) buy one for an unknown price and with an unknown set of features at an unknown point of time in the future?
I think it's very simply just a scam to extract money from Elon's fans.
There's only one deranged person in this conversation.
What's TDS?
Not true. It's clearly a stunt. Not practical. Nobody wants this on our roads by our houses.
>would have ignored his...
Not true. The left is famously quite critical of Democrats.
>if you are honest
I am, and I don't deserve the insinuation that I'm not. You're not assuming good faith, not only for me, but for the other commenters.
This is HN
>projecting their political stance on anything Elon does
You are quite literally doing that.
You people really don't get it, do it? It's not about the car being practical. Cleary this is not going to make it to the roads, but it will on a powered by Grok robotic space craft. Think potentially unlimited resources from asteroid mining. Get over your political leanings and these personalities involved and think bigger picture.
There is also that point and a an even so slight correction that it’s a hovering car at best.
Any sign of the tens of thousands of Optimus robots?
| ... cybertruck of sports cars ...
Page says:
> Note: Not approved for public road use.
it's "actual stunt" car
People couldn't figure out what to do with airplanes other than racing them. Until WW1, when it was first used for observation.
I wonder if this technology will revive the jet pack. At least it won't set your ankles on fire! And it's a lot simpler than a jet engine.
I mean if you're not sober, maybe it's a nice option to have
If it were throttled back just so you were lighter, you could possibly run much faster.
A concept car, primarily a track car I think. I would think less than 10000 will be sold but some of the tech will make it into other models over time and the tech could be interesting for military application. Jumping Humvees like cars anyone?
So in the straight of Hormuz, you'd have a "Tesla boat" hover off a destroyer and into the water, reach the target as a boat, then hover up to its deck. People would exit and meet the vessel's crew for however long. No hook ladders, anchor lines or helicopter rappels. Seems like a good balance between projecting soft and hard power to make a ship turn around, arrest or replace crew, run security checks or extract payment. The Tesla boat should make this type of rendezvous less costly, easier and safer - legality/ethics considerations aside.
Would be interesting if the boat rose up on a variable foil and keel as well where the forward thrusters could be used for super speed, maneuverability and fuel efficiency. I am just dreaming.
Curiosity, on the other hand, is a car that actually hovered, and that was on Mars, in 2012. https://youtu.be/Ki_Af_o9Q9s?is=uepnp2XLG81tHacn
It glides in a carefully controlled demo. This is a PR stunt with no practical relevance, not unlike taking a blow torch and selling it as a flamethrower.
That was actually not unexpected. Joe Rogan 2404 [1]. He warned Rogan that the demonstration would be completely "unforgettable, whether it’s good or bad"
References:
I'm not a Musk fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but this was clearly done as a marketing stunt to drum up hype about the street legal roadster. I didn't even watch the announcement but now everyone in my friend circle is talking about it because of the rocket engines. That's just called effective marketing.
This isn’t a flying car, which could conceivably have some use (like a personal aircraft). It’s a stunt to distract the gullible from Tesla financials, which do not justify the valuation. As you say, it’s not practical in production and never will be.
Musk clearly wants to merge all his companies, so that it’s too big to fail, and this probably came out of the questions that arise from that - how can we use Spacex tech at Tesla?
Suppose you accidentally drive your car off a cliff. Accelerometers and other sensors (cameras) could detect the fall and activate the cold gas thrusters to rotate the car into a safe orientation and bring it to a soft landing.
It should even be possible to use the thrusters as an emergency braking system in case of loss of traction, rollovers, departing the roadway, etc, to avoid or reduce impact damage and injuries.
The car is fun as a concept. Amazing as a demo. And the actual street legal versions will still be fun and amazing to drive relative to "ordinary" hypercar criteria.
Yeah, loading high pressure gas into tanks in your vehicle structure is a "safety feature"...
A supercar that can't crash would be very popular among the ultra rich even at 5 mil a pop.
So no, Musk is trying to prepare the ground for a merger with spacex and distract from Tesla’s worsening fundamentals and the flop of cyber truck, the decade late delivery of roadster etc etc.
Tesla in particular and all Elon Musk's ventures aren't exactly renowned for being sound investments. Even snake oil salesmen were seen as proper entrepreneurs at one point.
Personally I can't shake off the feeling that every single announcement is a con job, starting with the autonomous driving claims. I'm baffled why people still put any trust into anyyhing coming out of that field.
What? You do understand that in Europe Tesla was forced to market their feature as "Tesla assisted driving" instead of FSD because regulators in multiple European countries determined that it is unable to drive the car on its own and the FSD claim is misleading.
https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-full-self-driving-becomes-...
Even in the US Tesla markets it as FSD (supervised), which you must admit is a contradiction.
They will never sell a car with similar functionality to that demo to anyone
I could easily imagine the right films renting these cars for a stunt. Film cameras and practical effects are having a resurgence.
They're explicitly advertising selling exactly that car. They just say it's by "invitation only". Do you think it's just a marketing gimmick? I dunno who's crazy enough to buy one. But for the right price, they could definitely sell a few.
Priced at $420k I imagine.
There's no way he doesn't go for meme pricing on this stunt
Will they deliver this time?
I’m sure adding jet packs from SpaceX rockets will make that much easier!
It does if it keeps their valuation in the trillions.
Plus, whatever you think of Musk, this is really fucking cool.
It’s taking work done for rockets which are cool IMO (the control systems and software will all be from those) and sticking it on a car to make a circus act out of it.
I do have a problem with the fake spectacle of it and don’t think it’s cool in any way.
Evel Knievel did some cool things at well. In fact he made a rocket car and even flew in it!
He also didn't lie to people and collect deposits promising he'd sell them a rocket car.
It might be worth reading up on Evel Knievel...
Actually, title of the submission should be changed to "Tesla Roadster new prototype".
For the record, previous prototype was in 2017 and the real deal was supposed to ship in 2020
• For certain values of flying
it's a good trick tho, hey, now it's a flying car, so we gotta delay it more. that way they can delay the release and just collect pre order money infintely;)
New Model 3 today $36,990 so inflation adjusted already sub-$30k, and if Cybercab cones through even with inflation.
You're making excuses for a trillionaire who would happily watch you starve.
It would seem that your theory that the idea arose out of a need to distract from current financials doesn't hold merit.
He probably just wanted to design a cool car.
I disagree that it couldn’t come out of thinking of how to justify merging spacex and Tesla which he’s wanted to do for a long time.
This isn’t a cool car, it’s a gimmick. It will never be road-worthy, would lose money, and I doubt they’ll ever even sell it to customers.
As to why he’s going this dog and pony show now, we can only speculate, but I can’t think of any reasons that are good for Tesla (vs Musk personally) can you?
The obvious explanation would be that this design for the roadster took 8 years to come to fruition for a demo-able prototype.
I also very much doubt the 2028 timeline for delivery, and what the purpose of the Rocket edition is. Perhaps it's just a prestige project.
The non-flying version at least seems usable on a racing track.
I guess the answer is because it was Musk’s whim and nobody dared say no, which doesn’t bode well for Tesla.
And it can still be a distraction. The fact that they went through all this effort for a fantastically unreasonable thing just to wow for a company that is off the rails is...pretty telling. Have you never worked with someone who is late for everything, always overpromising and underdelivering, and as it becomes more apparently their promises get more exaggerated and unreasonable? That's Musk. Like "look you can play games on your screen", which absolutely no one asked for in a car, and for which it does much shittier than a $200 pad.
For that matter it's Trump too, and they're both cut from the same cloth -- don't like the dumb arch? Well now it has snipers and drones! And also it will eliminate the debt, deficit, income taxes, and...
So instead of just starting production of a vehicle 8 years behind schedule, look, new distraction! Amazeballs! Don't worry coming real soon now. Just put in those deposits!
I mean, the one part of this story that is unclear and no one seems to be asking hard questions is the compressor status -- there are vague, handwavy (oh we'll build a compressor claims, but I have huge doubts). A 5000 psi to 10000 psi compressor in the real world today is enormous. It's industrial equipment that generates enormous amounts of heat, is hilariously loud, and takes enormous power. While I am 100% certain this dog and pony show had their tanks filled by external massive compressors out of sight, I am pretty skeptical Tesla has any magic innovation in that field.
I also find it unconvincing that the purpose of the stunt is to receive deposits.
This being a prestige project to show off Tesla's advantage in experimental technology, or a personal pet project, would seem a much more likely explanation. Do we really need to bend everything into a malicious scam?
Hey remember when all of the Tesla factories were being retooled to make robots, and the hilarious robot demo where some remote controlled junk was pitched as next gen? Also SpaceX would be to Mars by 2021, and would have landed a crew there in 2023. Totes!
Musk is Elizabeth Holmes who lucked into buying a growing business. Like, he 100% does exactly what Theranos did, and which she is sitting in jail for, trying to boost the stock on bullshit and lies.
"prestige project to show off Tesla's advantage"
Advantage? The entire engineering world is going "why?", for a wide range of reasons.
Not unlike the CyberJunk nonsense where he needed to boast that it can stop bullets and double as a boat (https://nationalpost.com/news/world/cybertruck-texas-wade-mo...) and is made out of impractical materials. That massive, colossal flop didn't show any "advantage", it showed that a toddler was running the show, and when people just want cars he's off desperately trying to regain his Iron man allure, now that he's just a vile, garbage human being.
Another narrative that also fits the facts is that demand for their cars is so bad that they had to idle the X and S lines at that factory and they used Optimus as an excuse.
If demand was booming they'd set up a new facility to manufacture Optimus rather than dismantling a car factory
You should be asking Elon that.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me 10 times, shame on me
Wild people are still falling for Musk's fake products. I guess what they say is true, there is a sucker born every minute despite the evidence of the last twenty years. This will never ship.
Falcon 9 - 2010 - the cheapest, most successful, most reliable, most available rocket in history
Cargo Dragon - 2012 - first commercial resupply to ISS
Model S - 2012 - BEV that started the EV transition
Supercharger network - 2012 - first US wide charging network and still most reliable
Falcon 9 Booster Reuse - 2017
Falcon Heavy - 2018 - Super heavy partially reusable rocket
Model 3 - 2018 - best selling EV next 3 years
Crew Dragon - 2020 - only US NASA approved crew craft to LEO
Starlink - 2020 - only successful orbital ISP
NACS - 2022 - charging plug standard opened and then adopted by majority of US BEV manufacturers
Model Y - 2023 - First BEV to be world’s best selling car
Starship - 2024 - first catch of an orbital class booster without landing gear
Musk is highly accomplished and has also over-hyped his plans many times.
He’s delivered things years late that were also years ahead of others.
The actual work of SpaceX and Tesla are done by his employees, but the company wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him.
He’s expressed some laudable goals around green tech and space exploration and also done things designed to enrich himself immensely.
Tesla’s done some cool things and also had problems.
SpaceX is awesome and Musk is also a terrible human being.
Dichotomies are uncomfortable but they’re everywhere.
Clearly some time between 2018 and now he decided he'd have to actually have it done and ordered his people to make a stunt car with thrusters.
But pushing himself onto the President, manipulating democracy and being responsible for killing kids as a billionair makes his actions nefarious.
That part is true.
> manipulating democracy and being responsible for killing kids as a billionair makes his actions nefarious.
Indeed.
I think the admirable + despicable combination creates unprocessable dissonance for some people. People then take one side or another.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/15/what-is-starshield...
If you had that amount of money and power, you could be anyone you wanted, so why on earth does Musk choose to be as he is?
He is ultra far right wing and he did the salute as a 'joke', but even if you want to ignore that, his support of AfD is 1000X worse.
He also associated and support far-right wing skinheads in Britain and moved from the far-right reform to the even further far ultra right 'Restore' party in Britain.
I don't know how anybody can justify unless they themselves are a far right extremist.
My man. Maybe engage with what people are saying instead of the cartoon version you’ve crafted in your mind.
Yeah just like this car's motion is the same as that of an aeroplane.
Because those ultra far right wing parties really care about science and long term technology development. They also super love capitalism. I mean ignore that they want to destroy free trade, destroy the international order, dismantle equality before the law that is the bases of capitalist labor markets, that they are incredibly and openly corrupt and make it clear that contracts are given out based on loyalty rather then any serious evaluation of technical quality.
The far right wants a old school hierarchical society, based on loyalty and traditional values, not capitalism. Capitalism is literally what has opposed this world view for 100s of years.
The list goes on, if you actually believe that these people are pro-tech, pro-capitalism you are fucking delusional.
Talk all you want, but video is available for you to make up your own mind. Imo, it was very obviously a Nazi salute coupled with an angry face reminiscent of Hitler, and then repeated to make sure it was seen.
He is ultra far right wing and he did the salute as a 'joke', but even if you want to ignore that and argue it away, his support of AfD is 1000X worse. He actually supports a party that literally wants to overthrow German democracy like the actual Nazi party did historically.
He also associated and support far-right wing skinheads in Britain and moved from the far-right reform to the even further far ultra right 'Restore' party in Britain.
I don't know how anybody can justify unless they themselves are a far right extremist.
He is ultra far right wing and he did the salute as a 'joke', but even if you want to ignore that, his support of AfD is 1000X worse.
He also associated and support far-right wing skinheads in Britain and moved from the far-right reform to the even further far ultra right 'Restore' party in Britain.
I don't know how anybody can justify unless they themselves are a far right extremist.
The model s has always had Inconel in the frame for strength since relatively early on. But the Inconel came from SpaceX. Inconel is primarily used in aerospace applications. It made the frame of the model s so strong it broke the NTHSA machine used to test rollover strength. Look this up it is easy to verify.
SpaceX materials science has always been a big part of Tesla’s success since the very early beginning. Likewise inversely.
Given that it costs 10x more than aluminum, it is highly unlikely to be useful as a material in a production car.
The frame breaking the NHSTA story is correct but is just well-designed aluminum.
I’m happy to be shown a reference I’m wrong.
“”” That was combined with upgrading the main pack contactor to use inconel (a high temperature space-grade superalloy) instead of steel, so that it remains springy under the heat of heavy current. The net result is that we can safely increase the max pack output from 1300 to 1500 Amps. What this results in is a 10% improvement in the 0 to 60 mph time to 2.8 secs and a quarter mile time of 10.9 secs. Time to 155 mph is improved even more, resulting in a 20% reduction. “””
Certainly there has been crossover in both directions, most famously in Musk forcing SpaceX to buy Tesla cybertrucks (18% of production at one point).
Inconel would not be a good choice for an automobile frame. Not only is it expensive and heavy it also can be pretty brittle. You want a frame that's strong but ductile so that it will absorb impact energy.
From what I've been able to find, Tesla uses inconel in some battery components. This makes sense because the thing inconel is really good at is staying strong even when very hot. This is why it's used in turbines and jet engines.
This thread points out that inconel is not unused in the automotive world, high-end ICE cars have used it for their exhaust systems. Another advantage of inconel in this application is that it's highly corrosion resistant:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/inconel.50251/
So in summary: Tesla uses inconel where it makes sense to use it (to deal with high heat) and so do other automobile manufactures.
it fills its tanks with air from the atmosphere.
It's probably going to be like the titan submersible of cars.
I guess Tesla has officially entered its The Boring Company stage? Ambition does come in unexpected form, occasionally.
It's not like they care about lives. After all Musk throttled Starlink in Ukraine and that resulted in many civilian deaths. Anyone buying this is supporting this behaviour.
Neither has combustion rockets.
When the NTHSA did the rollover test on the Tesla Model S, it broke the machine they use. It was estimated that it would take the weight of nine model S vehicles ontop of a model S for the roof to collapse. Tesla patented millimeter wave radars in the seats and got approval to install them. They now know if a large adult, small adult, child, animal, or groceries are in a seat. The airbags are reconfigured on the fly depending on what is in the seat. Consumer reports did a test and found Tesla wasn’t great in slam the brakes stopping distance, and did a report about it. Tesla confirmed and did some testing. They had a software update in less than a month to dramatically improve it to generally best in class. They have so many safety features many of which are now mandated in new vehicles that were not required when Tesla started producing vehicles.
Just look at some of the utterly insane Tesla crashes where in most cars all would he dead and folks walk away from them in the teslas. Some of the Teslas use a very special composite metal named Inconel in the frames. Look it up. Inconel is most commonly used in high performance aerospace applications like space rockets, and Tesla is the sole automotive manufacturer in the world with access to a large supply of it and know how. The Tesla model S plaid seats were designed to withstand 9Gs of lateral force, a thing no other street legal car in the world can do. Tesla asked the seat manufacturer that makes most all of the seats in the world to support this and they laughed at them. So Tesla made their own, and it’s safer than any of the other ones due to its design. Don’t trust me, verify this with google. It isn’t hard.
Would Musk actually build a hover car if someone was willing to pay for it? Maybe, but it's hard to see the market/target demographic - it'd be a geeky toy rather than something to impress others of your wealth with.
Maybe Musk should do a ghetto rocket car - a gas thruster 30-sec hover add on for the Cybertruck. If he could do it for a few hundred K there might be some takers.
How confident are you that the flying object in that video is a car?
Some cursory estimates suggest that one really could get several seconds of operation with enough thrust to lift a real car with a big motor and battery and seats and such, but the margins are not great. If I were designing this thing and I cared more about showmanship than about demonstrating an actual credible car, I might use the tiniest battery I could find with adequate power output (lithium titanate? small LFP?), as little motor as I could get away with, and no interior amenities whatsoever.
More cynically, I would also contemplate whether I really really needed the fancy downforce fan for this demo. After all, that’s a very controlled track and I can imagine other ways of getting a car up it.
To be precise, it's not being sold (although you gan gift Elon a deposit) in any form, it might be in some future.
I confidently predict this demo model with all the jet gimmicks will never exist on the road. A basic version with just the electric motor will ship someday.
This is sort of like demonstrating a car that softens the asphalt in front of it with lasers to get a better grip; difficult, technically impressive, and zero chance that it will ever be allowed on a public road.
Edit: According to this Motor Trend article, it uses a big carbon-fiber pressure vessel at 5500psi, so basically an enormous fragile bomb. And the one that did all the stunts had two of the pressure vessels which would have filled most of the interior.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-roadster-thrust-system...
But then we get into the performance group.. SR-71 Blackbirds (3530kph), X-43A Scramjets (10870kph). Strange inaccurate brag.
Other cars have these tanks, but full of flammable fuel, not just air.
Off the top of my head, the honda civic CNG (3600 psi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_GX#Specifications
the toyota marai (10,000 psi hydrogen)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai#High-pressure_hyd...
and probably the other cng or hydrogen cars.
Fry: "How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?"
Professor Farnsworth: "Well, it's a space ship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one."
At this point I look at wikipedia what happened to the submarine bamboozled mentioned. Ooops. Heh, the pressure of water is as evenly distributed as can be. Seems my background in watersports is not enough to moonlight in material engineering.
carbon fiber is great in tension, i.e. a compressed air tank, or COPV
carbon fiber is much less great in compression, i.e. OceanGate
Also the OceanGate construction process was bad, even for carbon fiber, because the CEO didn't listen to actual engineers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdkIOhFmbKI&t=1239
Doesn't look too big, tbh. They also explain some of the mechanics used to make it happen.
But can we talk about the just casually driving straight vertical or sticking to the ceiling? I didn't think that would be technically possible for a 1000kg+ car with probably at least 2" of ground clearance.
There's presumably very limited stores of compressed gas, so you might get one hop or a couple 0-60 boosts per charge. But with electric fans, suction is a feature with much longer duration (minutes?), so you could feasibly do the batman driving on the tunnel ceiling past traffic trick.
I do think that this could only work for a short timespan and getting it to work perfectly each time with variances in weight would be hard. I'd imagine the thrusters and the tank would would wear out over time too, would be a nasty landing if only some of the thrusters worked.
They were tossing around an oversized shell of a car and it is only physically capable of holding about as much as it used in the short demo, is that about right?
So what even is the point of this thing? What possible function in the world does this farting car serve besides... driving up Tesla's stock price?
Did you typo this? Absolutely no way it's a 10 metric ton car.
The new roadster is obviously cool, but it looks like a practically useless vehicle for 99.9999% of the population. It's purely going to be a track princess -- with lots of extra weight for frankly pointless (but very cool) thrusters.
Imagine a normal car having to carry around the added weight of fans, COPVs, and the plumbing to make it work. And only being able to use those only if the track is clean and there are no other cars nearby.
Not f1, Can-Am but yeah, I'm really surprised this isn't a more common approach to modern track cars. Obviously banned in most motorsport but I'm surprised with all of the one-offs these days that it's not more common.
There are some McLaren street cars that use passive venturi channels which from their shape alone, generate more down force at high speeds than the car's weight. In theory, the car could drive upside down (if there was a Daytona-sized race track shaped like a ~30 ft diameter pipe).
An F1 car would need to move at over ~100 mph to sustain inverted driving (assuming you modified the ancillary systems appropriately—the road orientation isn’t the only limitation); a fan car can do it standing still.
Well it's effectively useless for 100% of the population. It's just that 99.9999% cannot afford an expensive, useless car. Some people can, though.
Amazing how funny this is.
Whatever floats your boat though.
If there was a live audience anywhere near that stage they wouldn't have been able to use thrusters to fly something that actually weighs as much as a car.
It’s strange that people need to convince themselves that this is fake.
10 years from their initial offering of the roadster, I'd like to see them release a well functioning, cool looking car. Why are they spending time/energy trying to make it fly?
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/691843612950003743/15...
The one that thrusts downwards removes the front passenger seat for another 400 litre tank. I don't think there are any pictures of that though.
I personally would find it scary sitting next to a huge 10,000 PSI pressure vessel but there you go.
They will not attempt to make it legal to use on normal roads, but intend to try and certify it to be in a road legal car but only usable while not on the road.
It also takes like 6 hours to fill and can be used one time per fill for a single use. It's a party trick for sure.
LPG, no - the pressures are much lower (but also still pumped in and significantly reactive).
I've done a lot of vacuum picking and it is surprising how large an object you can pick up with a tiny bit of surface.
The seal won't be perfect so you'll be running the pump more or less continuously. Apropos manhole covers: I wonder what would happen if this car would drive over one. Or was that your point?
https://www.youtube.com/live/GbqKwPktCdo?xstg=CAMSBhUDze3xHw...
Tesla seems to disagree with you as well, they call it a "multi-mode suction system" [1] suggesting that the evacuation under the car is what does the job. And that's far more likely than that the ejection of that little bit of air at the top is what keeps the vehicle planted upside down. But with vacuum that is almost a trivial accomplishment.
[1] https://x.com/Tesla/status/2110907039493038577 ; third slide; caption under the photo.
"Multi-mode fan & ground sealing system pulls air from beneath the vehicle, generating enough suction to hold it upside down while stationary"
I'll just note that again, my hypothesis and the actual way it works are very similar to each other, and both are very dissimilar to the suction cap analogy. Suction cap works by passively utilizing atmospheric pressure, this utilizes moving a large amount of air in the direction opposite to the road. The only difference is that it's taking the air from below instead of pushing from above. I imagine that is the case to utilize the same outlets that are used for lifting the car.
False.
The air from the fans is ejected out of rear of the vehicle, not the top. The kinetic energy of that air is neglible at best. The vehicle uses retractible fairings to create a partial seal and the fans create a low pressure zone inside the zone that holds the vehicle to road.
The cold gas thrusters are a completely different system that expels high pressurized air from canisters in the vehicle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaparral_2J
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46#BT46B_%E2%80%93_t...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
I don't know of any others, and it's a horrible idea for anything used on public roads.. even on the race track these cars were notorious for leaving a cloud of debris/dust in their wake
It’s entirely real, and nothing “shocking” from a physics standpoint.
On todays to gear video they said the car weighs < 1700kg
However, the COPV-powered reaction thrusters could shred anyone on the wrong side of the vehicle. Even in the non-invite-only 0 to 60 in .6s version, that is also a problem, correct? Meanwhile:
> Tesla 'Cannot Guarantee' Your Roadster Pre-Order Will Ever Be Delivered
https://insideevs.com/news/812247/tesla-roadster-preorder-de...
That's the idea Elon capitalises on with showmanship. The story is worth more than the substance.
(Link to Volvo's Epic Split: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FIvfx5J10)
But practicality aside, you have to be an absolute fool to believe any promises Elon makes at this point. Whether it's the automatic charging cable snake, or your car picking you up and dropping you off at the airport, or renting out your car as a self driving ride share, or your cybertruck also being a boat, or the dozens of other empty promises that he's made, there's just no reason to think he's telling the truth about anything until you can try it for yourself.
While I can appreciate, and he has joked publicly about having "pathological optimism," that he is more aggressive with timelines than the reality of the alignment between technology, practicality (cost, etc.), and regulations, most of what you have listed continues to be progressively released.
Is he careful with his speech in terms of distinguishing a "big audacious goal" from a shipping reality in the near term? Absolutely not.
So going through some of your list..
>automatic charging snake (you left off hot swappable batteries btw)
So prototypes were made and demoed, but ultimately they landed with wireless charging pads.. they are already starting to deploy this for real world testing.
https://www.teslaoracle.com/2026/08/19/tesla-tsla-gears-up-f...
>your car picking you up and dropping you off
I'll preface this that I'm nearing 99% FSD on my Tesla, and most of that 1% was the early miles when I first got it.
Robotaxis exist and hundreds of them in multiple cities are autonomously driving passengers every day. They continue to scale those numbers monthly.
They also have 14 billion FSD miles and growing.
I use summon every day to have my Tesla unpark itself and pick me up at the front door of my office. Short of me holding down a "come to me" button on my phone, it performs this action fully autonomous.
Banish (the opposite that sends the car away) exists but is not publicly available due to safety, operational and regulatory reasons (for example where does the car go if it can't find a parking spot?)
Currently this tech is limited to line of sight (~200 Feet) but the speed and distance continues to increase over time with updates.. again as the tech and regulations come together. Eventually, as we see with Robotaxi, the ability to drive you to work, drop you off, go back home and park and return when you're off work is not science fiction. The end to end solution exists today, the technology and laws/regulation need to come together.
If your complaint is that cars purchased in 2016 can't do this, sure I'll concede.. but modem HW4 is more than capable and the tech and laws are continuing to adapt.
>renting out
A far future vision sold as near term, for sure.. but it's not a matter of if but when as tech and regulations close the gap. Robotaxis are essentially doing this today.
These are not "empty promises" more so than long term visions (that do manifest) sold as short term shippable options.
By that logic any lie is simply a promise that hasn't been fulfilled yet.
> cars purchased in 2016 can't do this, sure I'll concede.
He made the promise in 2019! HW3 will almost certainly never have unsupervised FSD (let alone FSD without a human in the car), and HW4 didn't ship until what, 2023? There's more model years in existence where that promise is flatly broken than there are where it's maybe a possibility someday down the road.
But he also promised FSD rideshare in 2016, which arguably makes it even worse of a broken promise. Ten years later not only is it still a broken promise, they're actively working to ship a product that isn't what they promised.
He has a long enough track record of actually delivering. Elon is not a new entity with an unknown track record. He's been active in running and growing companies for 31 years. He's been involved with Tesla for 22 years.
You're attributing statements as lies which I feel is too strong a term as it implies intent, which as far as I can tell, doesn't exist.
>He made the promise in 2019! HW3 will almost certainly never have unsupervised FSD
In the same vein of calling something a "lie", you anchor to another strong term "promise", which is also not applicable in this case.
What Elon actually said is that HW3 "had everything needed for Full Self-Driving"
In 2016, Tesla officially announced that all vehicles then in production had “the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.”
Elon followed up that "All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you need to do is improve the software."
Both of those statements are true and HW3 is active with FSD today.
He went on record stating:
"Anyone who purchased full self-driving will get FSD computer upgrade for free. This is the only change between Autopilot HW2.5 & HW3. Going forward “HW3” will just be called FSD Computer, which is accurate. No change to vehicle sensors or wire harness needed. This is v important. "
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1111762533520531456
He also honored this. Customers that purchased HW3 and the FSD package were provided upgrades when needed to support the modern 14.x FSD releases.
You're correct that they stated that HW3 would provide unsupervised self driving, when it was technically and legally possible and did publicly reverse course on that.
"Unfortunately, Hardware 3, I wish it were otherwise, but Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD. We did think at one point it would have that, but relative to Hardware 4 it has only 1/8th of the memory bandwidth of Hardware 4. And memory bandwidth is one of the key elements needed for unsupervised FSD."
This isn't a "lie" to plan for something and have those plans fall through, the intent was to deliver and it didn't happen.
He followed up that HW3 owners who bought FSD would get options like a discounted trade-in toward HW4/AI4 cars or a computer + camera retrofit (which would require special facilities). HW3 cars continue to receive supervised FSD updates (including a “Lite” version of later software), but unsupervised FSD is off the table without new hardware.
So providing monetary compensation in terms of trade in options or retrofits in support of transitioning them to unsupervised when available.
If we've already established that he makes ambitious goals and sometimes delivers late or pivots as needed due to technical or legal limitations, I'm not sure what you're on about.
Your tone suggests he is selling snake oil and never delivering, which just isn't the case. His companies have been years ahead of the competition in space and electric vehicle tech and self driving.
>But he also promised FSD rideshare in 2016, which arguably makes it even worse of a broken promise.
Saying something in 2016 does not make it a promise to deliver in 2016.
What he actually said:
"I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy, safer than humans, but regulations should take at least another year."
He also described autonomous driving as "basically a solved problem."
Both those statements are true.. Tesla's are (and have been for years) safer than human drivers with FSD enabled, and those like me that are 99% FSD consider it full autonomous for all practical purposes. Yes I can't sleep in the car, but I get in, verbally say where I want to go and don't touch the controls.. it backs out, drives me, parks and I get out. Every day, thousands and thousands of FSD miles a month on a car I bought in 2023.
>Ten years later not only is it still a broken promise, they're actively working to ship a product that isn't what they promised.
To the contrary, again, what he actually said was:
"As the technology matures, all Tesla vehicles will have the hardware necessary to be fully self-driving with fail-operational capability, meaning that any given system in the car could break and your car will still drive itself safely. When true self-driving is approved by regulators, it will mean that you will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere. Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else en route to your destination. You will also be able to add your car to the Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app and have it generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation, significantly offsetting and at times potentially exceeding the monthly loan or lease cost. In cities where demand exceeds the supply of customer-owned cars, Tesla will operate its own fleet…"
These are all factual statements.. given we've already established aggressive timelines that don't match reality, it really is just beating a dead horse.
Deriving statements like
"The basic news is that all Tesla vehicles exiting the factory have the hardware necessary for Level 5 autonomy… Every car we make… are shipping now with Level 5, meaning hardware capable of full self-driving, or driverless, capability. "
and
"Our goal is, and I feel pretty good about this goal, that we’ll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York, from home in LA to let’s say dropping you off in Times Square in New York, and then having the car go park itself, by the end of next year. Without the need for a single touch, including the charger.”"
Most of that has already happened:
In 2025
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-fsd-successfully-completes-f...
And again in 2026
https://www.thedrive.com/news/a-tesla-actually-drove-itself-...
The Banish (drop you off and park) is not publicly available yet (regulations/operational) and wireless charging is just now being rolled out.. but again, the substance of his statement is true and will evolve over time to be fully realized.
So if you're arguing he has "pathological optimism" of overstating delivery times, I agree fully.
But suggesting he is lying or intentionally breaking promises within his control, I don't agree.
It is if you say it and people buy your product and do not get what they paid for. Everything Elon has said have to be delivered to the buyer. Otherwise it is a lie - false marketing - which is also illegal. You should be paid by him with the time you use at protecting him from his own crap.
If you read through my reply and the specific statements that Elon or Tesla has made, with the exception of HW2.5 and early HW3 (in which they provided monetary compensation in terms of enhanced trade in and upgrade options), statements beyond that are pretty clear to be future and forward thinking. I specifically quoted them above.
>You should be paid by him with the time you use at protecting him from his own crap.
I'm simply articulating the facts of what have actually been said and done without the emotional interpretation. Terms like "lie" and "false marketing" and "illegal" have specific meaning.
I don't want to rehash all of the actual quotes they've made, I did that in a prior reply. Those statements stand on their own and I'm not defending them in any way, only to say that with exception of the 2.5/early 3HW, they did not read as "promises or guarantees" or even definitive timelines in any way.
There is an active case to determine "claims accusing the electric vehicle maker of misleading them about the capabilities of its full self-driving technology", that as of this morning the US appeals court (a three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court) did not qualify for class action status. So legally the courts would be the right venue to make that determination.
This is insanity. How are shareholders still supporting this man?
I don't see how a Ponzi scheme involving paying to reserve a future product is even possible. One of us does not understand what "Ponzi scheme" means.
The Roadster is about marketing as racing is to every other car manufacturer.
They do not need the measly deposits for this car to sustain Tesla, not even close.
Space lasers, man.
I never claimed he’s out there wrenching on starship. The claim is that he builds companies that do spectacular things, which is why his spectacular claims for the future achievements of those same companies are not taken immediately as fantastic as they would be if spoken by any other person alive.
Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine. Smallpox killed 300 million in the 20th century alone and was eradicated in 1980.
Or maybe Norman Borlaug, who invented a kind of high yield wheat that is estimated to have saved a billion from starvation.
These certainly aren’t the kind of achievements Musk aims for (quite the opposite in fact) but I’d argue they have a far, far greater impact than anything he has even tried to do.
He’s got cooler demos though, I’ll grant you that.
Your obsequiousness is disgusting.
Who wouldn’t want to invest in a company that can achieve zero interest, risk free loans that might not even need to be paid back in full?
Why are people putting down these gigantic deposits for what is obviously vapor ware?
Back of the fag pack, let’s say it is light for an electric car and weights 1000kg. I’ll also go on a limb and guess the air flow is actually subsonic - 200m/s would make it 0.6 Ma (still insanely fast!). Even then, that requires 50 kg of air every second. Or 40 m^3. Using everyone’s favorite metric, this empties an Olympic swimming pool in 1 minute. It also requires a MW of power. I mean… that’s a lot??? Though admittedly, only about as much as accelerating 0-60 in 1 sec (50% of that in fact). So the flying would draw as much power as accelerating at full throttle.
Power requirements would go down a lot with slower exhaust speed, but then you need to shift more fluid. 40 m^3 already seems like a lot to me.
I get it’s a neat little demo and they have to get SpaceX into the picture somehow, but still I don’t understand how it’s supposed to add up. Also, what do I know - just a humble physicist.
napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.
Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?
British officers planning trench raids in the front lines during WWI. Or, at least, that's where I've been told the expression originates.
Really, though, is it impossible to imagine no one, ever, using a cigarette pack to jot something down? It's a colloquialism. It doesn't even have to be taken literally to make sense. What is gained by questioning it on that level?
Wouldn't the back have printing on it? I could imagine someone ripping the pack open and writing on the insides, which are blank.
https://britishmilitarybadges.co.uk/products/princess-mary-1...
That Christmas box itself, by the way, is beautiful. Brass, with an embossed portrait of Princess Mary, and scrollwork on the cover. My former father-in-law had one, that had been brought back by his father from France - missing, ironically enough in the context of this conversation, only the cigarettes, which he didn't smoke, but used in trade.
I took the OP's question to really be a question about the origin of that phrase, and with your answer, I learned something I didn't know before. So I, for one, am happy the question was asked.
The OP's question was clearly skeptical though:
---
napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.
Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?
---
Implication being that writing on the back of cig packs does not make sense. I'd agree with your reading if not for the "at least kind of make sense" bit.
in india.
I'm imagining this in two phases: phase one - you drive around, and excess energy goes to compressing air. Phase two - you use that compressed air which takes very little additional power, so you get to double up on force. I guess likely a 'running mode' where it's using some power to keep suction on.
I'm curious how much time you get at full blast vs 'just' enough to keep the car pinned to a wall, e.g. 1 vs 2 g.
It still doesn’t make much sense to me. And that’s before considering what happens when you get rocket stream hitting a tarmac road. Never mind public roads, this sounds like a major hazard anywhere. Plus the quantity of compressed gas son board (if that’s how it works)… not a pretty crash. At these numbers, imagine 10MJ released all of a sudden - apparently that’s about 2.5kg of TNT.
Surely I’m missing something… as I say, I can’t make sense of it.
ETA: this is a horrifying amount of energy to be sitting on top of.
Ok. 0.5% of all cars exploding still doesn't sound reassuring.
> the last 2 years over more than 250 launches is at 100%.
Sure, if we tune the statistics such that we only look at those that didn't fail, then nothing failed. I love magic tricks!
In the US alone, people make some 600m trips a day, so that "reliability" would result in about 2.5m to 1m failures a day.
It's an electric car - unless you've got an incredibly long charging cable, there is no "excess energy" when you're driving around.
So probably the compressor will run all the time.
You’ll have to do a lot of modelling to work out the best time to use the rockets, my instinct is that fast cornering is the best use of the rockets. Maybe with a boost button to get you off the line fast at the beginning.
From the marketing materials it looks like straight line acceleration is being prioritised tho, so you charge the tank during braking and cornering.
(2200lb) Also, that is completely impossible.
Lightest Tesla is ~3600lb, typical Model 3 is over 4000lb.
To get a sense of how light 2200lb would be, a 2026 Miata is heavier than that. A tiny Fiat 500e with limited range is ~3000lb.
It is flat out impossible for this Tesla Roadstar to weight 2200lb if it has any batteries in it.
That said, the production issues with the Cybertruck mean you’d be a fool to reserve one of these. Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls. Tesla has torched their engineering reputation lately and this page is making a lot of promises about revolutionary things.
Given some of the tauted 'features' of this thing, I'd be more concerned about it blowing up in my driveway.
The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.
This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.
Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).
That's pretty standard. An M3 has long pushed the tolerances of things in the engine more than a base-model 3 series. An S-class has more whiz-bang-hope-it-still-works-in-ten-years stuff than a C-class. A Lexus has more going on than a boring base Corolla.
Christian von Königsegg mentioned in a radioshow (Sommar i P1, Swedish) a while back that the reason he got into luxury cars is that it was what he could afford having the mechanic skills and time but not a heap of research or automation money.
Tesla has very different reasons for doing what they did on the cybertruck. It's very much a form over function. Lotus has always been function over form (to a fault, in terms of their financial position).
You can add glass microspheres to adhesives to guarantee bondline thickness. It's often done nowadays whenever you have different metals meeting with a glue bond because it keeps them electrically isolated, preventing galvanic corrosion.
The issue isn't glue, its that parts are falling off.
9 years since the announcement of Roadster v2, people who paid 50k deposits are still waiting.
Time to up the promises, and ask for more $50k deposits for v3!
there's a whole lot of systemic issues with wealthy people buying low-poly cars to their collection.
It's not a zero sum game, after all.
We're talking at a rate of 1000000000x in some cases but even in general what is the argument that it's obviously a good thing that few have much more purchasing power than most?
>It's not a zero sum game, after all.
No but I would argue that it's likely more beneficial to have a vibrant middle class over a few extremely wealthy individuals.
Saving up money naturally leads to wealth inequality. And the saved money can be used to earn more money.
> have a vibrant middle class
Are there countries with less wealth inequality that have a more "vibrant" middle class (whatever that means)?
Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ on an yearly basis until you get sick of fixing the suspension. Tesla claims to have fixed the issue on newer models (and apparently they did a lot of work on the suspension), but they don't really take responsibility for their old cars so I doubt they will take responsibility when their design causes problems for you.
I do enjoy driving my 2019 SR+ Model 3, but I hate when people do the whole "Well on first principles, EVs have less parts so they are more reliable..." thing. My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
FWIW, I'm into my fourth year of (Chinese-built) Model 3 ownership and it's been rock solid, the only services so far were to replace the air filter and wipers.
Rip away center tunnel carpet on rhs (lhd vehicle), remove 2 screws from below glove compartment, fold away panel, remove cap from filter compartment, remove 2 filters - put back together in reverse order.
That's literally a 20 minute job if you about know what you should be doing - a.k.a. read about the process in the free service manual of Tesla (only need an account, free) or watched a YT video...
Besides that, EVs are just really heavy and weight wears out tires. Just a fact of life.
https://www.michelinman.com/auto/auto-tips-and-advice/electr...
Apparently it's not just the weight, it's the instantaneous torque and noise that need to be considered. Lower noise and higher torque tolerance would, to me, imply a softer rubber compound is used, which would reduce longevity.
On the other hand, they also mention range and rolling resistance, which suggest that a harder compound might be used. Harder rubber typically corresponds to better longevity.
It's an interesting topic. Has anyone done a proper apples-to-apples test of EV tires versus their nearest equivalent "normal" tires?
Grandparent said they were on year four and seemed to be saying they were on the first set of tires, which surprises me.
This is less about EVs vs ICEs and more about Toyota's engineering quality vs Tesla's engineering quality, which is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Homer Simpson's barbecue pit.
(Also my Tesla is 74.5k miles, so nowhere near 100k)
-edit-
I was a victim of misinformation from my local EV repair shop.
https://www.dormanproducts.com/pages/products/oe-fix/article...
The prices you are talking about are incorrect but there are 3rd party parts now.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/NextGenT...
(just personal preference)
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Lamborgh...
Sound advice for people looking for a practical car. But if you have Lambo money who cares? I have never seen a supercar described as reliable.
I always heard they were a pain to get serviced with long wait times. Not sure how well they hold their value either.
Even if they make this work, what exactly is it revolutionizing?
Every generation of high-dollar sports cars has had something you could point to and say "that was way ahead of its time" or "they pioneered that." A few examples: fuel injection in the 1950s, variable valves and CFD the 1980s-1990s, dual-clutch transmissions in the 2000s, hybridization and electrification more recently.
You cannot tell me with a straight face that 20 years from now, my commuter will be outfitted with cold-gas thrusters and fans sucking it into the pavement.
Supercars have always been gaudy playthings for the wealthy. I think the difference is that Tesla doesn't even pretend the Roadster represents anything else.
Though they have not confirmed it, it’s basically a given it has teslas new networking, and is 48v which both lead to vastly less wiring (lighter, cheaper)
ALL of those things will be in every automobile within 10 years.
There are 20 year old family sedans with brake by wire. Unless you're referring to EMB specifically.
Anything invented before you are ~30 is cool, new, exciting.
Anything invented after you are ~40 is bad, wrong, not good.
If Waymo sets the bar for a "good" AV, riding in a cyber cab must be downright traumatizing. And now I know that its brakes are an open-road science experiment. Great.
This isn't anything practical. It's just cool. Like a hoverboard. Or landing on the moon.
I'd argue it's not the Cybertruck that is evidence of lack of care, but the fact that this car was promised 10 years ago and Elon took people's money to fund it. And now it's going to "fly" somehow and it's still years away.
- Performance: road ready, seats two, active aero and a “multi-mode suction system.” 0-60 mph in under 1.6 seconds. Available by reservation.
- Thrust: race ready, seats two, adds rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters. 0-60 mph in under 0.9 seconds. Limited release.
- Rocket: seats one, adds thrusters around the perimeter of the car for upward and rotational movement. 0-60 mph in under 0.59 seconds and a top speed of over 230 mph. Invite only.
Per Electrek: https://electrek.co/2026/10/15/tesla-unveils-cyberfied-new-r...
Hahah, the failure modes are going to be exciting.
This would be the opposite of that, though.
Yes, and at high speed, it helps make sure you don't take flight accidentally.
When you don't have enough:
Like any of this will materialise. Where’s the original Roadster people actually put down payments on?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(second_generat...
I want clean water. I want a stable climate. I want bees to survive.
You can whine all day about climate and I'll have the flying car
I wonder how many still believe this. It’s like Tom Hanks in Big is in charge of both a car and rocket company. Sure it’s awesome but not what we need right now.
The problem is that the same "we" won't let you build it.
I can see how a young, fit and childless 20 something would be much happier with a good public transport system, but once you stop fitting that narrow model, your affection for urban dreams dies slowly.
And don't get me started on the price for construction and maintenance.
I know exactly zero people that use public transport because of safety, specifically homeless/druggies. And yes, we all tried. I was an idiot and went with a kid, for my first and last time, after listening to a local, with mental blinders on.
Cities poll these things. Look up your local public transport polls, to see what others think. If you're in SF, for example, you wont be remotely surprised by the results [1].
[1] https://www.independentnews.com/news/regional_and_ca/bart-su...
And, you haven't said a word about even the possibility that good public healthcare, including mental healthcare funding, and a good social safety net vastly reduces those terribly inconvenient people in the streets with nowhere to go.
But in that case you'd have to blame the people in charge instead of the people.
More to the point, there’s a parallel system that came out of the same lawsuit that found the subway system illegally inaccessible to people with mobility needs. Those people can use MTA-funded “Access-a-ride” service, which offers private, scheduled door-to-door transportation for the price of a subway ride. It’s a really expensive way to do it, but a remarkable lifeline for the people I know who, for example, need occasional transportation to and from medical appointments.
Sure, you can use buses, but the buses are way less frequent than the trains, and you're waiting for them out in the cold, heat, or rain, often with no cover and no bench. If there's service on a subway line, it's possible there's no accessible route to where you're going, which could require a few bus transfers as an alternative.
Access-a-ride is a great concept, but one that shouldn't need to exist, and doesn't cover the full spectrum of folks who rely on accessible transport.
I'm a huge proponent of public transportation, and haven't owned a car in 15 years, but let's not give NYC a pass on this. Every station should have at least one elevator, and should be fully accessible.
(1) Does not pick you up from your home and does not drop you off at where you need to go.
(2) Does not start at your schedule. Missed by a hair? Wait up to 2h.
(3) Impossible to transport more than you can carry.
(4) Does not scale. When there are too many people, some will have to wait for the next train or bus. When there are too few people everything still moves around nearly empty.
(5) Being exposed to the public, which could mean drug addicts and insane people that will stab you in the neck for no reason. But mostly just smelly lowlifes that might take a piss in front of you.
No matter how great your public transport is, it cannot solve these inherent issues while being cheaper than a car.
4. Most cars move around nearly empty. When there are too many people (often 1 per car), you get stuck in jams. So cars do not scale either. In this regard public transportation arguably scale better.
1. Bicycles, electric scooters or even walking answer 90% of that concern unless your city is designed against its users.
3. When you need to carry lotta stuff then yes, use a car (either yours or rental). Does it justify bringing your whole car when you do not need to carry anything?
5. True, but I am concerned about what that means about your relationship with society. Or the society you live in.
2. You would NOT wait up to 2 hours in any decent public transportation system.
So yes, cars are still the best solution in some cases. No one argues against that. It is just a poor default.
Getting stuck in jams is down to badly designed roads. For example the use of traffic lights, whose only job it is to stop the flow of traffic.
---
If you need to take a bike or walk, then why not just go to your destination that way? I'll also have you know that not every passenger can have a bike when riding a bus or train. Capacity doesn't allow for this.
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What use is a rental car for carrying lots of stuff? First you need to go to where the rental car is and then you have to bring it back. Unless the rental car can drive by itself to where you are and drive by itself back it seem really cumbersome.
The issue with carrying stuff is that this will come up eventually and once you already own a car since you have to, why not use it when you don't necessarily have to, just because it is convenient?
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Can't do much about society. We unfortunately do not lock up insane people anymore and there are even talks of putting mentally disabled people into normal public schools. We live in crazy times.
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You WILL definitely wait up to 2h, maybe even longer. In fact, you will just be happy that eventually something does show up to take you home. Of course, you can then declare that whatever system you have is not a "decent" transportation system, but it will be reality, unless you live in a state capital and only travel within the city. Once you need to travel to a different state all bets are off.
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My argument isn't that that cars are better and more convenient than public transport, my argument is that public transport has inherent issues that are impossible to solve and can therefore never replace the role cars have in society as the default.
I hope for a future with cars on demand, where they drive to your home by themselves, you use them, and then they drive off by themselves. But even that won't work very well as it means other people using these cars and thus their cleanliness being in jeopardy. Guess the only way to solve that is by using something I don't want: a surveillance state.
Your experience is obviously about North American car dependent cities, which have all the issues you mention, but it definitely is not that way everywhere. Europe, Asia, and some cities or parts of cities in North America have great public transit that is more convenient and faster than driving.
Having a solution where cars drive people everywhere is definitely not a universally better system. Sprawl and car-centric design makes other (and in many people’s opinion) more pleasant forms of transportation difficult.
For example there are many dense cities and towns where you can find (almost) every amenity within a 3 minute walk: grocery store, barber, bar, cafe, school, etc. Obviously there are some trade-offs, and some people may prefer to live in less dense areas, but that is easily achievable within 10-15 min walking distance to those amenities while still being very car accessible
I live in one. What you are talking about is fantasy. I'm German and live in a large city.
The reality of it is that within the city I just walk everywhere, because taking the tram isn't worth it for small errands. Neither in time nor in money.
When I need to travel to a different state, using public transit is awful. It doesn't only need to be decent in one city. It needs to be decent across the whole country. Because if it is not, I still need a car. And when I have a car, I might as well use it, since it's more convenient.
I don't even care if you're going to say my rebuttal is sh*t. I will not be putting any effort into refuting your blind allegiance to the car over public transport.
They downscale pretty well, although the roads and parking space are still there. In practice downscaling does not happen much, though.
> If you need to take a bike or walk, then why not just go to your destination that way?
Because it would take me a whole day walking and only an hour walking + train ? Also, not every passenger needs a bicycle.
As for carrying stuff, I do have a small car. I still mostly move by bycicle and public transportation because it is often faster, easier, cheaper and I dont have to bring a metric ton a metal to carry my 80kg of body meat.
The car is for visiting remote places with the kids, for example. Public transportation just doesn't work there, agreed.
For the record I never had any real issue with anyone in trains or buses.
I did have to wait for 2h occasionally when there some accident on the line but I also got stuck in jams for hours because of some accident downstream. So it's a tie for me. This said, I never had to wait for 2h because I missed a bus in a well deserved area.
I believe it depends heavily on the place we live in. FWIW I'm in a second tier French city, about 200k inhabitants.
Where are you?
Technically, no.
But if you need that car once or twice a week to carry things then you already have the car. If you have it, it would be difficult to justify a 2h30m commute to work on public transit (my scenario) when I can just drive in 40 minutes with that car I already have.
What I really wish for is a lot more support for safe bike trails. I can commute to work in ~2 hours in a bike (still faster than public transport). I think with an e-bike I could cut that to barely more than an hour, and get some exercise and fresh air every day. But I do it only rarely because the route involves many stretches of dangerous avenues with barely a bike lane.
Many people do it. I did it myself for a few years. It sucks.
I agree with your sentiment about bike trails!
To be clear, it is only 2h30m by public transit.
Driving there is only 40 minutes which is, not ideal, but not that bad.
Doesn't sound like it? What kind of functional transport has a once a 2 hour schedule? I see this in rural areas but not in cities with good public transport.
It's common for trains going to different cities to only come by every two hours. If you are somewhere more rural it might only come once per day, if at all.
> If you are somewhere more rural it might only come once per day, if at all.
No one is arguing a complete replacement of cars, especially in rural areas. This is a strawman.
Most of your arguments throughout this thread are, really.
You'd think so, but the trains are regularly arriving late. It's not like a single train will always bring you to your destination. You'll have to switch trains multiple times and when one of your trains is late, you won't make it in time for the next and will have to wait.
> No one is arguing a complete replacement of cars
You might not be, but I've had this discussion countless times with people advocating for banning cars. I'm not against public transport, I'm just saying it has unresolvable issues that prevent it from being as useful as a car.
Maybe I'm lucky in my commute, I live in a small town in the UK, and head into London once a week- if I do miss my train it's about 20 minutes until the next at peak times.
I honestly can't think of anything worse than trying to do that journey driving though, it'd be twice as long, and very expensive to park etc.
Keyword here being 'convenient'.
We have been seduced by convenience. Moreso than simple greed, I would say. Unfortunately, convenience is killing us. It is also robbing us of satisfaction.
I guess maybe? My original comment was about the benefits of relatively good public transport vs flying cars (which seem space age but don't add a lot of value to our lives).
I think you're arguing a world with only cars might be more workable than a world with only public transport? I'm not sure that's a choice that's required by anyone though?
Rich people have always had toys.
If you’re just getting annoyed now, you have not been paying attention, or you just hate Elon/Tesla.
As it becomes clearer that my kids are having their future stolen, I am getting enraged.
They’re not making sense.
Capitalism is great for the rich, and the rich make the rules.
You're thinking of xai. ;)
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/boca-chica-spacex...
Youre letting youself be exploited by doomerist clickbait.
Who is "We"?
https://uswatergrade.com/worst-contaminated/
And the most damning part:
https://www.lawcommentary.com/articles/federal-appeals-court...
As long as oligarchs get their unrestricted factories, that's all that matters. If drinking water is poisoned, that is a price they are willing you to pay.
If you want all that you listed, you can't start clean water company, or stable climate company, or bee survival company, and offer all that you want. No?
By rough estimate, using hydroxide jet packs as a reference, I’d say they got it down to about 600kg.
I find it genuinely hilarious that anyone could possibly think this is a good idea.
Or make a few! https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
> SpaceX thinks it knows why its newest Starship spacecraft went boom this week. "Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing," the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19).
AI Elon pressure selling "act decisively, double your money" by transferring crypto to some wallet and getting 2x back - yeah, right
(PS Google shut it down)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD2__BcAxSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9hdO8avWbo
https://journal.classiccars.com/2026/10/16/delorean-enters-f...
Patently absurd, of course, but amazing too.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-spac...
Until they sold all their compute to anthropic, Ai was the boat anchor.
No way in hell is Twitter making a lick of profit.
For a while, didn't Amazon do the same? They basically ran a loss with Amazon retail but profits on AWS, until they spun off?
So yes, this is fairly common with conglomerates, (Amazon sold diapers at a loss to put diapers.com out of business). And in fact, this tactic is a target for anti-trust laws where they exist.
In the US, GE makes your microwave, aircraft engines, and also the gas turbine your power plant uses.
Siemens makes appliances, MRI machines, and even nuclear reactors I believe.
Or in Korea: Samsung, Hyundai, LG. Samsung makes chips, TVs, washing machines.
Japan: Mistubishi makes washing machines and excavators and mining equipment.
India: Reliance has cell phone service, grocery stores, and oil rigs. Tata makes cars, has tier 1 datacenters, and runs hotels too.
This is hardly a novel idea.
The only recent exception is Samsung because of memory suddenly costing 10x.
Long-term investors would lose about 40% of their investment to subsidize the inflated valuation of X (bought by xAI), the inflated valuation of xAI (bought by SpaceX), and SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
The valuation of both companies was inflated prior to acquisition, and Tesla shareholders will be asked to dilute their investment by absorbing that cumulative inflation.
Not even to mention that Musk would have exclusive control over the entire conglomerate, with not even the pretense of a Board to check his power.
When even Steven Mark Ryan is like "let's pump the breaks a little bit," you know it's bad.
Well, that and being the only reusable rocket company ever with an even bigger version on the horizon and a global Internet service that's about to get a whole lot better thanks to aforementioned rocket. Both of which are hugely profitable.
We do, at least at the time of the merger, as it existed as separate parts prior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceXAI#Finance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering_of_Spa...
He wants control, so that he can use investor’s cash to do epic stuff like humanoid robots, cyber trucks, an AI that tells you that apartheid was actually cool, rocket cars, real life brain controlled robot bacon chungus, etc.
“Other shareholder meetings are snoozefests but ours are bangers. Look at this. This is sick.”
Elon’s pay package: he gets 400 million Tesla shares if he raises the market cap of tesla(xspacextwitterxAIx) to $8.5 trillion (nominal). He spent a cool 250 mil on making friends with the republicans, so as to ensure that his incoming epic awesome merger is not blocked.
A merger, plus the amount of inflation this government has already produced over the next decade, will probably see X co hitting Elon’s salary goals.
Car looks half decent too.
To me it looks like a mashup of a Ferrari and a Cybertruck. That's not a good thing.
There was optimus robots already on Tesla side and inference / r&d funded by x.ai (now spacex).
That sounds extremely explosive and not something any random person should be irresponsibly driving around.
This thing is literally a fucking bomb if it fails, through accident or degradation.
The down-force negative pressure aspect they gleaned from McMurtry though? Really cool. Genuinely useful. I just hope they don't claim it as their own invention.
Which they will, because Musk is all ego.
> You can think of the COPV like the fuel tank in a compressed natural gas (CNG)- or liquid propane gas (LPG)-powered vehicle, except the nitrogen mixture in the COPV is stored at a much higher pressure, up to 10,000 psi, similar to the pressures in modern hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
LPG cars have somewhere between 100 and 300 psi.
10,000 PSI? That is beyond absurd. I can not imagine what alloy and how wrapped that pressure vessel is... Or what type of crazy pump is recharging it!
They'll happily burst (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ-__PlU4gM) and blow up your vehicle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71AwkBt3_ts).
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
"'Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing,' the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19)."
> LPG explosions are real combustion due to tank rupture…
They're mostly designed to vent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupture_disc) to prevent a BLEVE. Big fire, big mess, but without oxidizer in the tank and much lower pressures, relatively safe by comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQDyNjCNxVY
The other two videos are triggered by the copv failing, but the explosion is due to the methane and lox.
My point still stands. The composite overwrap either survives a collision (crash tests will determine this) or doesn't (the vehicle will not be legal for sale in the US and Europe). The crash conditions are inside the design limitations, just like the batteries are and just like a standard fuel tank is.
Sure. For the car, the COPV rupturing is gonna look more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byford_Dolphin.
> the vehicle will not be legal for sale in the US and Europe
I think that's already safe to assume.
CRS-7, Amos-6, Starship 36, and Super Heavy 18.
This is hot wheels. It's pretty clear Musk finally had enough of the culture wars at X and decided to go interfere with Tesla some more. Instead of producing a car people might actually want, he made them do this. This is the worst waste of a company you're likely to see in your life.
TSLA is probably not a good stock to be holding right now.
But TBF if they offered the SpaceX thrusters as an option, the SF effective altruists would slurp them right up to be their daily drivers even if they have to be strapped in next to a tank of toxic boom boom to use them. And Sam Altman would cry into his protein-supplemented energy drink because his Koenigsegg doesn't have them and I'd happily hand over 50 Quatloos to watch that.
Looks like the base version would be the one for that.
1. The kind of person who buys a sports-car often doesn't want the "base version". They want luxury. They want status. They don't want to face the choice of being upsold to an impractical deathtrap or driving around in the "base version" like someone who could barely just afford it.
2. This demo does absolutely nothing to demonstrate the abilities of the base version. I reiterate, a brick could have been made to fly in this way. The base version will no doubt have good paper stats because Musk understands that numbers must be big, but that doesn't mean the base model will be pleasant to drive.
3. The styling of this car is "wankpanzer with a few extra polygons". Given how well the wankpanzer sold, demand for this thing, even if the base model is a competent auto, will be limp.
4. Musk is currently trying to buy another election. With Musk visibly taking an interest in Tesla again, that's likely to backfire on Tesla. They need to cut ties with Musk, not keep doing the sort of puerile things he's known and frequently lambasted for.
5. When does this silly thing even release? They say 2028, but do we believe them? How long has it been since the last model released? We're talking half a decade between models. What the heck are they doing at Tesla? Making bricks fly apparently.
My only issue with it is that beyond being impressive and very cool, it's pretty useless.
First you have to build SpaceX.
Making a car with a heavy EV battery and powertrain fly like that is probably not something they're able to do.
I'd bet most of them see this as a cooler, shinier toy.
https://x.com/dhh/status/2110983188910923926?s=20
Why the second hand outrage. If you didn't buy a car and feel bad about the wait time, just enjoy the demo! :D
Everyone here can probably still remember the time to the minute that Steve Jobs in 2007 said "an internet communicator, a music player, a phone" and the 3-faced cube transformed into a single device. That's what gimmicky demos are for.
Maybe. Another possibility is a feeling of opposition to the idea that the world's richest person continue to accumulate wealth, while using said wealth to dishonestly manipulate elections, support openly fascist and bigoted political parties, and, most recently, tip the scales of international conflict (by limiting Starlink use by Ukraine).
You might love his products, but Elon Musk should not have more power. That's a statement not based in envy, but in a revulsion for what he spends that money on, and how it impacts innocent people.
75.7% SpaceX
15.1% Tesla
1.3% The Boring Company
7.6% Other
I expect that motivates exactly zero percent of the criticism that Musk gets.
--
Sent from my iPhone
The demos for the future tech are fun for sure, but the Cybertruck and Tesla Semi started this exact same way. The Cybertruck arrived incredibly late, wildly missing even conservative estimates of it's capabilities, and at damn near double the price they teased, AND the units that have shipped have been a fucking mess, to such a degree where Tesla seemingly can't even give them away. And the Tesla Semi has still failed to materialize at all.
So yeah it's a bit of a joke to me to have them hocking a flying car, when their pickup truck can't even drive up a steep unpaved hill, that even my old clapped out F-150 on it's SUV tires would manage just fine.
Edit: and to clarify, I know that it can do that, because I helped a friend move some exercise equipment he bought at auction back to his house, and he has an open-back basement. We backed my truck with trailer down the hill, unloaded it through his basement patio door, and the truck then had to climb back up to the road. And I was a little nervous to be honest, but it did do that, despite as I said having SUV tires on 22-inch rims LOL
By that logic any performance car is useless. There are, albeit few, people that do track these cars.
most of the things a Tesla Roadster is advertised with is not street legal.
He just misses with his products these days: Cyber Truck, Robotaxi, Grok...
Still hoping.
Could it theoretically help to avoid *some* crashes? Yes
But in most cases, it'll just trade a frontal crash for a crash against obstacles off/above the road... Which is way more dangerous for pedestrians, buildings, etc.
Driver assistance can in some cases brake before an obstacles. But we've also seen Teslas drive into obstacles. Regardless if it's going to be driver assistance or a human with too much confidence in their ability to avoid obstacles... I wouldn't want to be near a Roadster leaping off the asphalt
The one that flies has two COPVs- watch the top gear video
The negativity and nay saying on HN is next level.
Do you say the same thing every time McLaren/ferrari/bugatti/porsche announce the new hotness?
Who does the Bugatti veyron benefit? Or a super yacht? Or 3000 other things.
This engineering in this demo was only designed o get lucrative government contracts.
I wonder what the point of this was? Seems likely related to anticipated purchase of Tesla by SpaceX. Maybe meant to (irrationally) justify a high offer price for Tesla?
Can't say I'm a fan of the styling of the car - I guess it'd look at home parked beside a Cybertruck, but something like the Porsche Mission S is way sexier.
You seem triggered by the choice of wording. Do you think the upside down rocket car doing aerial flips deserves a more product-ish name like "concept car"? I don't.
Car manufacturers have been doing pointless things for over a century [1], with no plan to even try to make them available to the public. Why is this getting so much heat?
There's no getting away from the rocket equation - reaction mass is heavy. The sheer number of design compromises that need to be made to allow a cold gas thruster system means I can't see anything but ending up with an awful car for the sake of a few seconds "air time". And the rest of the time you'll still be (at least) doubling the mass of your car from the propellant plus whatever the thrusters, tanks, linkages and everything else weights. I guess you could leave it empty, then only charge it for the "Party Trick", but it still seems a lot of compromises for the occasional "Hey, this looks cool".
And then really only usable in a nice empty, flat, controlled environment - the "real world" driving experience has things like other cars, people, buildings and street surfaces that likly wouldn't appreciate what are effectively localised hurricane-force level winds from the car next to them.
This is a car rigged for a specific stunt. And there's a reason why people don't just drive around rigged stunt cars. They suck as being "cars".
Sad that people feel the need to add this qualification. I see it regularly.
Preferably those tasked regulating his companies.
Guess he hit a nerve, eh? My condolences you got hit by the layoffs, try to not browse Reddit and Facebook all day at your next government job. Or do, but ONLY if you work for the IRS or ATF, they deserve nothing less.
You'd have loved L Ron Hubbard back in the day.
Karin Spaink (RIP) did a good number on them.
We are talking about people with STEM doctorates and 30 years of experience working 60-80 hour weeks for a 120k salary, because that's about where the GS scale caps. People are on the road for weeks, flying economy class and sleeping in roadside motels with a $50 per diem and when they visit a vendor or a lab or a client they cannot accept a meal or a beer or anything beyond a cup of coffee because of government ethics rules. I worked in an office in Washington, DC where all the staff pooled their money to buy a water cooler, and people gave voluntary donations of $2/month to join the "water cooler club" to defray the cost of maintaining an office water cooler because OPM considered that an unnecessary expense.
The first thing DOGE did, literally in the first week, they implemented a "deferred resignation plan" — they paid people 8 months of salary to not work. The smartest and most talented people saw the writing on the wall at that point — folks with PhDs from MIT or Stanford; self-made founders; crusty veteran engineers who preferred work to retirement. They took the money and they had no problem finding alternative employment, or they took it as a sign to hang up their spurs for good. Many of them were subsequently rehired by their agencies as contractors at 2-3× their previous salary when it became evident they were irreplaceable.
(I had friends in the NNSA, the branch of the US Department of Energy that manages the nuclear arsenal. DOGE fired hundreds of employees without realizing what they did, then attempted to rescind 90% of the firings months later. Plenty of the fired employees had already found new employment. Others simply did not want to return to a job with such contingent status where they would be treated disrespectfully. Several fired employees could not be rehired because they were fired so abruptly there was no way to contact them and offer reinstatement.)
You know who didn't take up the deferred resignation offer? The unproductive layabouts you claim to despise. The ones that knew they couldn't get a better job elsewhere. Yeah, there are bad employees in the federal government, same as anywhere else. DOGE bullied out all our best talent and now we're stuck with the dregs. They paid billions of dollars for people to not work for the privilege of doing so. "Department of Government Efficiency".
If you are interested in learning more about excellent and unglamorous work done by underappreciated American civil servants, I highly recommend the book The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.
It will take years for those Musk lovers to grasp how much damage their sieg heiling idol has caused.
I did not, at all. Never got laid off in my life.
I have seen my share of useless employees in private companies, though. You don't have to work for the government for that. But if it makes you feel better to think that you are useful because you are in the private sector...
I have seen my share of government funding going to private companies that completely wasted that money (or worse, used it to fuel their stupid ideas). The only thing they did well was convincing the government that they would do something useful - of course they did not. I'm sure you would take that as a reason to criticise the government, "not able to spend the money properly", but before you do: more often than not, it's VCs who invest in ridiculous projects. You want to stop wasting tax money? Stop investing in bullshit tech startups, too!
VCs are interesting: they are people put in a position where they are incompetent and dominant at the same time (i.e. they invest in technologies they don't understand, but they have the power of life or death over startups). That's a perfect recipe to create overconfident assholes (similar to getting rich, actually)!
At the very least, government employees contribute to a system that does stuff for the people. Like roads and schools. Not goddamn flying cars.
You want to be actually critical? Most white collars are doing bullshit. At least those who don't work in technology may contribute less to destroying the planet. But they don't get to be condescending assholes for that.
> they deserve nothing less.
I would be curious to learn about what useless job you do for a living.
3 or 4 data points isn’t a whole lot more than an anecdote, but it’s still more data than baseless claims line you’re throwing around here
Do you care about food safety, disease prevention, consumer protection or the ability for the government to investigate blatant corruption?
Do you think this has gotten better or worse?
Only the President and Congress were elected. The rest are all appointed.
> laid off thousands of government workers
He did at the direction of the President, who was elected. Government service is not a jobs program.
> the second order effects of that will affect millions
speculation
> All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?
Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
All you need to do is see how frequently he posts on Twitter to know he's broken and trying to fill the hole with money and attention.
I've worked with engineers "on the spectrum" my entire career. They can be difficult to get along with. None of them were evil, none intended to offend or hurt others. It would just come out wrong.
Once I understood, it wasn't an issue for me any more.
That’s an amazing claim in this context.
Musk is many things, but I've never heard anyone seriously claim him to have any particular aptitude or expertise around military strategy or conflict resolution. So if Trump is unilaterally executing on Musk's musings, we can derive two definite (and highly conservative) observations:
1. Musk has opinions
2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement
Him possibly suggesting that Trump pressure Zelenskyy to comply with his demands by temporarily crippling Starshield’s performance in an active war zone, which means making it harder for Ukraine to defend itself against Putin’s jet-powered Shahed drones, is not merely an opinion. It’s an attempt to influence policy by proposing a way to harm Ukraine, without regard for the lives at stake.
We’ve seen this behaviour from him before. He doesn’t care whether any of his actions or ‘advice’ will harm others.
Of course you're correct that Trump and Musk both hate Zelenskyy, and this established fact and not conjecture. Nonetheless it all still boils down to:
1. Musk has opinions
2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement
My comment was more in regards to saying 'Musk has opinions' (who doesn't) is downplaying his involvement.
I'm basing this on what the 4 sources have stated mentioned in Telegraph article and also based on his previous behavior and comments about Zelenskyy / Ukraine and overall affinity and support for authoritarian political leaders.
It's all a game for him and winning at all costs.
Whatever it is Musk actually said to Trump (reporting of which we should take with a heaping grain of salt, since there are plenty of people with obvious motivations to lie and fabricate) we can see that the service SpaceX controls (Starlink) has remained unaffected, while the service the US military controls (Starshield) is what's in dispute.
Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
To this day full speed hasn't been restored, continuing to endanger lives.
'Zelensky stated that Ukrainian military commanders, the Ministry of Defense, and foreign diplomats are conducting active negotiations to resolve the constraints. However, he noted that management at SpaceX has declined direct dialogue with Ukrainian military representatives.'
Even in a degraded state, Starlink and Starshield remains a critical strategic advantage for Ukraine, even if it's less so now than before. Being less helpful to Ukraine isn't good, but it's still actively helping Ukraine, and that is worlds apart from actively helping Russia.
Musk, Trump and co know that they can't openly turn things off as it would be a PR nightmare, so the next best thing is to cripple it and deny deny deny that you've done it.
speculation
And just so i am clear on your philosophy there is no guilt that rides whatsoever with presenting this capability to the leader of the free world who then goes and does exactly what you suggested resulting in many people dying while a nation fights for its life.
So an unelected official would be correct, right?
> He did at the direction of the President, who was elected.
Where is your evidence? Reporting contradicts what you say - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/trump-cabinet-musk-...
> speculation
Not really. Multiple independent sources and reports have confirmed the damage done by Musk during his time at DOGE.
> Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
He is as "thrust" into that position as he was "thrust" into the DOGE role.
What are your thoughts on his illegal state-sanctioned intimidation of ex-FEMA CFO?
Free markets drive prosperity, socialism does the opposite.
What are the most expensive things in the US? Healthcare, housing, and education. Those are the most heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.
What are the cheapest things in the US? Software (free), TVs, computers, consumer goods. The least regulated and subsidized.
A bit of advice: resorting to insults is what happens when one doesn't have an argument.
If I may, I recommend a book for you: "Free to Choose" by Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize winning economist).
https://www.amazon.com/Free-Choose-Milton-Rose-Friedman/dp/B...
It's an easy read.
Just doing his job and following orders?
Have a read about his actions on Ukraine, even just this last week. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/10/16/musk-appro...
He's a bloviating conman and no rational person should believe that this demo will ever see the light of day, if it wasn't faked.
This is completely outside of politics.
On the road.
> Where is the mars program?
Starship is the required precursor.
> He's a bloviating conman
Enough of what he promised has been delivered that has made him a trillionaire.
> But a rich one, so, you must be wrong!
Parting fools from their money is not respectable work in my view.
I think people should be reminded of this.
We also weren't discussing GoDaddy as a registrar without mentioning it's CEO killing elephants and being an all around douchebag. Or Oracle without the lawnmower.
It's tough to ask people to dissociate the CEO from the company, especially when he's doing all the PR by himself.
Its the character. Buying a global media platform to "promote free speech" and then shunt the entire thing and himself behind a particular political party. This guy uses his money and his twitter account to support neo-nazi hate groups in my country (Britain First, Patriotic Alternative, Hundred Handers, Tommy Tennames). He has no self-restraint. Its abhorrent. Its not "about politics" when the politics is about racial superiority and ethnic cleansing.
> Imagine if you couldn't post a thread about Microsoft products on HN without republicans feeling the need to jump in to talk about how much they hate Bill Gates for his donations to Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024. It's really tiresome.
and if Bill Gate was literally campaigning for the Dems, getting up on stage, handing voters cheques and THEN being employed by the government to run a department then you'd have a point.
He repeatedly crosses the line of what is appropriate. People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes. Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
People with that level of power — because it is power — will do what they will. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.
> Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
We have transitioned, it would seem, from the pretence of “goodness” to naked displays of power. Unseemly, definitely.
Justice. Righteousness. Old fashioned words and old fashioned ideas. Oh for a good and righteous king!
agreed and we should hate them for it.
The temptation to succumb to Godwin's Law is so, so, so strong. How shitty and horrible of a person does one have to be for someone on HN to admit that they are a shitty and bad person? At some point the Big Bang sterotype of "nerd" who jerks off to the idea of a rich guy who "computers" and "businesses" and "engineers" outgrows tiresome and becomes despicable once said rich guy facilitates/encourages/actualizes concentration camps. Grow up.
> This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths) [1]
30B+ is pocket change for the US, but makes a massive impact in poorer countries.
It also had a soft power effect that the current US government seems completely oblivious to [2].
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23353912
[3] https://time.com/article/2026/05/15/usaid-shutdown-rise-glob...
The 90M figure is probably exaggerated, but this video is completely nuts. This is exactly why the internet has failed us.
I think the qualification is unbelievably tame considering what Elon deserves.
google: did congress restore food aid funding?
Wildly different estimates or not, this is a matter of principle not of degree.
Donating other peoples' money is not virtuous. Donating your own is.
Then you are indeed virtuous.
As it stands the war in Iran is creating problematic issues with many petrochemicals and their derivative products making it harder for countries to generate wealth to invest in the US stock market.
This is why I always find it a bit funny when people start blowing smoke up his ass. He's just some old guy who spouts points at this thread as a perfect example ideological nonsense and when challenged on it digs in harder in the face of evidence to the contrary - just what you'd want to lead a project (/s).
2) No of course we are not necessarily morally obligated to donate aid in perpetuity. We can decide to stop if we want to. But it was not Musk's or even Trump's decision to make. But since they assumed that mantle of illegitimate authority, they assumed the moral blame that comes with it.
(And yes, every Trump voter also shares significant moral blame for the deaths of all those people. Atrocity was a predictable and likely consequence of a Trump vote in 2024)
Both made by nazis too.
The qualifier matters, that guy has serious issues.
This should literally be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of this guy - a mass murderer working his way up to the level of the despots of the early 20th century
Sorry for being skeptical but Elons track record of being honest at such demos isn't stellar.
Edit: To the downvoters, this is a serious question. I'd really love to see such evidence.
Sorry, but in world where the vast majority of people can't afford groceries, gas, housing, or healthcare... I just can't look at these silly things the billionaires are spending their money on and get even remotely excited about it. It's just so absolutely tone deaf in the moment we're in right now.
Square-cube scaling being what it is, I think it'd be much more reasonable to use propellers (like quadcopters) than try to scale down COPV's to a Vroomba! size. That's actually an interesting product idea. A small flying vacuum cleaner could clean a variety of surfaces; not only floors.
(And you could even mount the charging station on the ceiling, so it doesn't take up floor space).
https://www.amazon.com/window-cleaning-robot/s?k=window+clea...
Fan cars are pretty old. From that perspective, the driving upside down part is "less impressive" but screw it, still cool.
I want to see it on a track going all out, but something about what they decided to focus on tells me nobody gives a damn about this actually doing anything performance car related.
I'm more worried about the COPVs exploding in a crash, for the thruster version. Hopefully it will keep the tanks empty unless a special launch mode is enabled with a warning siren sounding as long as they're pressurized.
This doesn't tend to end well. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
Why would you solve that? Open roads aren't a track, we don't build highways with 90 degree turns, there is no need for such thing
It won't.
And this is also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH. Some cars come with "Donut" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
The suction system is interesting. It's possible for it to work on the street but incredibly dumb. The kind of gap you have to keep is millimeters off the ground and your typical streets in the real world have so much damage and inconsistency it's hard to imagine it working for anything but straight line acceleration on a newly paved road. This would be a suicide mission to drive this on Skyline with the expectation to get 2-3g in the bends.
The concerns about debris and so forth are somewhat valid but can be taken care of. Similar to dust collectors for woodworking - this will have a cyclone separator, mesh, and whatnot that will prevent the blades from getting wrecked by a rock. But wouldn't want to tail this thing. It'll be pelting your car.
It'll be another "car goes really fast in a straight line" feature which electric cars have always done well with. While it'd be cool to use the suction system to get incredible g forces in bends - it'll be too dangerous for public roads. You'd immediately fly off the road if you lost any suction and I don't know what public roads (especially in the Bay Area) you could run such a system reliably on.
This is why it was banned in F1 cars.
Corruption? Musk is already down a quarter of a billions in donations to the GOP for these incoming elections.
Also, the stock market's id, aka WSB is not impressed in hilarious and sometimes insightful ways. [0]
From my nerd POV, this looks super cool! From any other POV, ummm, what are we supposed to do with this? This is neat as heck, but you cannot put COPVs on public roadways.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1x73hxs/tes...
What happens when a charged COPV is involved in a car accident?
What is the point of reaction thrusters that turn anyone on the wrong side of the car into pink mist?
Will anyone ever be allowed to drive this on a public roadway?
I can see this being a thing in a cyberpunk dystopia, so.. in a few years I guess?
1. In countries where that is popular, due to unfortunate events, they are not allowed in many indoor parking lots.
2. Does anyone have a comparison of pressures and volumes between a car's propane tank, and the Roadster's COPV?
3. The converted car propane tank does not have exhaust ports in various directions that could shred meat, whenever the driver chooses.
For 2: my basic research shows that Roadster's COPV has 50x to 100x the pressure.
uh.. zoom out a bit? The stock price is double what it was two years ago
There are 1000 variables that go into it
Also 2 years ago is a pretty specific time point where it was near the lowest it's been looking back a less random 5d, 1M, 6M, 1Y and 5Y it's only up on the 5Y chart and that's a relatively meager 25%.
You'll see the stock go up when Robotaxi and the Semi hit the market.
Robotaxi is trying to enter an already crowded market and isn't exactly flourishing there. I'm still seeing every one in Austin with a human behind a steering wheel.
As for the Semi, yeah, if it actually comes to fruition. But like all things Elon ... let's wait and see.
they have about as many unsupervised robotaxis on the road as there are waymos in austin, as spotted by an AI watching public camera feeds
And as a nerd, while it's a cool demo in a controlled environment, cars like that are the last thing I want on the road near me as a driver, passenger, or pedestrian!
But this technology is as useless as a toothbrush with a rocket engine. Some rich car crazy guys will buy it, sure. But maybe a few thousand units. This technology doesn't bring any substantial revenue for a billion dollar company. People who own this rocket car it will try it out once or twice and then it will end up in some pretty garage for a few decades.
There's a little secret you should know about the value of all stocks...
Most companies are valued at a price that somewhat reflects their current or near-future revenue. Tesla is mostly hopes and prayers. This doesn't mean they won't come though. But it's valued like the chance of living up to their promises is nearly 100%.
But there is also not a lot of money to be made on supercars. A lot of those manufacturers are struggling financially for a good reason. Extremely expensive to develop, hard to manufacture at scale and limited pool of buyers.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/qt5p-_tE8d0?si=V5csPghK02wwd0or...
it has its own pump, but if you don't want to wait 6 hours to recharge, you can fill it with a nitrogen cylinder.
I've seen some claims that the gas is stored at a pressure of 10000 psi/690 bar in a 200 l tank. If that's true, then that is a gas volume of 138000 l. A commercial, stationary scuba compressor compresses around 850 l/min [0] to 350 bar. A compressor like that would take around 160 min just to compress 138000 l to 350 bar (so significantly less than 690 bar), is a _large_ appliance, and _loud_. Compressing gas quickly also produces heat. An on-board compressor seems quite unrealistic to me unless I'm missing something.
[0] MIL-PRF-27401
Single use is perfectly fine for that purpose. No one complains that airbags are single use.
I'd say the best way to avoid collisions at scale is already on the road and its cars with sensors and computers, if we weren't living in a pre-cyberpunk dystopia I would gladly have them coordinate to achieve that
The "air rockets" could probably also be used as hard emergency brakes.
It could also be made into a water/air vehicle instead and useful for getting over rough seas or air-docking with superyachts or destroyers. Floating/inflatable solar panels would be great too. Another interesting use case would be for airplane passengers and their baggage to leave a plane without the plane actually landing. The landing car could re-dock with the plane on its return flight. That'd be tricky, though.
Every time Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering [0] explains the Engineering of the product by stating that they are "breaking the laws of physics", everything he says is losing a bit of credibility...
Obviously they’re not literally breaking the laws of physics, but they’re breaking what has traditionally been possible putting power through tires alone.
Let's say I ask a SW engineer to describe the code he wrote, and he repeatedly (!) refers to the addition of an index table as "breaking the laws of computer science".
He can clarify more than once that the achieved result would be impossible with sole event-processing alone, and obviously I know that he didn't break any "laws of computer science" by adding a indexed database.
But every time he explains his work with these words, he will lose a bit of credibility.
For the average laymen, it’s a simple enough explanation that works to get the point across while keeping it “fun”
Who do you think the demo of a flying car - with no details on range or price or weight or battery size or torque or really anything technical - was actually for?
If only I had been given fidicuary responsibility for millions of peoples life savings. Then I could build a car that has 0 chance of ever reaching production, just to impress my friends.
Imagination is powerful.
The Apollo program was taxpayer funded. It's priority was to develop and test ICBMs for delivering nuclear weapons, the most destructive thing man has created to date.
The IC's were for the same program.
We went to the moon on a murder mission, so you're right, this is not entirely unlike the Apollo program.
Destruction of the future only requires your passive participation and rosey glassed outlook.
A pox on anyone who does the math which would break those glasses.
No to mention there was no actual driver in it.
For current performance motors, they each weigh between 100 and 150 pounds. It's very likely the roadster ones will weigh more.
The "gearbox" equivalent is about 200 pounds on modern teslas, and again the roadster will need a beefier one.
So literally just the essentials of motors and wheels and "gearbox" is now at a bare minimum of 600+ pounds. This isn't including the actual frame and structure itself, the battery, the wiring and electronics, and literally the entire vacuum/cold gas system.
I would like anyone to comment how the demo unit could possibly be under 500 pounds "guaranteed".
If you do the math that gets you about 13 seconds of hovering.
Drawing a parallel, manufacturers presented rollable mobile devices already a decade ago, modular devices with replaceable components, etc. The archives of Nokia and Ericsson (and others) are full with these kinds of products. Car manufacturers did the same. They presented a vision, not a commitment to a product because there is much more to this than just "being able" to build it.
But it was never economically feasible or sensible to do this at SUCH a scale of engineering cost, and presented with the unrelenting confidence of "this will be yours in two years", despite all the fundamental roadblocks still to overcome.
It appears that this is the most disrupting aspect of their presentations: People are not used to being presented a "vision" of such a scale with so little regards for practical execution.
They like the journey they are taken on, and willingly fill all gaps and doubts with "they wouldn't present this if they didn't think of everything already"
And also your point: It is a company presenting a jet-pack to actually sell a premium back-pack under the same name.
They invested in the engineering of 1-10 jet-packs, to sell 200-2000 backpacks...
The demonstrations seems to be very specific, it probably can't do anything more than fall to the ground. The practicality of actual levitating the car may out of reach.
Everyone calls it a "flying car" the idea is planted in people's mind and they let people's imagination or credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
Even if we would accept the premise that flying cars will be the norm at some point, I'm not sure what people imagine that would do for them. Technically you could solve traffic jams to some degree, but still not entirely because I can't imagine that at any point flying cars would mean that you just fly wherever you want. It would give us multilayered traffic, which is cool to reduce traffic jams, but does it really do anything else?
But prior to any of that, I'm fascinated by how irrational it is to think that this jumping car is even remotely feasible to participate in any kind of traffic.
That's why I assume that the general public expects that Tesla has already solved all these problems, as they otherwise wouldn't announce such a product.
In reality, we apparently have entered times where they could present a teleporting machine and start a 200k USD pre-order with little to no public scrutiny.
You can clearly see what it does. If nobody buys it or it can't be driven on public roads, so what.
This event was like Disney presenting a mass-production rollercoaster you can pre-order for your home, but the general public seems to glance over how utterly irrational this is.
So far companies did alot of fundamental due diligence before making such an announcement (and the prior R&D investment!), because the consequences could be fatal.
The average consumer apparently still assumes that this due diligence phase was passed, thinking it's impossible that a known company presents something that big it cannot deliver on...
For Eg, we have self driving trucks. Nikola admits prototype was rolling downhill in promotional video: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...
Tesla’s History of Faking Demonstration Videos: https://dawnproject.com/teslas-history-of-faking-demonstrati...
This is probably just to hype up the stock. The stock is down 5% (5 days), up 1% (1 month), down ~7% (6 months), down ~20% YTD, down ~16% (1 year). It has a PE of 336 and dwindling YOY sales. Tesla’s U.S. vehicle sales fell approximately 14% to 20% year-over-year through the first three quarters of 2026. Rest of the world, Tesla is not competitive and will probably go down rapidly soon.
Also Tesla events rarely (if ever) get followed by a durable stock bump.
--
Edit: Credible independent videos have been released on YouTube by reputable people. There's no doubt that the spectacle did happen as shown by Tesla. That's not to say it's anything more than a carefully staged spectacle, but claims that it's fake or AI or CGI are absolutely debunked.
There are lots of ways for sleight of hand. Do you remember the time that guy made the Statue of Liberty disappear?
It's not at all conspiracy theory. It's just same old over promise and under deliver that Elon does.
All major exterior panels are welded and/or bolted on. On the earliest revisions, the thin upper door trim strips were bonded using a bad structural adhesive which became brittle with temperature cycling. These were recalled and remedied with a different structural adhesive plus a welded stud. Such recalls are very common; the current generation Ford Explorer had multiple recalls for exterior panels falling off.
A car company that as a long history of making false claims?
I agree: one of us is delusional. I think we disagree about whom.
But hey, you're right. If it's not styrofoam I'm sure we'll see proof of that very soon now. Like a person riding in it. Or it out where someone can actually touch it. Try to lift it.
(And if we don't....)
WE know that the robot demonstration were remote controled.
WE know that the cybertruck wasn't bulletproof (didn't you see their demonstration on stage?)
If someone lies once and twice and regularly enough, why do you have such a low standard in your life?
Despite its overly optimistic thrust, the meat of the video was proven correct over time, with the main valid criticism being that Tesla in 2016 underestimated the amount of compute power which would ultimately be required. What's incredible is that FSD v14 Lite demonstrates what's possible with HW3 despite having fairly potato-quality cameras.
A test car crashed into a fence in Tesla's parking lot during filming.
The video was cut from multiple takes.
The route was hardcoded.
You do know that bulletproof doesn't mean zero surface damage right?
Watch the video, Musk says "it was a little to hard" and the way they discuss it and stand around makes it very clear that this was not the demo they wanted to give.
"aarrgh man" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udxR5rBq_Vg
That is of course very very far away from reality (though, progressing to a feasable program faster than any space observers predicted.)
THat, combined with Elon signaling to investors/market that tesla no longer produces cars.....it's hard to imagine the company splitting their very, very , very over-commited engineers to a flying car. At least, they aren't commiting the point that this will be a consumer-market car, or even a halo car.
No contradiction between "more than everyone else combined" and "it is unfeasable to launch 36,500 metric tons per year compared to the about-2,500 tons in the last 12 months".
Especially as the working launch vehicle is getting retired and the replacement has only had one circularized orbit, and is currently behind the development pace set by the Saturn V, N1, and even the Space Shuttle.
I suppose, depending on how you count.
The N1 was cancelled after four explosions, and the fourth Starship launch was non-explody.
But the fourth N1 launch was 10 years after the N1 work was started. Starship began work under a different name in 2012, and by 2022 it had yet to launch at all, let alone reach the non-explody stage.
If you assume all the pre-2016-rebrand work was scrapped, then you can have it beating the N1; otherwise I think my point stands.
Comparing apples to apples, this seems to be the appropriate starting point for N1:
> Studied and designed by OKB-1 since 1959, it was the counterpart to the US Saturn V
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N1_(rocket)
First launch was 1969. Starship's first launch was in 2023, so it took one extra year from initial concept to launch.
Starting from first launch, N1 did four launches in three years and never succeeded. Starship did 15 launches in three years, had multiple mission successes in which they achieved orbital velocity but had planned a suborbital trajectory, and then orbited on the 15th launch. Their first mission reaching orbital velocity was in 2024.
Also worth mentioning that a lot of the Starship work focuses on full reusability, a quite difficult problem which N1 did not attempt.
I assume you’re dirty on Usain Bolt for not running faster?
That said, a few seconds of cold gas thrust is more "cybertruck" bad than "theranos" bad.
Starlink alone is the biggest contributor to it. If i remember correctly it was 1000 tones before and because of starlink its 3000t
Starlink as is only has 10 million customers, borderline most of them people who can afford something like this.
And every other 9 billion human has to accept that the sky now has a lot more starlinks in orbit and astrophysics is disturbed.
I personally gain a lot more from astrophysicsi than from Starlink.
Good way to show your privilege.
Starlink is changing peoples lives around the world, previously the fastest they had was dialup, now they’re video calling doctors and family and doing school online.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes in rural Australia, arctic Canada and Tunisia.
Talk to people who really benefit from it.
You saw what? Rich people in other countries (a small amount of) having now fast internet?
Wow.
Now take my proper argument, stop nitpicking and compare a handful of peple on a planet with 9 Billion people.
My main argument was and is, that a lot more people are getting hurt by this than gain something. Loss of research and clear night sky and risk of atmospheric poisening vs. a handful of peple now benefitting from it...
Especially in contrast to the other option: Landlines and mobile network. Most of the planet is connected one war or the other ALREADY. Even shepards on mount everest or people in mongolia have one or the other.
“Handful of people” benefiting from it is vastly missing the mark.
Someone in a 3th world country or someone who doesn't has any real internet access, can't afford starlink.
Given that they have largely relied on reusability rather than strongly ramping up production of boosters for Falcon 9, and given that they have performed 3 launches in a single day, one launch per day is clearly achievable without any further advances, and without even using Starship.
To be clear, the stated goal for Starship is one launch per hour throughout the year, which would still be a tiny number compared to, say, airline flights, but quite impressive for orbital flight.
It would also mean nearly 900.000 tons of resources leaving earth for ever and potentially poluting our atmosphere if they have to ever reenter.
Preparing this while our planet earth has A LOT of empty space and desserts and no breakthrough in quantumslipstream or warp core tech is ridicolous dangerous for all of us :|
Reentry of dead satellites and other debris does seem like it's eventually going to be more of an issue, so that will be something to work on.
I wouldn't count on any warp drive breakthroughs, potentially ever, but the whole solar system is still out there for living and industrial space.
We are so so so far away of mining resources on other planets/moons than earth, setting this up now is just crazy though.
And lets think crazy wild: in 20 years we send up enough stuff like machines and resources to start mining and setting things up, to do what? I love scifi but it has to reach some kind of goal.
Nobody else comes close, whether considering individual companies or entire nations.
I can go even further and say I trust they will be the company to deliver, given the decades long historical relationship between US Space Agencies and Vendors.
That said, 2.6 test falcon launches per week, is so, so many orders of magnitude away from "~150 full payload delivery and recovery missions per week".
I struggle to think how anyone with experience in the industry (and eye balls) thinks this is aligning with reality.
This is a mathematically silly assertion. Over the past decade, SpaceX has scaled their launch capacity from ~20 metric tons per year to ~2,300 metric tons per year. That's more than two orders of magnitude. It's not unreasonable to imagine that they could scale a further 0.3 orders of magnitude if there were customers willing to pay for this amount of lift.
CUrrently they're averaging, what, max 3 falcons per week, usually in test configuration?
The partnership scope calls for.....~150 launches per week, delivering payload and returning the module.
Trust me, I love space and pushing the frontier at the cost of US dollars, but that is....so significantly far away.
COnsider the boeing 737-8,9,10 MAX. That program is far, far less grandiose in it's delivery scope, has an ancient legacy OEM that is very familiar with regulated contracts w/ the gov, and they can't deliver a plane within 5 years of the expected contract completion to their premier airline partner.
I can be convinced IE; some transparent internal reporting on project lead's current understandings as the project progresses, but there just isn't any statements from SpaceX/Nasa/USGOV on what we can all see with out eyes.
A car company that has a long history of making false claims? Are you really asking me that?
It’s dangerous for you to let your dislike of someone or some company to cloud your judgement like this. You know other companies have launched failed products too, right?
No one is falling for it.
> where are the fabricated demos?
Why not even make it more specific? "Where are the demos where he had a fake flying car before"? No one's falling for that one either.
I have no idea what your game is now - but I'm not playing.
But sure, if I actually need to, let me spell it out.
The statement: "He is a liar" is stronger than the statement "He is a liar who sometimes tells the truth", despite the fact that the second is more detailed. Extraneous details distract from the main argument. Also - there is almost no example in the world of someone who makes only false statements. It's a ridiculous insertion.
I hope you can understand why your suggestion above is nonsensical.
> is an assertion without supporting evidence
I’m sorry, I thought the evidence was obvious. Allow me to explain it to you: someone who has a history of lying has a significantly higher chance of lying again than someone who does not.
> You also construct your own straw man
Asking a question is not putting words in someone’s mouth - and it was resolved with his simple “No”.
> The insults
Oh my. Do you really want to go there after this sequence:
> you're moving from the territory of reasonable questions to moderately desperate conspiracy theory
> Your confusion is understandable given your own (excruciatingly obvious) motives.
> find the words to make yourself feel good when pressing 'reply'
> I humbly apologise. When I said you were confused, I only meant to state a fact, not cause you harm.
> These linguistic motte-and-bailey tricks are pure debate bro.
Motte-and-bailey? I have not retracted a single thing.
> hope of actually changing the other person's mind
HA! I realized that would be impossible quite a long time ago. Now it’s just a fun game to see how bloodied you get.
As I said, pure debate bro.
How the mighty have fallen.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
OH! No need. I enjoyed explaining it to you.
Fool me once...
Even if they didn’t deliver FSD, the data says they delivered something people are choosing to pay $100 per month for.
There are a couple Chinese companies with better tech, but you obviously can’t get those in the US.
They’ve been selling it for a decade, when exactly do you expect it to undo them?
The moment his criminal shield is removed from power.
Watch.
Your Dad cannot fully self drive (I am a huge fan of Tesla FSD given that no other equivalent option exists in the market at that price point, but I have had to take over and drive it, at least as of the most recent free demo last Christmas season).
A more objective definition is any entity that is not willing to take on the financial liabilities of driving is not capable of full self driving. The minute Tesla says they agree to take on full liability is the minute I buy and use FSD for all of my trips.
Are you conceding that FSD is in fact correctly named in terms of its technical capabilities, and only falls short in terms of legal liability?
I should note that my Dad is a perfectly competent driver who has not been in any car accident in the last 30 years (at least, I'm not aware of any). But he drives in a way that makes me feel somewhat uncomfortable as a passenger. It's hard to explain.
Assuming your evaluation that FSD is better in every way, which I suspect is wrong because FSD is lacking at edge cases, such as parking. It’s good, but I suspect your dad is more competent at figuring out many edge case scenarios.
>but then proposed an "objective" definition which my Dad unquestionably satisfies.
Right, which is that if Tesla was so confident, they would take on the liability, like Waymo does. It’s possible your dad is so bad at driving he shouldn’t be taking on that liability (like Tesla has decided to). But apparently he’s good enough for an insurance underwriter to trust him.
From videos I've seen FSD is perfectly capable of parking. It doesn't yet have the ability to reliably discern which spaces will reliably avoid parking fines, but it can park just fine.
This really gets to the question of what qualifies as driving. A robotaxi can't top up its own wiper fluid either, but keeping that topped up is, IMHO, a critical part of being a responsible driver.
> if Tesla was so confident, they would take on the liability, like Waymo does
This is a non sequitur. Both operators accept the same liability under the same conditions. Both Waymo and Tesla accept liability for vehicles in their own autonomous taxi fleets. Neither Tesla nor Waymo have proposed any mechanism to accept liability for customer-owned vehicles.
IMHO transferring liability for customer-owned vehicles is a deeply non-trivial matter, and I doubt it will ever occur in any absolute sense. For example, how does liability shift if an autonomously operated vehicle crashes into a pedestrian because it was raining and the tires were overdue for replacement? What if the crash occurred because of prior damage to the suspension which the owner knew about and chose to ignore?
True, I had not thought of this. Thanks for engaging, I would say you have convinced me the definition of driving, or self driving or full self driving, is not so simple.
This is a circus stunt.
This is a circus stunt.
Tesla will continue to rule the US for the next two years due to the admin but the Euro and Canadian markets are likely going to continue to close to them. It might be that home-grown competitors will step up to the plate or maybe they'll open their doors to Chinese exports - it's hard to say. So while it's hard to identify a winner, the loser is clearly Tesla.
The problem with China’s economic model is that you can’t just sell to everyone else and not buy their stuff too. As European automaker sales continue to collapse in China, the EU will find new protectionist policies to enact to preserve domestic manufacturing jobs.
Well then, I'm sure it'll be disproven very shortly, right?
They won't keep the vehicle hidden and out of sight, right?
Let's just revisit in a couple months, shall we?
It's surely not AI, but so far it is little more than all these Jetpack demonstrations of the past decade...
They've been promising those since the 1970s...
They promised we all would be vacationing in Mars by now.
Meanwhile Chinese EV maker Nio has built over three thousand battery swap stations. We can speculate all we want about Tesla's motives, endlessly entertaining as that is, but the fundamental idea was sound.
The failure of the demonstration got vastly more coverage than if it would have if the, um rock?, just hit the window, went donk and fell down. If your goal was to communicate to the maximum number of people that you had put bulletproof glass in your cars, it would be quite a reasonable tactic.
It only showed the dynamic of Musk vs. his engineers and how he 'works'
His software company, named Green Hills, supplies the RTOS for Mobileye, which formerly supplied driver-assistance hardware and software to Tesla (and continues to do so for other car companies). Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
So he has a very real financial incentive to convince the world that Tesla's system is bad.
Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla wouldn't stop using their tech in ways they did not approve of, turning back all the safety limits to allow the public to do things Mobileye knew were unsafe. Mobileye publicly called them out, saying that Tesla was "going to hurt the interests of [Mobileye] and hurt the interests of an entire industry, if a company of our reputation will continue to be associated with this type of pushing the envelope in terms of safety".
This is one of the reasons why S/X ADAS performance famously got significantly worse in late 2016 with HW2, they had of course been working on their own tech but because they'd already built their brand around ADAS they felt compelled to put it out unfinished when they no longer had the Mobileye system to sell.
And inevitably two groups will clash, one pointing out how much this deviated from the original, often decade long promises vs another pointing at the identical naming, how it's still a product they like and of course the all time winner "I don't see you do X"...
For what it's worth, I'd file this as a RCS demo for SpaceXGrokSI (or whatever they call themselves this week) above all else and if I were a betting man, might be a prelude to fusing them into SpaceXSuperXTeslaXIntelligenceX...
It would encourage me to sell, if I had, seeing this nonsense.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/11/tesla-s...
Also I feel like it should be said that anyone who doesn't like fascism and Nazi salutes should be a critic of Tesla, and if you aren't, that speaks volumes.
FSD has no real competition in its capability and market fit.
Why do you ignore all the other companies capable of doing this?
Just because other manufacturere don't put hardware in every car and let pay people for tech they can't use for years, doesn't mean these companies don't have the tech.
Nvidia has the tech, BMW has the tech, Waymo has the tech.
And while a Cybertaxi is still not allowed on german streets, Waymo is coming to munich...
No one else has the combination for affordability, custom silicon, deep hardware integration, market fit, manufacturing, and vertical integration like Tesla. Some people have some of the parts. Like NVIDIA. or Waymo. Or Comma.ai. But no one is even close to being in the same ballpark in ALL the areas required, and that has no easy fixes.
EU being corrupt and regulating themselves to the stone age is sad, but only makes them less relevant for the world of tomorrow.
Remember when they sent one into space? Same thing, everyone in the world is talking about it without spending a single cent in ads.
Doesn’t mean we’re getting flying cars.
The Gas Tank is big and very dangerious, runs for 1-2 seconds and needs hours to re'charge'.
No one was sitting in it for savty reasons but probably also weight.
Just changing the design and adding more electric power is not a real art. They could just do this without building a complete different car which will never see the market
Its marketing an when i see your comment, it seemed to work.
I'm not saying that there aren't lower hanging fruit reasons why they wouldn't make more of those, but you can see how the guidance necessary to make this move the way that it does could be dual use.
They have to sell one to say that it exists. It’s marketing.
Absolutely nobody who owns that vehicle will be “flying” it.
He complained to me "I keep getting guys coming over to talk about the bike"
Nowadays as a "petrol head" when I look at stats I want to see weight - as little of it as possible. Horsepower needs to begin with 2, maybe with 3 in some cars, any more than that and it's silly. I want reviewers to say the car puts a smile on their face driving it to work every day, not doing 160mph on the race track. And of course, high speed is "fun" - one of my favourite memories is driving at 158mph past Berlin at 4am - incredible. But the modern obsession with horsepower and 0-60 is...just stupid. Fast 0-60 time does not make for a fun or an engaging car. It just makes it fast.
Yet it's a useful, comparable, measure for acceleration and is frequently exercised on track. If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it. Image?
Maybe 30-70 would be more useful for determining overtaking capability, but that would require everyone in the motoring industry to agree to change at the same time.
Oh I have, and it was awesome. But 99% of the time I drove it to work and back, sitting in traffic, thinking to myself I'd much much much rather be in something more comfortable, more quiet, something that isn't using quite so much fuel just sitting there and something that didn't require new tyres every 8000 miles.
Like yes, speed is awesome - fast acceleration is cool. But the obsession with it is destroying the industry - like, it's so clear that a lighter Lamborghini with 400bhp would be a lot more fun to drive than a 2 tonne one with 1000 horsepower, no? Even if the latter does pretty good on the race track. But because everyone only cares about 0-60 times and horsepower we are where we are.
Most young boys have the Lamborghini poster on the wall even if it actually sucks to drive, especially the iconic Countach, I find pure joy in driving my old beetle now, or the past weekend a friends 1957 MGA, horrible safety, tiny engines, zero comforts, not even a radio, just a pure carthat can't even be sold anymore, but there will never be a better driving experience than an proper ancient British roadster.
Of course, it's also less safe. But the threat of a quick death in a lithium fire is the only reason some of us get up in the morning.
I hope.
I think of F-150s that have quickly climbed over 400hp and can pull a giant trailer... but I don't think the brakes and suspension match.
(f-250 or f-350 might be more balanced when pulling those 30'+ trailers)
The vast majority of LLM users -- not the average person here on HN -- doesn't know which "model" they are using, can't tell the difference and don't care, including many software engineers. You could ask the same thing about those LLM benchmarks.
For something like the performance versions of their high-volume vehicles, it's partially for the same reasons people like sports cars, or at least how some people like a sports car that is faster / quicker and gives them more excitement while driving (obviously a lot of the appeal for sports cars otherwise is the sporty look/sound of the engine, which Tesla doesn't really deliver on at all).
People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.
That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.
Is that a bad thing? Aren't there always a range of products that cater to different levels of interest?
If you're a "normal person" you don't need a 8000dpi mouse with RGB, or a Louis Vuitton purse, or a large big mac meal.
This is not poverty it is prosperity.
Sure.
I think the poster you are replying to is trying to say that the “k-shaped” economy is incentivizing the market to cater only to the high end and simply ignoring the low end.
A few businesses I own are dealing with this issue now. It’s just much more profitable and logistically easier for them to charge what seems like an absurd price, justify it with some inexpensive “white-glove” service, and just ignore the rest of the market.
On the one hand, this is a tribute to modern marketing that high value-add products and services can match with customers more efficiently. On the other hand, it has the potential to create a bizarre “race to the top” such that only suckers will cater to anything other than the top 1% of their target market (in terms of wealth / willingness and capacity to pay).
Where I currently live, this is happening with frightening efficiency with health care. Almost all of the “good” PCP doctors are going concierge, and the concierge prices are increasing at a rapid clip.
But to be clear, in my example products aren’t the only thing to which the economy doesn’t cater to normal people for (lower-middle class but increasingly middle and lower class). War, corruption, and genocide are all bad for the average person. Generally things that funnel money into hurting or enriching individuals. Both of these are inefficient and the inefficient use of resources, is hurtful to normal people. E.g. enriching an oligarch to build roads could be twice as much road if he takes a 50 percent cut. And the money sitting with him does harm, oppresses people. Food for thought.
I think Nissan had a workaround I could live with: GPS fencing around known tracks would activate/deactivate the speed governor.
The faster you drive the more stress you produce in other drivers. The faster you drive, the higher the risk.
And i have seen plenty of ' trained drivers' thinking its reasonable to start taking over on the right side because 2 cars are ahead of him. swiffling into your lane without proper safetydistance, starting to take over everyone from the 3th or 5 position...
If you don't drive faster than 180 at night on an empty autobahn, you just might be a dick and ignorant to everyone else you share the autobahn with. And yes when i do this, it might be a short sectionwere it is very clear that its for fun and thats it.
Not all products have to be aimed at you.
> unsupervised
This guy might be the most biased reviewer on the planet. Dude practically cashes checks from Apple on camera.
That you agree and they are alive because they are moving money around?
(To stop masking and start ‘musking?’)
How many years ago did Elon lie and say the roadster would be available? How about put out the thing people reserved back then instead of skipping to a version of it nobody asked for.
It’s like he’s a bad product manager, forcing you to build things nobody actually wants. Except make that product manager a trillionaire surrounded by sycophants. Nightmare shit.
I'm not denying that there's some cool tech going on in there but this approach just makes me cringe. He knows well what he is doing and that's why I used the term "meme stock". This shit will not make any revenue, ever, probably but the demo moves the stocks.
Does Tesla have value? Yes it does. The cars work. I've never driven one but everyone I've spoken to few people who have, all of which really enjoyed driving them.
Flying cars will not ever be a thing. At least for not the next 50-100 years. Goddammit this shit is so stupid.
My main suspicion is that this is done to prop up SpaceX stock till the next big unlocks are done and eventually it gets included in major indexes. after that its Adios Suckers!
In any case they should first deliver on tesla semi than keep jumping onto these gimmick low volume products.
How fast the gas expands through an opening depends on the pressure ratio between entrance and exit, and for ordinary air the flow reaches the speed of sound at the narrowest part when the pressure ratio exceeds about a factor of two. The flow never becomes supersonic in the constriction itself, but after the constriction the flow can continue to accelerate to supersonic speeds, especially if the constriction is followed by an expanding nozzle (converging-diverging, or de Laval nozzle), although this is not strictly necessary. For example, one can observe shock diamonds in the air coming out of an ordinary plastic bottle filled with slightly compressed gas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61tsXGUc6nU
I wonder if the shock waves visible in the video are still due to the converging-diverging aspect, just with no bell around the diverging part.
In rockets, there is a so called "aerospike" engine [1], which does not have any bell-shaped nozzle at all, but instead uses the ambient air to always shape the flow for an ideal expansion ratio. In theory it is great, but in practice it remained mostly a pie in the sky.
For a few seconds. It's a parlor trick. And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.
Do you know what gets me excited? Have you seen the new Porsche Mission S?
Form, function and beauty ...
It's a glorified Beetle.
Yeah just like the Tesla screen in the car. Quite a problem since it lacks physical buttons.
They also re-used a lot of "stock" footage.
And frankly I'm not sure the engineering is all that impressive. I'm sure someone could've done similar a long time ago, there's just no point to it beyond, well, the parlor trick. Even millionaires have no use for a single seat, road-illegal vehicle with no storage that happens to be able to jump
Unfortunately, he had the silly thing in reverse. It launched backwards maybe a hundred feet. The drivers reflexes to shut off the engine were outstanding. If it had gone much further, it would have climbed up one of the full grandstands.
I never stand behind a drag car with the engine running, or in front, or in the plane of rotation of the engine. (I've seen a few engine blowups, and parts often go out sideways.)
Many of the best parlor tricks are.
Until then, this is simply a purpose built drone, powered by compressed air to perform specific tricks in order to grift and hype up interest in the company.
I can buy a drone from DJI that performs more impressive flying maneuvers than what Tesla showed.
But they lacked a lot of the showmanship here.
You can basically engineer almost anything with enough money for a demo. It's a lot different to engineer something that'll actually get commercialized.
Sometimes I think this sub, being software heavy, downplays the achievements of their own field and overplays the achievements of other fields they lack experience in.
Ron Patrick's beetle is more interesting. https://www.ronpatrickstuff.com (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37778531 - 139 comments) ... He was trying to sell it a couple of years ago ( https://www.motortrend.com/news/jet-powered-vw-new-beetle-fo... and it has some photos that no longer load on his original site)
It's just plain impressive, even if it's not practical.
Which of these is impressive or novel?
Aye.
That said, on previous stories about flying cars I tend to bring up how the helicopter meets such a standard.
It does't tend to go down well.
The same fans that blew downwards to create lift were likely first run to suck it in to the ramp, then reversed.
These demos were not performed by "daily driver" cars - they were multiple look alike props in a magic show, each optimised for the trick shot and not driver comfort or experience (if any driver(s) even took part).
That's a nice theory, but it is wrong.
The fans that are used to create suction do not create lift. The amount of air moved by those fans is way too small to create lift, the lift is entirely due to compressed air used as reaction mass.
On a tangent, I prefer this two year old locally garage built "flying boat" to Musks "maybe one day" car prop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ILbQHnHPnY
( FYI - there's a couple of Dutch boats down there ... )
On the front of cars you can actually buy and drive there is the McMurty Spierling an electric single seater with a fan generating more downforce then it weighs (can go upside down)
However neither the engine, nor anything else, is designed to operate upside down, so it wouldn't be able to do it for very long.
I imagine it must be able to do some comical cornering.
Edit: citation? Common sense. If it was real they'd have done everything they could to prove it. It's as real as Tesla's self driving taxis were a decade ago. How many more times will people get duped by this conman?
I want a citation this was real before I believe literal smoke and mirrors at night.
The car was empty because it was to dangerious to drive it. It was for sure also striped of everything it not needed.
This tech needs a LOT of space and an Air Tank which needs a lot of space.
What type of bot are you that you think there is any realistic way this 'tech' will land in any normal car ever?
The air tank is too big, the police cars are to heavy. Its not possible from an engineering poitn of view.
And from a usability one it doesn't even make sense. You can't fly you can jump ONCE for a few seconds every 6 hours.
Apparently Pops Racer works for Tesla.
Given that we don't have such software, and that this currently requires trading all three seats for compressed gas storage, there are obviously some hurdles to this becoming a practical emergency feature.
We could just put oversizes brakes on cars to achieve this. Have you seen the stopping distance of a Formula 1 car with its giant brakes?
Bigger brakes != more stopping power.
At the price of your passenger seats being occupied by gas tanks, that surely are safe in a collision that's far more likely occurrence.
It's PR stunt, nothing more.
They showed a still of the submarine car from James Bond as inspiration for this.
That's the roadster they should have built. This compressed air jumping thing is impractical and dangerous and will never be road legal. But a submersible car would have actual practical uses, increase survivability in several accident situations and not face the same regulatory hurdles.
If they were actually trying to build something cool I think that would be the play, but everything Elon does now is to bump stock price
I imagine that if you were to crash your car into a body of water, the damage could allow water to enter the normally sealed vehicle anyway.
That does not really sound cooler than a car that can drive up walls and jump.
How many times have you been in traffic waiting to cross a bridge or driving around a body of water wishing you could just go over it?
It may not be US legal anyway. The FAA will almost certainly have something to say about something that can go up in the air and propel itself.
They're typically used to affix your beer to the steering wheel of your boat.
And many a rocket scientist would be insulted by the comparison of a nozzled rocket motor to the simple pipe of an air rifle.
Not that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.
And mass is one of the top engineering concerns for these types of performance vehicles, even those which do not need to fight gravity.
Or, if I'm making up stuff as I go along, you can't crash, the car can just auto-takeoff to dodge whatever you were about to hit.
**
Side note, as I was looking for the right stream, youtube gave me a link to a different deep fake 'Musk' stream where he extolled virtues of sending him money ( https://roadster-tesla.com/#participate ). Everything has changed man. I am sure the scammer actually got some people.
As an engineer who dislikes polished presentations of unimpressive things, it encourages me that it’s still possible to do a bad presentation about an amazing thing and (most) people don’t grumble too much.
No way?! Elon Musk? Unnatural and cringey?!
It's really time to say Thiel and musk are briics backed inside attackers
It's also the company that built crap Cybertrucks and the fake humanoid Bots controlled by people remotely.
They will never deliver this. It's an excuse to justify SpaceX rescuing Tesla. Meanwhile, SpaceX is primarily Starlink, a telecom company, masquerading as space exploration and AI.
It’s very late, but it’s here.
EDIT: I want to make it clear that 1) I'm not talking about the driving upside down thing, and 2) just because I am not sensationalizing the kickflip trick as some incredibly complex endeavor doesn't mean I didn't think it was cool and I'm some kind of hollow, depressed sad sack. The kick flip made me laugh my ass off, but be real. His companies make rockets that can belly flop and land themselves, stream hi res video of reentry using LEO satellite constellations, catch huge boosters in towers, and this is what's blowing your mind?
Elon has been working on this for ~8 years
How long would it take another company to do the same?
Just the engineering alone is impressive regardless of beliefs but this posting has so many Eore replies that makes me wonder if I am one of the few not miserable people on the planet.
From one non-miserable person to another: the trick to a happy life is to not engage with people whose minds cannot be changed. Tesla haters and Apple haters are on that list, and you’re replying to someone who is both.
> Tesla haters and Apple haters are on that list
I'm only seeing one of us that's making inflexible assumptions here. Did you know that I used to be an Apple fan?
You clearly care about nothing and I do.
I care about the other humans who used Tesla FSD before it was save enough and died.
I care about our atmosphere and the potential of Musk poisening it because again he throws some money at currupt polititions or presidents and gets his will.
I care about the people affected by DOGE and the kids which had to starve to death because the richest person on the planet thought he can optimize stuff he doesn't know shit about and doesn't care.
You are also lucky that you don't live close to Space-X facility or any Datacenter from Musk.
But what does that matter how much expertise went into this car? We don't know how expensive it was for them to build it, we don't know how long it took them to build it.
And just because someone builds something fancy, it has to also deliver any value.
If i would have gotten millions and billions of dollar 20 years ago to build a charging network, a handfull of car factories and an EV, i would have achieved that too.
I would love to see an alternatie reality of this.
Musk is not a genuios he is not stupid either for sure, his biggest asset is the money from his dady, his ignorance, his unconventinal thinking and luck.
He is also responsible for plenty of tesla drivers to die, apparently there were enough excuses that he never had to go to jail for that while other old companies would never risk this.
He is also responsible for humans and kids dying through DOGE and USAID. He also doesn't has to go to jail for this.
And now he might poisen our atmosphere with his massive amounts of rocket starts and the ones he is planning.
Again, no one stops him. Why? Because he bought everyone he needed.
But hey, he moved money from random people into a show clap clap
Every hobby just died.
If i would have gotten millions and billions of dollar 20 years ago to build a charging network, a handfull of car factories and an EV, i would have achieved that too.
There's a parable of the talents. The wealthy man gives three others a different amount of capital. Each use their capital differently. One was a failure and punished. Who was the failure? Why?
One of the biggest fups of Musk was buying Twitter but all of this stuff + turning it around by leveraging it as a propaganda platform, took A LOT of limited capacity of Musk away from other companies.
Same with DOGE. It cost him also a lot of time with his other toys.
Edit: another user in this comment section said "This is not a flying car. It's a falling car. It's good at falling though."
I think the downforce fans themselves are notable and pretty impressive however. It's like a McMurty
It would be interesting if they could add the RCS to the production model and have it solely as a "safety" feature if you fall off a cliff or need to break or something. I have a hard time imagining how you would integrate the flight control systems without designing the whole vehicle around it, so maybe it could have some "automatic landing" program.
The problem with the demo is that it was vapourware. Period, full stop. It is not the car they are selling to us, and they haven't even begun making them. I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown.
Steve Jobs said that "Real artists ship," because the act of shipping is the act of making the incredibly difficult and important decisions that manage the enormous number of constraints that go into the actual product.
If people like concept cars that don't have to actually work or meet a specific price point, fine. It is entertainment, nothing wrong with that. But I am not and will not be impressed until, like Apple, the thing they show on stage is so far along that you can be expected to buy one within weeks, not years.
I am not telling anyone how to judge this. But by my very old-school standards, vapourware sucks.
Its Airtank and all of this tech wouldn't fit the car.
It jumped for 1-2 seconds and needs 6 hours to be ready again.
It did not had a driver.
It probalby/for sure was striped of evertying unnecessary to even make it to these 1-2seconds
I can’t recall the vehicle now but there was a futuristic car around the turn of the century that had a lot of buzz, but changed dramatically for production and nobody liked it. But an engineer on the project said the concept car had less aerodynamic drag going backward than forward, which is quite an achievement.
That is one of at least a dozen experiences I have had that tell me not to get attached until the prototypes ship to car reviewers for examination.
What sad reaction to a real life flying car.
No.
It’s a cool concept car, and very impressive engineering. I don’t get why people hate on it so much.
It is very impressive engineering, just not very useful or ever going to result in any viable product. It’s a dead end. A waste of somebody’s engineering effort and talent for a one-time rich guy demo item. People hate on it because they get it.
How do you know?
Sounds like another “640K ought to be enough for anybody”.
How do you know?
But also, I read about how this tech works. Have you? If so, how are you possibly still confused about this?
Your brain can predict future?
> But also, I read about how this tech works. Have you? If so, how are you possibly still confused about this?
I think that in 1900s there were a lot of people that were saying the same things you are saying about brothers Wright and their inventions. And yet, if there is demand and value in specific things people will find a way to make it work cost effectively and at scale.
This machine demonstrated zero ability to gain altitude in the air alone.
I’d need to go deep into something like being able to maintain altitude in the medium of air without positive impulse or something, but again, I don’t have a strong enough definition at this point.
> This isn't flying, it's falling with style.
Others could get this done too. With less lying and more safety.
So why do we hype Musk to get stuff build sooner than ncessary?
Do you think these people who had to die because of musk enjoyed doing so?
We ask the wrong question, you ask the wrong question: Why do we allow Musk, just because he is rich, to manipulate politics so bluntly? Why do we not put Musk behind bars for all the death he is responsbile for?
Why is it okay for musk for being such a horrible rolemodel? X Æ A-Xii Musk, 14 kids of x different woman etc.?
Im open for any discussions though, go ahead.
But yes of course pointing out relevant points for a discussion is 'bashing Musk'.
Go ahead try to proper argue with me, i'm complelty open for changing my mind with arguments and i mean it.
The first orders for this car were in 2017, still yet to be fulfilled. Tesla will keep taking money, without delivering anything, for decades to come.
For context: https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/24/apples-250-million-siri-settl...
Looking at the pictures, design-wise, I’m almost tempted to ask: “what was the prompt?”.
Disregarding that, all stuff that Tesla (and SpaceX) have demoed had become commercial products, so I wouldn't call Tesla a vaporware company.
Sure, it takes them decades ... but that's different from not shipping.
Others have pointed out that Apple have shipped vapourware. Yes they have! And I'm old enough to remember how much buzz the Knowledge Navigator generated in 1987:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umJsITGzXd0
It was exciting. It pointed in new directions. People were nerd-sniped. But in retrospect...
Apple wouldn't ship Newton until 1993, more than five years later. Nothing of importance from the Knowledge Navigator video made it into Newton that didn't already exist. iPhone was 2007, a full twenty years later. And we are only now getting close to the core concepts of Knowledge Navigator with LLM-based agents that can animate a human avatar in real-time.
Knowledge Navigator was billed as a concept video. Apple did not promise you could buy it in two years or two decades. But apart from some temporary hype... It accomplished nothing of importance for Apple or its customers. The 90s were so hard for Apple that they were nearly acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Shipping a demo didn't move any needle other than "engagement."
Just because it's not your hobby or within your budget, doesn't mean that others must feel the same way as you.
I wrote, I am not telling anyone how to judge this. So where do you get the idea that I think others must feel the same way that I do?
You like it? Go ahead and like it. Knock yourself out. In fact, when Tesla ships a car that can kick flip over a Semi, you can look me up and yell, "Hah!"
For that matter, even if they never ship it, you can bump into me anywhere in the world and say, "I liked the flying car demo." I won't argue with you liking it, but don't expect me to change my mind.
Concepts cars are cars.
What was shown on stage is closer to the Apollo lander training rigs than a vehicle that you could purchase and drive on a public road.
It can never, ever be sold as a production vehicle! The COPV gas storage is under enormous pressure, and would explode with the force of a decent sized bomb if damaged in an accident.
These things would be regularly turning their owners into pink mist, emulating Stockton Rush at a larger scale.
I am. These machines push the limits of prevailing technology. Strong organizations set stretch goals and pursue them regardless of market viability. Sometimes they share this with everyone, and convention has named this practice "concept" cars. I appreciate when they take the risk to do this. And when they do it well, credit is deserved.
There are real engineers and technicians behind this. A lot of them. And they will tell the story of this event for the rest of their lives. I've known a number of people with such stories. They're among the best people I've ever met.
It is possible to exist without cranking the cynical knob to 11 at all times.
It’s somewhat notable that Tesla was up significantly overnight and closed the day down 2%.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a very lengthy period after which people will look back and wonder “what the hell was everyone thinking?”
Well, it's not the car he's selling to me because I'm not going to support white supremacist fascists who flip heil Hitlers when they celebrate buying an election. It could be the best car in the World, I'm not sending Musk money, I'd rather walk.
The sooner y'all stop funding this shit the better.
I want to short anything you touch. Please give us stock predictions.
Indeed, even for the demo they did not put a human inside.
IRL I can think of so many failure modes it makes this "car" unpractical for anything but a tech demo.
Is it going to be fun and engaging to drive? Absolutely not. It doesn’t even have a steering wheel.
Finally, a vehicle that’s perfect for the CEO in your life who wants to upload his brain to a data center powered by the body heat of his employees hooked up to the pods from The Matrix.
It also has steer-by-wire which makes the steering yoke practical as they can tweak the steering ratio to prevent the need to go hand-over-hand. As they did for the Cybertruck.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=USSHxtHLHc8
Driving an F1 car is fun in the same way that cycling in the Tour de France is fun. Everything about that experience is purely for function and competition.
I think Louis Hamilton has a lot more fun in his Ferrari F40 than in his F1 car.
You can feel the road because your steering wheel is directly touching the wheels which are directly touching the road. This is true even when the steering is heavily power assisted.
Steer by wire has to engineer that feedback back in artificially, and there’s non-zero input lag.
I don’t think fun is the priority of this car. The priority of this car is to be a marketing vehicle for the brand. Almost nobody will own this car and certainly almost nobody will own the more insane trim levels.
We can’t even trust that this company will ever ship the car since they didn’t ship the last iteration. Read the reservation fine print, it says they might not even make the car.
Ask yourself who would see the benefit of a vehicle that can jump over obstacles, other dangers or other cars?
Obstacles including barricades, flooded roads, tank traps, rivers, fences and burning cars. Dangers might include IEDs, mines, destroyed bridges, barbed wire, stinger strips, active munitions being fired at it, etc.
Even without such dangers, jumping over moving cars would be useful in pursuits where getting in front of a target gives an advantage.
And the extra mobility would be useful in humanitarian and disaster applications where getting to and from those in need in a timely fashion may save lives.
Other cars, if you have to ask where the government will allow you to drive it, you can't afford it.
Haggerty has a good video with more details about the engineering. [1]
Here's an RC car that can drive on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
My general assumption is that anything and everything that wasn't necessary for that demo was removed to trim enough weight to make the demo possible.
Tesla's website literally says the Rocket version is "Not approved for public road use." And has "Seating for one." Any battery that can perform that demo can certainly power basic driving. You're accusing them of deception when every modification you describe is plainly stated on their website. (E.g. It's drive-by-wire, and the seats are modeled chassis elements. Yes, it's wildly minimal.)
The expectation that a vehicle that did a literal standing barrel roll (even if only a single time) be functionally equivalent to a Toyota Camry is madness to me. The much more interesting question is what type of localization system in 3D space were they running?
You fell for Elon's three-cup monte.
What we saw was impressive, but it’s a trick. The car’s tanks are surely empty after this, and now you have a loud compressor filling them up for minutes. You can’t use those thrusters near people and cars cause you’re at risk of getting them in trouble.
It’s part of a long history of useless tech in supercars. Impressive, but useless.
Some of the earlier prep work used wires, but not the final stunt.
https://insideevs.com/news/812205/tesla-roadster-replenishes...
Satellites are on a ballistic trajectory, they don't 'hover' but they will stay aloft long enough to be useful. A bullet fired horizontally is going to follow a parabola and then impact (the ground or something else) it does not hover. A car that is dropped that ejects a significant fraction of its mass in any direction is going to alter its trajectory but that won't change much: it's going to come down, and sooner rather than later, it isn't 'hovering' it is just very temporarily staving off the inevitable.
If you show me this car staying in place for more than a couple of seconds I would agree it is hovering, the mass ejection trick would have to be replaced by something that actually works. But this is just a gimmick: it gives the illusion of a hover by ejecting a bunch of mass so large that outside of a split second demo it isn't going to work, it's going to come down within a very short time and there is nothing that will stave that off.
That meets the definition of hovering.
It wouldn't be the first time Musk demoed something and promised something and then never ships.
And I'm the one with "derangement".
Then again, maybe I'm forgetting about the corrupt lawless country they operate out of...
I'm not saying its impossible but it seems pretty naive to just assume on face value
For what it’s worth, my $600 hunting rifle will go clean through both sides of any bulletproof vest, and it’s nothing special.
For everything that is bulletproof, there is always a calibre of projectile that will go through it.
Skins on cars are shocking thin.
I.e. they are light enough to be body armor, but if they blocked bullets people would have been using them as armor for a long time now.
the hate trains folks get on boarded onto just blind them from simple truth. yeah I'm pretty sure the road does indeed fly for short distances. yes it's totally impractical. and yet it does. and it's also quite the feat. doesn't mean one should buy it, but the blindness coming from manufactured hate is really ridiculous.
Technically it’s water vapor, not smoke.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
Surely the intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
Nope.
List of cars I know to go over 90MPH. Supposedly. 2000 Dodge Neon with 800 pounds of man in it and only 3 out of 4 cylinders functional. 2004 Toyota Camry with broken O2 sensors, and it loves it. Anything by VW. Pretty much anything parked in your local highschool.
Most modern cars can hit 90 MPH with ease, that's what modern aero and 145HP being "underpowered" means! Supposedly cars are electronically hard limited to 115mph and I have never been able to confirm that in practice
Of course, this implies that you might be able to own some of these features, with the actual crime being using them. Like that Beetle with a helicopter jet turbine.
closed tab. thanks.
Tesla has never really shown they can design anything compelling that doesn’t look like a lumpy shoe.
Right now it has 80s delorean look... That was nice then but a bit out of place now especially for a supercar
2: I still want a topless Tesla that could be a good daily driver; an SL63 competitor basically. So, I'm sad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(second_generat...
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
Though, the thruster model that does flips has a heavy in COPV in the passenger seat, additional thrusters, and carries several hundred kg of compressed nitrogen. So it may actually weigh 2300 kg fully loaded.
Gemini 4 Argon: https://x.com/LechMazur/status/2111255403216384046 GPT-6 Pro: https://x.com/LechMazur/status/2111255536666644932 Opus 5.5: https://x.com/LechMazur/status/2111258566539493402
The software industry has taught me how sneaky a demo can be ;). That's without considering Tesla's history of bonkers claims and sus demos (anyone else remember the bulletproof windows?).
Edit: Removed a rhetorical question about the demo. Apparently there was a live audience, so they couldn't have just made a very tiny Roadster haha.
But you know, that's just off the top of my head.
Based on the record of Musk & co straight out LYING in such events (remember Solarcity?), I am very confident in saying that a large portion of what they demonstrated they have not actually solved how to fit in a real production car.
They could be in the unit when its happening and there would still be some counterclaim.
It's amazing how on HN, a place where hackers, dreamers, builders come together to talk can't say one positive thing from some of these actual delivered engineering feats. It's bias happening real-time.
It’s not like this is the first time that Elon has overpromised and underdelivered.
The fact that Waymos don't get hit head-on by drunk drivers suggests this is a situational awareness versus last-minute dodge problem.
This is not and will probably never be practical, but it's something that's never really been done before, and for that alone I kinda like it.
hparadiz said it would be much more impressive if they had driven it off a cliff.
It occurs to me that's a much more interesting use case -- to the extent that the jump tech is functional and can recharge itself in a reasonable time frame (?), it would be much more useful in an off-road vehicle. Tree trunk in your way? Don't even bother to slow down -- in fact, speed up -- and jump that thing. Likewise for gullies and other obstacles, even relatively small cliffs, and rivers.
The reason thrusters work well in space is minimal weight there. You need to work many times harder on Earth to counter act the weight of the object here.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-079-introduction-to-convex-opt...
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM
Aren't spacesuit visors actually gold plated, not copper?
Until everyone who wants to buy a flying car can buy it and have it delivered next week, yes, we have every right to complain.
Until then, this Tesla demo is no different than an AI generated video. Can’t buy the car yet.
How’s that FSD from 2017?
Has it been delivered yet?
Rideshare on Tesla Network making money for you while you sleep? Oh, “concept”. Right.
That being said, the stock tanked today so I don't think most people are buying it.
The problem is not the car, is the flying part. No doubt is pretty impressive but I can't see myself buying it even if I had the money, the car: yes, the flying part: no.
This is just a technology demostrator trying to perhaps increase the stock value of SpaceX and Tesla.
Consider also that there could be people not interested in the car but in the hardware and the flying technology itself. The level of precision shown in the demo makes me believe that you truly don't want to commercialize such a product: is too much advanced tech for peanuts for the ones who have other plans.
I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but that will require more than a scripted demo. Meanwhile, I'll let my full self-driving Tesla drive me to my workplace in the Mars colony, where I currently live. Can't wait to see my coworker, Robby the Tesla Robot.
It beggars belief that was not scripted by a comedian. Comedic timing was perfect.
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
I am skeptical that this feature will prove to be much more than a publicity stunt, especially since the availability of these models will be so limited.
I would put it in the same class as the McMurtry Spéirling. Let's just see how far we can push a car if there is no concern for cost or maintenance.
I think if this ever makes it to production (doubtful) it will be a let down like the Cybertruck.
I don't see much difference between a more affordable autonomous bus or van option vs a subway. The benefit will eventually be access to the tunnels more than the fact it's large and on a track. But in cities it's also incredibly expensive to build anything without a hundred stakeholders interfering so a large amount of new tunnels is probably DOA just like most high speed rail projects have been.
Fan cars are old. Nothing about them is new or special or unique. Trying to build infrastructure dependent on such a feature would be the dumbest thing since monorails.
Just build subways for heaven's sake.
I vividly remember reading we were all supposed to have flying cars by the year 2000. I was so excited and looked forward to the future. As the early 90's approached, it was obvious, NOBODY would have flying cars. Better late than never...
Tomorrow's World on the BBC also was chock full of this.
And Back To The Future II was set in the future (which is now our past) and had flying cars.
I think people are a bit over-optimistic, wanting flying cars for no known reason. People can't manage in 2 dimensions (x and y) so why on earth you'd give them the z dimension too and expect them to get it right is beyond me.
The Model 3 Standard was released in October 2025 priced starting at $37k.
The $7500 federal EV tax credit was scheduled to apply to that car but was killed early by the OBBBA, ending in September 2025. Had the tax credit still been in place as planned, presumably the sticker price would have made it under $30k.
It sure looks like Tesla worked hard to hit their $30k sticker price but then Congress pulled the 'ol switcheroo. Elon left the Trump administration in ~June 2025, just before the OBBBA was passed, calling the OBBBA a "disgusting abomination".
And let’s keep in mind this is 100% vaporware; the cars sold to actual buyers may differ significantly in their design and capabilities from what was demonstrated here. It is possible that the COPVs in the car on display took up the entire passenger compartment.
The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell, it would basically be a bomb. Also, the battery pack that would go in the car would be so large that they couldn't do the stunts they showed in their drone vehicle.
Are we not calling an obvious stock pumping charade what it is out of some sense of politeness?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZpQZSBTi7k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2c-B3y7yGQ
https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/australias-first-flyin...
Just because the technology is technically feasible doesn't mean that a specific company is not scamming you when they promise it.
And Tesla already has enough of a history of fake promises (your tesla will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep within a few years, FSD will take you across the country while you sleep by next year, humanoid robots, the new roadster is taking reservations now and will deliver soon, regulation is the only thing holding up FSD, etc etc).
The existing tech fab plus this car maybe makes it harder to sue once the merger happens - but he will still be sued. “Look we’re making it rocket cars with AI of course we should be one company”
Was it a an amazing demo? yes.
Looks like 4 seconds or so.
Is that your claim?
with the most notorious pedophile on earth?
> Virginia Giuffre alleged in a lawsuit that in the early 2000s, when she was 18, she participated in an orgy on the island with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and eight girls who "appeared to be under the age of 18" and did not speak English.
What exactly are you defending here?
Prove what exactly?
Epstein pled guilty in state court in June 2008 to procuring a minor for prostitution, and was subsequently registered as a sex offender. His conviction, the child victim, and his plea-deal scandal were all public record and nationally covered by the media in 2008. Prior to November 2012, the publicly available records linking "pedophile island" (as it was referred to by locals) to abuse of minors was multiple 2008–2009 lawsuits and the 2011 media coverage. Said media coverage was the UK press turning the case into an international story from February 2011, that included: photos of Andrew and Epstein in Central Park, the Mail on Sunday photo of Andrew with Roberts and Maxwell, details about Sarah Ferguson being paid to clear her debts, and Andrew stepping down as trade envoy in July 2011.
The facts we have currently are via this truncated DOJ release, because prior to that Elon lied about their relationship on several occasions:
- “he never toured SpaceX” (July 2020).
- “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED” (Sept 2025)
And the facts are that Elon was asking the world's most notorious pedophile when he could visit the private island so he could attend his wildest party. This might be normal for you, but if I knew someone who was a convicted pedophile I wouldn't want to speak to them ever again, let alone begging to be invited to their wildest party on a remote private island.
"What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?"
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA006616...
"Do you have any parties planned? I've been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose. The invitation is much appreciated, but a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I'm looking for."
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02563...
October 2, 2013 - https://www.etonline.com/news/139074_Woody_Allen_Daughter_Br... - "Woody Allen's adopted daughter Dylan opens up to Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth about the sexual abuse scandal involving her famous father."
Sat, Nov 23 - Epstein: "will you come to caribean this xmas? , woody alien with me, you might enjoy", Elon: "Yes"
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01944...
Again, who is the convicted pedophile?
Again, I do have to pose the question because I'm not sure if you are being willfully obtuse:
Would you willingly of your own volition repeatedly keep emailing a convicted child sex offender (a “Level 3 sex offender” in New York, which is the state’s highest classification), asking to visit their private island (where instances of underage rape were documented in the public domain) so you could attend one of their wildest parties?
If your answer is anything other than no, then there's not much more to say. Note that I did use your preferred phrasing too, even though clinically, pedophilia means a sexual attraction to children.
> Or keep this living rent free in your head for who knows what reason.
Why would this not bother you in the slightest? That's a better question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia if you need to learn.
Pedophilia means attraction to prepubescent children. Quibbling about whether Epstein and co. met the legal definition for being a convicted pedophile wouldn't be the hill I'd want to die on. All of your comments look insanely bad, but will look immeasurably worse in the future.
As a reminder:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
> “You read through these files, and you read about 15-year-old girls, 14-year-old girls, 10-year-old girls,” Raskin said.
> “I saw a mention of a nine-year-old girl today. I mean, this is just preposterous and scandalous.”
Go look at the emails. It kinda shows Elon was clueless about what the island was about.
Also he wasn't notorious at the time.
> What exactly are you defending here?
Ah you're going to accuse me of defending pedophilia now? Figures with your type.
No, it is not normal to be attracted to adolescents after you leave that age group.
Jesus fuck.
Pretty sure they’re just straight up lying too.
I literally linked one in my first post - I'm clearly more familiar with them than you are.
> Also he wasn't notorious at the time.
you're right, it's not like the UK press had implicated Prince Andrew in 2011 which was international news, three years after Epstein's conviction for procuring a minor which was also international news.
> It kinda shows Elon was clueless about what the island was about.
In the released emails we have thus far, Musk was the first to bring up the concept of a party, on 25 November 2012. So no, that doesn't indicate at all that Musk was clueless about what the island was all about.
> Ah you're going to accuse me of defending pedophilia now?
I don't need to, but given the evidence (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50126559) it is very weird behavior to go out of your way to defend him.
In fact we agree that everyone throwing around this word does massive disjustice to actual pedophilia victims which is one of the worst things you could do.
There's absolutely an argument to be made there but in this case it's a bit more specific.
Anyone that repeatedly emails the most notorious pedophile on earth, begging to be invited to the wildest party on their private island is absolutely a pedophile.
That kind of liar is what I would expect of someone who goes around claiming Elon's a Nazi though.
Straubel, in the year 2000 at the age of 25, may very well have had unprotected sex out of wedlock !!
Also yes you can legally sell it. Whether you can legally operate it is a different question.
Also Cybercab.
How many Optimus robots are out in the wild?
It is a scam, 100%.
Optimus is coming, the huge factory in Austin is being built now.
Late? Always. But coming.
Two outta three ain’t bad.
Cybercab is operating already on the roads? They're building the factory for mass producing them right now.
Optimus robot is still in development.
This was an air tank with a styrofoam shell held together with glue. It's a rough prototype of a concept car.
And they did build one pilot station that did the battery swaps and did some swaps with real owners cars, but drivers didn't like the idea so they abandoned it.
And yes to my point, I said Tesla product, namely something that is sold to customers as is. So yeah it's relevant.
Which serial numbers? I see no evidence of any customer shipments with this capability. Happy to be corrected with factual evidence, though.
> I said Tesla product, namely something that is sold to customers as is.
That’s not what the word “product” means. It’s not limited to products shipped to end users. Components used only in service stations, dealers, or for their own internal use that are produced by them are also products. Quite literally anything that comes out the output side of a production process is a product.
The corvette ZR-1 had a special key that would unlock all the performance. I don't think it met emissions when unlocked.
Lots of newer muscle cars have performance modes and dragstrip modes that you shouldn't use.
Even other teslas, like model 3 performance and model s plaid have have track mode and dragstrip mode that shouldn't be used on public streets.
The Mitsubishi Outlander outsells it.
I can’t imagine a car without a steering wheel benign fun to drive. Tesla has never been known for handling and driving dynamics.
Numb steering, crashy handling, that’s what the gearheads seem to say about Tesla vehicles.
They go fast but they are absolutely not at the top of the class for driving dynamics.
I’ve test driven a Model Y Performance and the steering was lighter and more numb than my basic economy car. The car goes fast but that’s all it does.
If the roadster has drive by wire like the cybertruck that’s going to be even worse.
There is no universe in which I would compare any Tesla model to an M3 or WRX.
First of all we should consider that their direct competitor the Ioniq 5 N is a better performance car.
The M3 finishes Willow Springs faster than the Model 3, so we can’t even go by raw performance. In track conditions the battery thermals and stock tires on the Model 3 can’t keep up.
Comparing the emotions you’re going to get from a V8 gurgling and thrashing through gears compared to a silent EV motor is just not even in the same league. The Ioniq 5 N actually does something about that and reviewers are impressed. They directly state that it is more fun than Tesla performance models.
Then your other problem is that the Model 3 performance looks identical to your uber driver’s car. Someone dropping $60k on a performance car wants to feel special. The trim and upholstery options on the M3 alone are more exciting than the Model 3.
I own a v8 (4.6 modular, baby), and it's lovely. Different driving experience, much less performance. I don't want an EV that's trying to compete with that experience, I want a machine that's honest about what it is.
I don't care how my car looks. I spend the money on performance. Bang for buck, the performance model 3 is maximum smiles per hour.
They sell 20k of them per year. It's the opposite of popular
They ARE popular, I see 10-20 a day when I drive around. Now if you want to compare to a corolla, I don't care.
They're distinctive.
Count Corollas for a day. You can probably see 10-20 at once in some spots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
(When I got a Toyota Echo back in the early 2000s, I suddenly saw them everywhere, too. And yet… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Platz#Sales)
Please, try.
Meanwhile: Hyperloop, Boring company, everything app, Mars colonies, FSD... Maybe he'll end up delivering on some of these (most probably partially, at best), but with Musk, overpromising and underdelivering in the norm. There's nothing to be confused about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
- The cold-gas only version will shotgun debris into onlookers, and possibly yeet anyone behind it.
- Active suction is very cool until a rock punches through your intakes.
- Lithium batteries and pressurised tanks in the same package, yippee!
Thank god it'll take them years to manufacture this thing.
They'll make a handful that a select few billionaires will get to keep in a hanger somewhere for bragging rights.
There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I wouldn’t want to sit in it tho (and I’m guessing no one in the demographic this will be sold to would want this level of risk either).
I'm not even sure if a fighter pilot could. The passenger compartment of the "Rocket" model is probably packed full of tanks and other equipment, to deliver total of a few seconds of flight time. Doing anything in the air would probably require such precise timing no person could do manually, and it probably can't even be done automatically outside very controlled conditions.
I think the bigger issue with be making it street legal. Kickflipping over traffic, and refusing visibility for everyone to 0 in the process, can't be good.
For closed courses, movies, etc it's really cool.
The Tumbler? Oh, you wouldn't be interested in that.
The base model has the suction fans which will make huge gains.
Next model up has rear thrusters for the acceleration, which will be more insane. It’s limited production.
Final model that can fly is invite only and will be a joke on the track, using those thrusters to go around corners way, way faster than normal.
I wish they had shown track laps and 1/4 mile times instead of the gimmick of flying.
They also wouldn’t have wanted it on test tracks before today.
If that thing would have looked like a huge drone (which I strongly suspect it is) no one would be up in arms about it.
And they already did that with a cybertruck pulling a 911, already done.
When you were a kid, if you saw a car fly and flip you would be amazed. You are old and jaded like me so nothing gives you wonder anymore.
This would even be a sensible choice for Tesla, because it will put that car in a garage far away from public scrutiny...
(thinking just about all the debris damage-potential of those thrusters here, not even any potential quality issues)
The cybertruck is for sale and FSD is active in the US. The US lets automakers "self-certify" that they are safe. So although I don't think this thing should ever be sold, it may end of on US roads.
Flying / rocket acceleration are special versions they can sell one offs capable of doing the stunt once per canister change.
Harvard, Yale, University of Texas 82
For example, Smale, a descriptively poor student educated in mathematics, didn't work as a janitor in any of the three institutes you mentioned and yet still scored a Wolf Prize, a Fields Medal, and other gongs most of us don't have.
You likely didn't notice the merging of threads and how your comment was out of context under the common title.
>This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Neat car though.
It's very impressive. Not useful, but impressive.
If they ever deliver a single unit that's a low enough bar to make it completely economically infeesable.
if they somehow managed to sell a couple of thousand... it might become profitable.
this has to be just a fantastic bit of marketing to jazz up their share price.
also.. I'd love to see a blooper roll of making it do these things...
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that it'll never make production like this, but what I see as being demonstrated is a suborbital lander/off-world ground transport concept that can work in low gravity environments etc. This will aid autonomous delivery vehicles etc to be dropped from low orbit and find their own landing sites, and then drive to location.
I wonder how many maimed kerbals are stranded around the space X facility while testing this.
The car is just a façade.
Edit: And to expand on this. Owners of GM T.50' say they can't use the ground effect fan anywhere in public due to the debris it picks up and throws, and are ineffective on anything but near perfect roads. So that's not impressive to me. And the jet boosters are also ridiculous, there is not real-world application where you could use them outside of completely closed environments with no one nearby. It's a huge investment into reaction thrusters for a car that would never, ever be used - unless it was to demonstrate thruster technology for another reason.
i.e. Space X.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IM-1#Lunar_landing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_1#Landing_att...
This feels like a delivery mechanism to drop hardware from terrestrial orbit. At least the last leg after parachutes
Also, assuming the delivery vehicle is destroyed at the end of each "delivery", what will it cost?
I think you are on an entirely different page.
It clearly does not look like a smaller Cybertruck though. You're just wrong there.
I mean, it's fun but useless? It's like those semi trucks with a jet engine on them. It looks awesome but it's utterly useless.
If this is for entertainment, sure. But they're trying to sell you something here.
And, speculation by Chris Norland YouTuber is the Roadster being fitted with literal rocket boosters is a portion of an argument to help justify SpaceX financially helping Tesla.
It's a backpack company presenting the engineering of a jetpack to promote the sales of a premium backpack with the same name.
It could hover up through a large elevator shaft into a spot as well. That way no one gets annoyed by the sight and sound from the street. I wonder how nimble it is in the air.
this site just toast
This is not some suden demo, this is something they've promised and talked of along time ago and has been in development the whole time.
And Tesla is all about manufacturing so mistaking this for some "prototype-only" device is misled.
What people mean by "flying cars" is mass production. Ford Model T.
Kids: “that’s not really flying”.
https://news.dupontregistry.com/blogs/ford-news/whatever-hap...
This is just amazing, congrats to everyone who worked on this.
From an engineering pov, it must be the highlight of someone's life and a massive amount of fun to be able to work on a product like this.
Planes also require an enormous amount of space and time between local movements at airports. City street are the same as airports, space or should i say TIME is needed betwee aircraft. Airports have been runing for over 50 years, they never run planes back to back.
Remember one mistake, one crqsh between two flying cars, and both are basically dead.
It must be incredibly difficult to keep the car stable while mid-air at low speeds, I suspect it wouldn't look that "elegant"...
But once that phase is overcome, how stable is the car actually mid-air?
It looks to me that they added the barrel-roll because everything else would have looked worse...
You’d want something that smoothly hovers rather than a launch then catch with boosters.
Was there a second jump without a roll?
A barrell roll is a specific manoeuvre involving pitching up vertically before commencing the roll.
Learnt something today, thank you!
I've yet to see this thing fly.
* The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw
But, I just wish it didn't resemble a Lamborghini so much.
The unreleased roadster (2017) looked amazing. Tesla is capable of incredible totally original design.
It’s an engineering demonstration, it’s main purpose is to make people dream, generate vocation.
Because if we go by this, Apollo mission was also useless, making car who go beyond road limitation is also useless and so on. But every of those projects have serve to make some children dream, children who have made to their jobs because of theses projects.
In a world where the mood appears to push people toward depression, thank you, Tesla, for letting us remain optimistic and keep dreaming.
Because if we go into this the Apollo mission has employed literal old Nazi scientists, but nobody say today “Apollo mission was a bad thing” because of that.
I don’t care if the innovation come from somebody who doesn’t share my point of view or the other way, the innovation is the only thing to matter in this case.
hmmmm. spacex-tesla merger signalling?
sometimes u gotta just ignore economics and instead make history!
Sports cars are designed to be impractical, but they can also be impressive feats of engineering.
I imagine the flying variant will be an extremely limited release and mostly just for stunts and shows.
[1] further conditions may apply.
My guys. Talking about how it's going to work and the merits of cold gas thrusters on cars is moot. I assure you that you will never, ever see one of these sold to the public or on the road.
2. I know fuck all when it comes to real physics but there’s a lot of discussion of this “flying” and some serious napkin math. The demo has this falling, stopping momentum, and landing. Is that demonstration of enough force to produce reliable lift from the ground?
My crap knowledge can come up with arguments either way but I’m leaning towards you can’t possibly have enough force to leave the ground and land safely?
If you have 2.5 seconds of thrust you have 1.25 seconds to use to get off the ground and 1.25 seconds to stop you from absolutely destroying the car as it pounds into the ground in my shit math world, and I feel like there’s no way you could even concept car demo that?
Cool stunt car though
I'll be listening even more closely to his ideas from now on, even when they defy the "common sense filter" we adults tend to have.
It appears like they always did a barrel-roll because the car is simply not stable after take-off...
I think there is a more rational explanation. Tesla sales have slowed, other companies are catching up, and if it weren't for import issues, Chinese cars would be eating Tesla's breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yet Tesla is trading at a 330 P/E and Musk has to do something to make it seem like Tesla is still light-years ahead of everyone else and just wait, that 330 P/E will be justified any quarter now. Just like shooting a roadster into deep space was just a PR stunt, this is a PR stunt to boost the brand with no actual market relevance.
At this point it's not clear that there's anything other than a 14 year old in him. A greedy, sociopathic 14 year old.
Catching up? BYD has already surpassed Tesla and looks like the gap is going to continue to grow.
Dunno. Looks like it jumps. Fying seems to require some degree of control over direction but I'm just a gravity-impaired bidep.
In other news, the car is very ugly, which is the only thing that was interesting to me. They made it look like an underfed cybertruck for some reason
Fun demo, never will see the road. There's a billion ways this can kill scores of people instantly.
Plenty of ways to maim/kill people in traditional cars already and I doubt this will be the most common one in roadsters.
The generally available car will have cold-gas thrusters which boost acceleration but is nothing like what was demo'd.
The flying trim will never be sold to general consumers. Even the rear-thruster trim is currently listed at a $250,000 pre-order fee, which is a deposit for a fraction of the full cost of the car. Final cost will be over $1M. Any of the thruster variants will be extremely rare; like, the one guy in your city that has one will show it off at car shows twice a year, McLaren P1, level of rare.
I historically argued for a sort of horror-vehicle that would achieve autonomous driving "early" by exploiting downforce from powerful fans, but I mostly imagined it being used for autonomous deliveries and never imagined there being people inside it.
Also "Beyond The Limits of Physics"... would any actual engineers at Tesla/SpaceX agree with that marketing statement?
Just like we will have 1 million robotaxis on the streets by 2021?
EDIT: wow it really can fly, that is crazy
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
> Tesla Sales Slump in Third Quarter
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-sales-fell-in-third...
Tesla Q3 sales will be the same tomorrow.
It doesn't surprise me that any particular companies sales are down at the moment, how does Tesla compare to other car manufacturers out of interest.
This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.
With high interest rate and tight money supply, this could get them a few billion dollars of 'customer financing'.
also wonder how comfy that is? i kind of welcome it tho!
It would be an extremely cool demo if this thing was even remotely close to a car that can be produced and sold. Alas, this was something that could be used in a circus at best (where people would need to be very very far since it's very dangerous).
I have no reason to believe this isn't another Deplorean.
Will the frame itself hold up?
> "Will it even be maintainable?"
Probably doesn't matter. I don't think it will be permitted on public roads anyway.
The presented variant is invite-only, so I guess it will be made to put in the garage of some (Saudi) investor who commits a billion dollar investment...
It turns out the car has a 200L/600L nitrogen tank with 10,000PSI that needs to be filled from external source.
Consumed nitrogen reduces the pressure, so the tank is re-pressurized with ambient air by a in-car compressor.
That can do kickflips.
He recently shut down Starlink, weakening Ukrainians.
I really don't think people should feed that billionaire any more, no matter the reason.
Tesla made something actually cool. They did a live of demo of it. No one in these comments or anywhere else on earth could do what they just did. Even if they don't sell a single one they've received billions of views on these videos. Even if it wasn't commercially meaningful ( and of course it isn't given the small output of extremely expensive cars compared to mass manufacturing vehicles ), it's still just cool and props to them for doing something cool. The world needs more cool stuff
Rocket trim is not street legal.
The uncanny valley is telling me it shouldn't have shaken at the top of the track like that unless it was on a guide rail system for the demo.
I'm so glad Elon exists. He must have spent over $100 million to build the flying variant with no hope of ever profiting off it. I can't imagine any other CEO ever doing that.
There’s no engineering advancement here?
I sure hope they don’t hit the road. Seems like an obviously novel (and terrifying) consumer technology
I'm not sure about those thrusters though, I doubt they'd be legal?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
No advance. Its engineering gimmicks to hide the fact self driving is 15 years late, and all recently announced Tesla models are worst, and more expensive, than any Chinese alternative.
But hey, 0 to 60mph in 2.7 seconds isn't bad, assuming that ramp is 37 metres high...
The thrusters were able to cushion a fall.
That seems useful in ruining the ending of Thelma and Louise, but isn’t really a flying car.
I think this is pretty unique demonstration for something that theoretically may be street legal one day.
A few considerations, just my own thoughts.
1) I would bet that the actual car shown in the demo weights less than what will eventually be sold to the public. I am not an expert, but the way in which the car reacted to the air boosts suggests a relatively "lightweight" vehicle. Plus, I would imagine perhaps a smaller battery (again, for demo purposes).
2) It is a nice "exercise" as a game, or an expensive hobby for billionaires. I doubt, as Elon hinted, that using these thrusters will be allowed on public roads. Perhaps just on circuits?
3) Overall, Elon said that Tesla's strategy will no longer be about cars, but about robots and AI, and then proceeds to show a car that will cost billions to develop, and might not be the commercial success that justifies the investment.
4) Twitter (now X), Tesla, SpaceX... things are moving, tricks are being shown, and who knows, perhaps next year everything will be merged under ElonX, and he will finally be happy.
This one is a hard-top super-coupe and I recommend calling it the "Cyberwedge"
My sense is that this is just more Elon Musk bullshit that will never materialize.
1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem. 2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.
These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.
still tries to murder passengers jumping across traffic at shadows
good luck with anything Musk, you are the beta tester, if you die they'll debug it, eventually
The only time he takes over is in a very tight garage where you need to drive really close to walls and FSD freaks out a bit.
I'm not condoning his behavior, but it tells me that FSD if "mostly works" for normal applications.
I mean this isn't even ancient history, it only happened in 2022. He sent three termination notifications before it was determined that he had no grounds to refuse to buy.
It just means you can do jumps and stunts programmed into the vehicle at the push of a button with zero skill at being a stunt driver.
The Dukes of Hazzard had to do that without the thrusters.
Can't wait to see how people kill themselves and other people with those things by being stupid...
Hopefully that shit gets blocked by the DOT and kept off public roads--which is probably the goal to get a bunch of drooling simps outraged over "government overreach" keeping them away from their "flying cars".
That's the bit where we diverge.
Can I put it under grokbot's control?
And this tech is simply part of the Tesla/SpaceX merge, and right in line with flamethrowers, tunnels, and chainsaws. It's going to funnel loads of cash his way, which was the idea.
Also amazing stupidity of people believing anything close to this will hit the streets. Lies and lies for a decade, and now after a flashy demo it is again "2028".
Yesterday, that’s exactly what we saw and it’s ok to just enjoy the spectacle.
Bullshit, no it can't.
> Advanced cold-gas thrusters use all-electric actuators to offer precise thrust, completing micro adjustments within a fraction of a second. This helps stabilize the vehicle in flight.
In flight? What? Did I miss the joke, or what? It's a fucking car... The image even shows it hovering off the ground. How is this not blatant false advertising?
ETA: okay, skimmed some of the livestream. These is absolutely no way that any of these features will ever be part of a production model. People get serious whiplash injuries just from being rear-ended at low speed. What do they think is going to happen to the occupant when they tell their car to jump over a semi and do a fucking barrel roll? Seriously, what are we doing here?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
Watch the video - the car jumps into the air. Not exactly flight or what we’d consider a flying car, but it’s careering through the air off the ground.
I mean, this isn't crazy. In fact, it's already been done. Ever heard of McMurtry? (https://mcmurtry.com/). They're notorious for exactly this - using fans to provide extreme downforce (urr... upforce if you're hanging upside down?).
> In flight?
Did you see the stunt where it literally flew over vehicles? I mean, maybe it's a bit closer to a controlled super-leap like the original Superman, but... yeah, my personal reaction to that was more "holy shit" than "well, that's not flying".
> Bullshit, no it can't.
A proof of concept already exists:
This is the latter. Four propulsion mechanism that introduce tradeoffs in the structure that remove value for 99% of people.
Part of me though wonders what this would have been like if it had been a slick sciencey presentation that paid real tribute to the talent below the smug denim C-suite. A bit more Engelbart or Feynman or Sagan and a bit less Balmer, Bezos, and Bozo the clown.
Showing the world your flying car is a moment to shine as a serious person. These men seem to be actively trying to not do that!
Uh what? Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip
Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/LC97wdQOmfI
Amazing suction power. Waiting to see a video of its crazy turning power.
A lot of public funds go into these companies and it just feels like they are playing around with toys instead advancing humanity. I sometimes wonder if we are not allocating resources very efficiently.
Also the public government funds being received are in the form of contracts. It's not like they can just use the money anywhere. Both Tesla and SpaceX are likely using private money (that is to say, funds not from the government) to fund this.
> It's not like they can just use the money anywhere
I mean SpaceX was literally caught buying Cybertrucks it's clear there's some corruption. But aside from that, they also just represent such a large chunk of the market that it's hard to argue that they aren't just siphoning funds from other ventures somewhat even outside of public misappropriation. I wouldn't even mind that if I felt like they earned it, but it just feels like the stock was pumped as a meme or something. The engineering is impressive but not impressive IMO for what they are worth.
> I mean SpaceX was literally caught buying Cybertrucks it's clear there's some corruption.
Government contracts are not grants. There are specific appropriations for where that money is allowed to be used.
And as for your point about the funds going to other ventures, sure I guess. You're free to think whatever you want about which private companies deserve funding, but it's not like it's unfair to anyone when two private agents get together and agree to do something. That is the case even if the private investor funds the private company to do something considered phony and pointless.
you have to be pretty jaded to think a car that can fly through the air is not impressive.
If it was like "we figured out this technology and it will be available to the public and we will be working with regulators to usher in a new age of flying cars!" I would be pretty stoked. But it's pretty obviously just a stunt for the launch.
I don't know I just...I feel crazy but I feel like these resources could be doing something amazing and we getting like stunt tricks.
You don't think electric vehicles and battery storage advance humanity?
On the contrary I would rather my big companies didn't try so hard to advance humanity. Elon has a lot of takes around creating a Utopian society which do not sit right with me. Really it's not the advancement that's the problem, it's the requisite power and resources necessary to achieve the elaborate visions. Humanity should be advanced by a collective, not by a few gifted individuals, even if that means more bureaucracy and less efficiency.
In other words, you are advocating for communism.
Oh no, they are letting people “reserve” their roadster
How is anyone still falling for this grift?
Like the Cybertruck, this is just the Musk "fuck you, get out of my way" worldview realised as metal and plastic.
An innovative way to make some whoop-de-dooping billionaires with extra cash to spare land upside down on their rooves.
Almost all the comments here are just the most generically negative I have ever seen on HN, with just general grumpiness everywhere.
This car is an incredible engineering achievement and a completely unexpected reveal.
Tesla should be sued into oblivion over "full self driving", but after that, if you believe this nonsense and buy one that's on you.
How delusional are people? The emperor is not wearing clothes y'all.
5 years of broken promises and actively fighting to make the world worse will do a lot to opinions.
If, instead, you had a grounded, balanced opinion about the man, you'd understand the great good he's delivered, and continues to deliver for the world, from Tesla (making electric cars desirable and mass-market) to Neuralink (making viable brain computer interfaces to give heavily disabled people back their lives), to SpaceX (giving humanity hope for a brighter, more exciting future in space, as governments once did, but have since failed to do).
(I assume your instinct will be to defend him because said rescuer was mean first. Don’t bother, as you can see I am well aware and it doesn’t change my opinion.)
I can totally understand if you think the good outweighs the bad. I tend that way myself: I own two Teslas and I eagerly watch every Starship launch. But I also think Musk has shown himself to be a real piece of shit. A real piece of shit who has done some great stuff, but that doesn’t negate it.
What has Musk actually done to get us closer other than talk about how humanity ought to do it?
Starship has only even achieved LEO once, in an unmanned mission a few weeks ago. Starship has so far cost about $15 Billion, the entire Saturn V launch program (excluding Apollo, to keep things apples-apples here) cost about $35 Billion in today's dollars.
LOL. Enron Musk collect 1000x 250k pre-orders 10 years ago for a car that doesn't exist.
Now he made a stunt (doesn't fly) and the fanbois go "ooo it flies". And he'll collect 1000x 250k more. Great return on investment, truly genius businessman.
Literally no proof of this working in real world conditions.
I call bull.
Looks like it truly is a K shaped economy. Flying cars for 1% and loans for the rest
They are trying. Inflation keeps moving the bar. It's not like they want their cars to be expensive; the components and fabrication prices just are.
Used you can achieve sub-25k easily.
The problem is not inflation, it’s that America sucks at manufacturing low cost electric vehicles. BYD has demonstrated that tenfold
American labor is expensive but BYD owes its success to vertical integration more than cheap labor. They are moving into Europe to build there before long. Americans have an uninformed notion that China simply couldn’t have superior technology, they’re just cutting corners, dumping chemicals in the river etc (as if American companies would never)
It might just be that china is better at building cars.
The real win for environment would be building cities and towns to support not having to drive everywhere.
> it works great
I have a feeling that you can and do work on it, because maintenance otherwise would easily be triple the market price of that car yearly. That significantly changes the economics of old cars.
Say, you go for the cheapest option and get minor services done at around 500-700$. Okay, a medium or major service is going to be over 1K and you're bound to have one. Down 2-3K if nothing goes wrong, at all.
But if something breaks, you're going to be down 2K at minimum for the part itself (not counting labor) and your car is going to be in the shop for two months while the part that broke is imported, and that's if you bought a Chinese replica. Original parts might as well equal the total value of that car.
In England if I go to my local garage and ask them to replace something like A radiator or water pump it will be like $200 for labour plus maybe $250 for the part ( unless I get it myself off ebay for like $30 and install it myself ).
For example a plastic fender came off, I just bought it for $15 and all I need to do is click it in place when it arrives by post. Im not a mechanic.
EDIT > Incase you all think Im crazy I did the numbers as Im not "a poor man" and quite fancy a cool new car even if 2nd hand, if I get a 2nd hand Landrover Hybrid for 40k, the MPG will be double my old Mini, ONLY if its charged at home, I dont stop at petrol statinos etc, otherwise it would be more!
In 20 years: I got a garage to replace a radiator after a stone hit it, for $600 Also 2 tires once, for like $200.
I might not drive as much as you all, but when I do its at a relaxed pace and the roads are good where I live. I have a manual transmission and Im always careful how I accelerate and how I brake and change gears. It has about 100k on the mileage now
Its a Mini Convertible if anyone cares
I assume you're in the US? Are things that much worse there?
The Slate is probably the closes to what you want.
A cargo e-bike is a good solution too, if urban.
Getting Renault e-Twingo / Citroen e-C3 street legal in the US wouldn't really rise the production cost much. But nobody is going through all the trouble, because (obviously) almost no American would buy such a car, even though they start at <$20k new.
This was in a gated parking garage in a nice neighborhood. Every few months is admittedly a bit dramatic but it’s happened once and we’ve only been living here a year
47 MPG on the highway (but it goes down dramatically when driving around town to ~35). My Limited trim has a glass cockpit with all the popular safety features. Its exterior also looks more expensive than it is and at the time was way cooler than Civic or Corolla.
It remains to be seen what happens around 100K miles/10 years though and how it compares to my previous Corolla experience.
Get a Mitsubishi Mirage and pocket the extra $10k for gas.
What you want does not exist because EV buyers are mostly "look at me" types with deep pockets. That's why they're all luxury vehicles full of gadgetry. They build what the 90% customers want and you ain't it.
See: non-smart TVs etc.
Also, it shouldn't come as a surprise, but if you're spending upwards of two to four hours daily sitting in traffic, you want it to be the nicest experience possible. Punishment boxes like the Mirage are desperation plays, and people upgrade as soon as they can.
300 miles a week in a full sized van and 10K is a three year supply of gas at current prices.
Though, to be fair, that one specific case is a bit extreme (someone with a 100-150km round-trip daily commute and a not-especially-economical car). My commute is about 20km round-trip daily, but I also end up saving money over the long term because a lot of that time is spent sitting idle and wasting gas with nothing to show for it.
Really?. Define "quickly" please.
Edit: nvm. 10k would be just around 95k kms.
Saving money on gas is only one reason to own an EV.
Other reasons include:
- rarely having to take it in for service
- never having to stop for gas when commuting
- a much quieter ride
- a much smoother ride (no transmission)
- instant torque
- no emissions
There are probably others I’m forgetting. But I can’t wait for the day I’ll not need to own an ICE vehicle (still better for long trips).
But in the plugin hybrid, the change in noise is very noticeable when the car goes from pure EV into hybrid and the engine kicks in. It's specially loud when the engine revs up as you're accelerating, but even when the car is cruising, I can still hear the engine noise.
Teslas just feel like legos, build qualify is not very high ime.
Then don't take it in for servicing if it's not needed. DIY the few things an electric car actually needs, or take it to an independent mechanic if you can't be bothered or lack the skills.
That’s my point, they impose those intervals and they are the same as a petrol car. It does not make sense but it makes the dealerships happy. Only Tesla has very long intervals that truly reflect the nature of an electric car.
This is particularly nice when you're warming the car up in the garage during cold snaps. Hard to do this with ICE vehicles without risking carbon monoxide buildup.
I generate 80% of the power I drive on (PHEV + 10kW of PV on the roof), though I mostly commute by bike so I don't drive a ton.
Not to mention that even in the current state of affairs in the US, the emissions are far lower on average. Even in states where production is 60% coal: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2023/ph240/stafford1/
Yes, we're not there yet, and that's why I prefaced with "True", but I think this kind of splitting hairs is part of the problem. EVs are vastly better for the environment and have no emissions of their own. Yes emissions do come from somewhere in the current state, but path to a cleaner environment is not radically far away and the thesis that "emissions come from somewhere so that's not a reason to buy an EV" is ludicrous at best and disingenuous at worst.
Naively you might think this (eg here in Australia the majority of electricity is still generated by burning coal) but:
- this is not true during certain times of day, and,
- this is not true for a growing number of buildings that have PV solar
Wait till you learn when, and how, the typical Australian EV gets charged!
Can we just say it out loud? Because it's good for the environment and we don't want our children or their children to have an unlivable planet. This should probably be the number one reason, but yes EVs are better in many other ways too.
Best I can say about EVs is they’re quiet and don’t wear out their brake pads, and the lack of other service is economically efficient, so in that sense they are progress towards a vehicle less likely to fail on you (software updates not withstanding!)
If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil. A thousand pound lithium battery per household is not a tenable way out of destroying ecosystems.
This is not realistic nor scalable. The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars, and even if we had huge transit projects there would still be a need for roads and vehicles due to the size and rural/industrial areas.
Lithium batteries can be recycled. All the studies have shown that electric cars are a huge net win for the environment, and the cries about the environmental cost of building the cars in the first place don't actually match the reality. Especially when you consider that future ev ecosystems should and hopefully will have a strong battery recycling operation.
This need not be permanent, there is a Pareto improvement to be made and it has nothing to do with Rural/industrial areas.
So I will speculate, there could be a more adequate supply of used cars if we found ways to keep old cars running longer. back in the 90s, a 200,000mi car was a real beater, doomed to transmission failure at least, uneconomical to repair. cars made in the 2010s are lasting into half a million miles just from improvements in engineering (Toyota hybrid planetary drivetrain eliminates many points of failure: no clutch, no alternator, 0 belts. Brake pads are only engaged below 5 mph and may not need replacing in the useful lifetime of the vehicle)
I don’t even know why I’m such a hater on EV, it is better in the same ways, it’s just also a luxury vehicle that is heavy and fast af. I would love to see more ev hype for efficiency, like this car is so lightweight it goes twice as far for the same kWh. Maybe Aptera will pull it off.
Unfortunately, lithium is abundant enough that it will always be cheaper to manufacture from virgin material, battery recycling will probably just look like power grid load balancers. When batteries age they don’t fail, they just lose the ability to deliver hundreds of amps when you floor it.
Not only is charging away from home no less expensive — and sometimes more expensive — but the time it takes to charge on the road is a deal breaker.
That’s why I mentioned I own an ICE vehicle purely for long distance travel.
I’m hoping someday away-from-home charging drops (significantly) below gas prices, and also that charging speeds get closer to the time it takes to fill a tank of gas.
Or, more likely, that range will allow you to drive several hours without ever having to charge on the road, so that you can just use destination charging.
ICE cars are pretty reliable, frequent service tends to be for luxury brands.
> - never having to stop for gas when commuting
This is achievable with ICE by just watching your tank. Also, it's not really a benefit because charging takes a lot longer than a gas fill up.
> - a much smoother ride (no transmission)
Unless it puts the motors in the wheels, they have transmissions and gearboxes.
> - no emissions
They have emissions base4d on the electricity generation method, but even so it's still a lot less than ICE and this is a huge benefit.
Plug in at home takes way less of your personal time than a gas station and costs significantly less than public charging.
Personally it wouldn’t be worth the money to me because the only thing that matters is the time to plug it in and the time to unplug it.
I own an ICE car and an EV. We use the EV for long trips and it is great. The only time we hesitate is when we are going out into the middle of nowhere.
EV advantages on trips:
- Smooth ride
- Always-ready A/C
- Pet mode
- Self-driving
You do have to plan a bit more. The Tesla route planner is excellent. Having a charger at your destination really seals the deal.
Maybe people want to take leisurely strolls while charging up or will be stopping for lunch at that truck stop anyway, but that does not solve for my problems as well. I don't have a pet, my car's heating/cooling is perfectly cromulent, and I enjoy the act of driving a car.
Also, what is "smooth ride"? Are we talking suspension or accelleration/braking?
You don't have to buy it and it costs you nothing. The sales people aren't sleazy either.
Just try it so you can speak from experience.
You should be able to recharge at least 200 km of range in a 20 minute stop which is probably enough until your next break. An ICE lets you cut out those breaks but you really shouldn't because breaks are good for you (and your driving).
Either your car or whatever you use for GPS directions already handles the planning for you. It will automatically find and route you to chargers as needed.
But personally I would recommend people consider a used Model 3. They can be $25-30k which is new Prius territory. I don’t recommend other manufacturers because IMO the competition only started making good electric cards in the last year or two, so these tend to be higher-priced because they’re newer.
I think this reason is understated. A friend was attacked at a gas station years ago, and since then she's had a major fear of gas stations. Her husband would fill her car for her so she could commute to/from work. She bought an EV a few years ago, and this was a major reason for it - she can fuel-up on her own without being a pain to her husband.
- The cost savings are as much as a car payment. >$100/week in gas when my entire household electric bill averages only $200/month. Up until this recent issue at 85k miles, I've had $0 in maintenance costs (excluding tires). Those same miles in an ICE would have cost me about $2000 in oil changes and brakes by now.
- Getting gas sucks. Sure, it is easier to get gas than charge an EV at a public charger. But it is far more convenient to charge at home every day. In 10 years, I've used a public charger maybe 10 times, but I have to get gas at least once a week. Would you rather have a phone with 6-7 days of energy but you had to drive to a dirty gas station to fill it, or just plug it in every night?
- ICE range anxiety when I have a quarter tank left. I know I can get gas all over the place, but it is pretty rare that my EV has as little range in it at the start of the day as this ICE vehicle with a quarter tank left. Either I go to the gas station more frequently, or I have to account for going to a gas station before driving 30-40 miles away.
- EV powertrains are so much better than gas powertrains. More powerful, smoother, quieter, drive better especially due to the better weight distribution (front to back, and height of the center of gravity).
I can't wait to get my EV back.
Of course right now EV prices are probably inflated for the exact reasons you cite. Even with $4-5/gallon gas, an economical ICE can still be overall more affordable because you can buy them for a few thousand dollars.
And then Musk has the gall to claim India is not open to Starlink because Ambani is in charge! https://twstalker.com/elonmusk/status/2108604227643719745
I've heard it said (literally, it was a podcast) that US car-companies are caught in a kind of prisoner's-dilemma: They all want to be the ones selling expensive (high profit margin) cars, and nobody wants to be serving the low-end. But in the long run, somebody has to, or else the market gets... Weird.
Tesla's efforts on the original Roadster made them be able to transform the whole EV industry to the point that EV's are nowadays actually affordable. Not everything is exactly about your specific needs, and you shouldn't shout people down when they're lifting the whole field.
Back to the K shaped economy, it’s not just annoying that some people have more money than everyone else, but given the gap in economic power, the goods that are produced are made for the people with money. With limited resources to produce material, are you going to sell to the bottom or the top? So the people not buying flying cars are left behind in more ways than one.
A 2023 crossover with 50k miles should suit you fine. I like Subarus and Hondas.
1. New
2. Electric
3. Sub $25k
Drop any one of those, and you'll have plenty of options. This isn't about a K-shaped economy -- it's about adding significant constraints and being unwilling to compromise on any of them.
Also what's wrong with "loans for the rest"? Most new cars are bought with financing and have been for a long time.
Here’s one place with 26,000+ cars that cost less than 25k: https://www.carvana.com/cars/under-25000
This is the natural flow of things. People with disposable income buy nice new stuff, suffer the rapid, early depreciation, and then they trickle down to the next tier of consumer who can't afford or doesn't want brand new things.
Cars and houses all work like this. Very rarely have the lowest income tiers ever gotten brand new, expensive things.
And if you're high income and smart, you still get used things because you recognize this is the most fiscally responsible thing to do and a great way to build and preserve wealth.
They are, they just aren't allowed to sell in the USA. And they're looking to make the ban permanent [1]. Canada is getting some though!
[1] https://apnews.com/article/senate-chinese-ev-ban-elections-m...
Electric cars are still an underdeveloped form factor, so it makes sense that you can't get a car big enough for many passengers that is cheap enough for your budget (the battery needs to scale for passengers/weight, so the market so far is tiny cars or big expensive cars. The middle comes as the tech develops)
The idea of cheap, modular base and a focus on user accessibility/customization is in my view a very cool and sorely needed model in an industry that looks more about shoving in features, consolidation and ever increasing costs and complexity. Not to mention the rampant protectionism in the United States because Musk is terrified of Chinese EVs.
Now we're turning everywhere into a playground for the rich. The sad part is that they're unimaginative and in such poor taste that it gives you pause about the dynamics of human hierarchies. Wealthy people used to be dignified; I'm not quite sure what you call today's crop. Insecure chic?
I would just get a hybrid Corolla if you can't stretch that budget to an entry level Tesla or similar.
Whatever you think about these advancements (like you could marvel at Nazi inventions), make no mistake. Musk and his Tesla should get fucked.
Not sure there would be a distinction.
Remember concept cars? Companies have been doing gimmickey shit forever and nobody expected those things to make it to production.
What a well-thought out comparison. You've definitely got something, here.
(still not buying a tesla thooughbeit)
This is another expensive marketing gimmick nevertheless, and I'm struggling to see the value of it, especially when Tesla is not doing that well.
I don't see how we can discuss this demo without acknowledging that fact as well.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-zelenskyy-burn...
European or Japanese cars all day.
But the real question: does the roadster come with SpaceX thrusters? If so, they have my attention. Otherwise, boring, even more boring than the boring company. False advertising too. People need to demand that SpaceX thrusters are now an option if only to reboot the Dukes of Hazzard except with a smart car.
Edit: Hi there Elon fanboys! Hope that all meat diet is working out for you. Have you considered taking up smoking knowing full well that AI will cure cancer?
What has HN become - just endless anti-tech hate, downstream from idiotic TikTok politics.
Is it the moderation system that amplifies this nonsense here?
If those cold-air thrusters are getting commoditized, the real discussion here should be around what could be built around them. How to HACK them.
Reddit exists for this other nonsense pile on.
Breaking, emergency braking in trucks? Kind of like reverse thrust in airplanes.
Drones are extremely weight sensitive. Adding a heavy thruster would massively eat into the payload.
Trucks are also weight limited by the 80k rule. Brakes are far superior.
The hate and politics obsession of the people you're complaining about on here pales in comparison to the guy doing this presentation. He is doing it 24/7 I'm not even sure he sleeps he is so engaged in it.
The gimmicky part is not the engineering but the fact that it is not a flying car but a proof of concept of a flying car in a very controlled environment, with no regard for cost, with no actual viability of real world use.
Its like the breakdancing humanoid robots in China, a cool feat of engineering for sure, but it makes you think that robots can do human tasks, when the reality is much further away.
Sure but Tesla is not SpaceX.
I'm not claiming any of these are worth the complexity and cost of rocket boosters, but there are uses!
I guess as long as we’re thinking up increasingly outlandish use cases, how about being able to park at the top of buildings when there are no parking spots available. Or being able to hop over the parking gates at theme parks. What about bypassing the speed limit at school zones or hopping over stopped school buses. Oh and no more waiting for draw bridges or railroad crossings. The uses really are endless!
If you want a sensible car, get a Toyota Corolla, or a Model Y if you want to stay with Tesla. They will get you to your destination just as well for cheaper and with more space for your stuff.
Also, maybe the car is able to hover for short to medium distances, which for a military and offroad vehicles, could be very useful to cover all types of terrain
No human could survive this rocket-jump without a neck-brace.
The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.
(Calling it a "roadster" is cute, but this has nothing in common with a Boxster or Miata. If anything, the ICE analogue would be muscle cars.)
Because there are no real unique driving characteristics, the only engineering you can compete with is raw speed or price. That and crazy gimmicks.
Are you referring to the Tesla Roadster? Because, if not, I am pretty sure that most EVs, except for maybe small compact EV cars, usually weights 2 tons or more.
You can't call this beauty of engineering a muscle car.
911 is not really a roadster - it's a full on sports car. Even then the older ones top out at about a ton. Same as the Boxster and Miata.
Most serious sports EVs start at 2 tons or more. It's really impressive what they can do to hide the weight, but because it's all digitally controlled, it's really not a dynamic driving experience in the same way.
More importantly to my point - all of them have nearly identical drive characteristics. Outside of raw performance, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe the difference in handling between a Tesla, Mach-E, or a Polestar - I'm not sure I could give you anything.
https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/tesla/model+y/0961 https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/byd/atto+3/0992/
And because he's the richest man in the world, he just does it for fun. Nerd Cool for sure! But given the state of the world, absolutely horrible..
The somber music, darkness, 3 awkward people presenting it with 0 presentational skills. Just a random comparison - if Steve Jobs were to present this, he would've killed it. I was watching the demo, impressed by the car so much, but I couldn't help but feel irritated at how badly is was presented. The choice or music, lights, everything.