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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't trust promo videos.

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.

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This Tesla event was apparently performed in front of a live audience. Yes I'm sure there's a hype strategy here but equating this with the Nikola scam is a stretch.

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.

They're not afraid of doing tricks in front of live audience either. Look at the battery swap event. No camera placed anywhere near where the "swap" was happening for a few minutes. Then the car drove off Wow! Amazing! And they never talked about battery swap again

Or the continued use of tele-operators for all of their humanoid robotics demos.

When it's not a human dancer in a robot suit.

They never talked about battery swap again because DC fast charging got fast enough to eliminate that hassle.

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.

I have nothing against the idea I just don't think they bothered even doing a real battery swap for the demo

They got about $300 million in extra regularory credits for that demo. The government shut the loophole in 2014 after it became obvious Tesla was faking it and no real Tesla drivers were benefiting.

Not to disagree that this Tesla event took place, but there was also a "Nikola World" event in 2019 where Nikola presented its product to an audience of 1000+ people.

It's surely not AI, but so far it is little more than all these Jetpack demonstrations of the past decade...

> all these Jetpack demonstrations of the past decade...

They've been promising those since the 1970s...

Even longer, Thunderball (Bond film featuring the Bell Rocket Belt) was released in 1965.

I wasn’t alive then, so I started being promised it on my children’s books.

They promised we all would be vacationing in Mars by now.

True (the autocorrect stole my 's' of 'decades'...)

This is the same company that showed off "bulletproof glass" on the cybertruck.

I was never quite sure if that was a deliberate ploy. The demonstration showed that it quite possibly had enough strength to stop a bullet (it would just smash).

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 was clear that they didn't expect it to happen.

It only showed the dynamic of Musk vs. his engineers and how he 'works'

All car manufacturers demo "concept" cars that are real and work(for most parts) but mass production with reasonable price is just not worth it, in this case there is legal challenges too.

zOMG!1!!! Proof of concept demonstration was carefully staged.

Sure. But do we have any confidence the "car" wasn't made of styrofoam?

There are lots of ways for sleight of hand. Do you remember the time that guy made the Statue of Liberty disappear?

Is it really so unbelievable that a car company with access to rocket engineers, built a car with rocket engines?

Yes, completely unbeleivable. I mainly think this because SpaceX has committed said engineers to delivering unfeasable amounts of payload to LEO/ISS, etc. Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".

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.

> Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".

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.

If space-x would ever send out one Starship per hour, that would be horrendes for our atmosphere (potentially).

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 :|

The launches themselves can be made roughly neutral by producing the methane and LOX from the atmosphere using solar power. For an hourly cadence, that would require as much solar as a third of all US installed commercial solar, but the US is already adding that much every few years, and accelerating, so it doesn't seem impossible. That's best-case, of course, but given that, all the combustion products would balance out propellant generation.

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.

Even if resources don't evaporiate in our atmosphere, you need to send up a lot of resources like metals.

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.

They're averaging 2-3 Falcon 9 launches per week. That's not 'very very far away' from one per day.

Nobody else comes close, whether considering individual companies or entire nations.

True, they are clearly top of the entire planet when it comes to succesfull LEO launches.

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.

> SpaceX has committed said engineers to delivering unfeasable amounts of payload to LEO/ISS, etc. Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day". That is of course very very far away from 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.

I don't see the silliness, maybe you can help me.

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.

Planes carry billions of passengers per year, so their design and operation needs orders of magnitude more oversight than an unmanned cargo mover. Every little detail of an airliner needs to be scrutinised for the various ways it could affect safety. Rockets don't require that level of safety assurance.

SpaceX put more mass in orbit this year than the rest of the world combined, and you’re saying they’re not doing a good job?

Both can be true.

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.

Well I'd say they're ahead of N1 considering that N1 never made it to orbit.

Hmm.

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.

For the first few years they were just doing design work, and it's hard to say how much effort they were putting in since their focus back then was Falcon; the first Falcon 9 landing was 2015, and the first Falcon Heavy flight was 2018. For Starship they didn't even decide on stainless steel until 2019.

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.

That is just a one OOM scaling. It's not that difficult, especially considering that Starship just delivered the 3rd largest payload ever launched and it wasn't even at capacity.

Sounds like you’re very big on the nay saying for its own sake.

I assume you’re dirty on Usain Bolt for not running faster?

If Usain bolt claimed he would run 75mph, does him being the fastest runner change the fact that he lied?

If he was the fastest runner, won a the races and had all the world records, I don’t think failing to meet his aspirational goal of 75 would be important.

Boasting you're a year or two from something that is biologically implausible makes a person's proclamations in other fields inherently untrustworthy.

That said, a few seconds of cold gas thrust is more "cybertruck" bad than "theranos" bad.

Lol, aspirational goals. What other goal posts would you like to move?

And for what?

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.

> 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.

I heard that on and off and its just not true.

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...

No. I saw rural people (not rich) getting to access the world of medicine and education people in bigger population centres take for granted. Not to mention connecting with their families. They were very happy.

“Handful of people” benefiting from it is vastly missing the mark.

Which rural people?

Someone in a 3th world country or someone who doesn't has any real internet access, can't afford starlink.

It's a similar level of complaint to windmills spoiling the view. And if you poll people which would they rather have in the wilderness: no satellites visible at dusk and dawn, or full internet access, which would they prefer?

It is a valid critisism of windmills but there is a huge difference between having to save the planet you live on and using windmills to save co2 vs. polluting space, increasing kessler syndrome, polluting our atmosphwere for a little bit of internet.

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.

There are legitimate question about the physics of the thing that even the most talented engineers will still come up against.

They’re one of the leading companies developing autonomous vehicles, but their original self-driving demo was still faked.

yes. unless elon himself personally is in the drivers seat while the "car" is doing all those things, it's cardboard and styrofoam.

Unbelievable? No. A company already caught lying multiple times in big fashion to whole world, never delivering FSD yet cashing in tons of money for it, plus rather mentally unstable owner to keep it polite?

Fool me once...

Tesla FSD has 1.5 million active subscriptions and is growing at 50% annually.

There are several model years that charged full price for FSD at sale and never received the necessary hardware upgrades.

>never delivering FSD yet cashing in tons of money for it,

Even if they didn’t deliver FSD, the data says they delivered something people are choosing to pay $100 per month for.

So where is that million of robotaxi? https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/elon-musk-says-tesla-robotax...

It’s both true that Elon lies and overpromises damn near everything, and that Tesla has the best self driving related features available in the US that a normal person can buy and use.

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Yes because nobody can buy a Waymo, and nobody else is even close.

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?

> when exactly

The moment his criminal shield is removed from power.

Watch.

So where was it claimed Tesla achieved full self driving?

There's no formal definition for "full self driving". But perhaps we could tease out a definition we can both accept. Let me start. My elderly Dad is a legal licensed driver who drives every day. FSD drives much better than my Dad in every way you can possibly measure. Can my Dad fully self drive or not?

>FSD drives much better than my Dad in every way you can possibly measure. Can my Dad fully self drive or not?

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.

You just said my Dad cannot fully self drive, but then proposed an "objective" definition which my Dad unquestionably satisfies.

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.

>You just said my Dad cannot fully self drive

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.

> FSD is lacking at edge cases, such as parking

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?

> 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.

What you just said is: "Ok, they lied, but they're still in business!"

> Is it really so unbelievable

A car company that has a long history of making false claims? Are you really asking me that?

Correction: A car company that has a long history of making both true and false claims.

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It's not a defense. It's refining the criticism to be more believable, and therefore more likely to be believed. If anything, I'm helping your argument.

Dude - you're the guy who called me delusional earlier.

I have no idea what your game is now - but I'm not playing.

Your confusion is understandable given your own (excruciatingly obvious) motives.

No need for insults, friend. It weakens your position.

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.

[flagged]

> I humbly apologise.

OH! No need. I enjoyed explaining it to you.

[flagged]

It would seem we've filled the queue on the other thread. Allow me to respond to you here:

> 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.

> Now it’s just a fun game to see how bloodied you get.

As I said, pure debate bro.

Sticks and stones, my dude. Sticks and stones.

[flagged]

You broke the site guidelines badly and repeatedly in this thread. We ban accounts that do this. I'm not going to ban you like I did the other account, because it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of it, but please don't let it happen again.

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.

Just pointing out that you're now being deflected by kindergarten chants.

How the mighty have fallen.

We've banned this account as I explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50145382.

They have a long history of promising bad dates for future releases, or of exaggerating the capabilities of their ""FSD"", but they haven't rolled cars down hills or built them from styrofoam.

They demoed a non-working demo of solar roof that was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for normal tiles with huge fanfare which turned out to be utterly impractical in real world usage and later quietly killed entirely.

Ok? They’ve still largely delivered products even if the timing has been way off. I am a huge critic of Elon Musk and won’t buy another Tesla but they clearly build cars and products that work and hit consumer markets.

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?

[flagged]

Bad promises for future releases and timelines, as well as odious politics. I don't like the guy either, but where are the fabricated demos? That's what he's being accused of in this thread, but I see no precedent for it. In fact upthread the example of a fabricated demo had to come from Nikola,a completely different company run by a completely different man. Why bring that up if there are good examples of Tesla faking their own demos?

"I don't like Elon, but..." and "I'm not a racist, but..."

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'm not saying it was a production-ready car, but the notion of it being styrofoam is stupid. These demos are as much for the morale of the engineers as they are for the entertainment of the public. Tesla doesn't need to demonstrate a rocket car.

They kind of do, though, their sales have been dropping year over year during an extreme fuel crisis - and Chinese EVs are coming for their lunch.

They need to get their sales up (lots of folks like me won’t buy one now because Elon sucks) but your reasoning I largely disagree with. We don’t have a fuel crises in the US for example. And Chinese EVs won’t be able to gain too strong of a foothold in American or European markets because neither market will permit their domestic industries to collapse due to Chinese state subsidies and industrial overcapacity.

Even if Chinese EVs can't make it into the American market in numbers it's a pretty clear signal that Tesla models are vastly overpriced for their functionality. The subsidies have spurred innovation and do continue to artificially depress the price of vehicles, but the value you're getting for a dollar in Chinese EVs far outshines Tesla without any of the weird built-in design annoyances needing to be present like the door handles or terrible dashboard UX.

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.

They will increasingly not make it to European markets either though (Canada who cares the market there is tiny) because the EU won’t allow its domestic industry to be destroyed regardless of how good Chinese EVs are. It’s not “hard to say” it’s easy to say. Just yesterday the France and Germany announced changes to emissions standards. The writing is on the wall there.

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.

> notion of it being styrofoam is stupid

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?

I read that the car used in the demo was actually a hundreds of kilograms, nothing like the real cars weight of ~ 2 ton

Agreed. Just think about it for a second. If it was 2 tons like a real EV, could a fan or 2 keep it adhered to a vertical surface?

This is a circus stunt.

That's not even the original part - it's been done by a car with a driver in it - the McMurtry Spéirling.

I think “a fan or 2” is underselling the technology here. It’s not about the weight of the car but the force that the atmosphere presses on its surface area. This is well-established physics that has been demonstrated by others so I don’t know why you’re questioning this and not some of the wilder parts like the flying.

Also don't undersell how wildly impractical this known technology is - it requires a skirt that in order to get close to the ground, which will abrade. It loses traction dangerously if the seal is broken, it's very loud and energy intensive. It sucks up dust, pebbles and other road debris and spits them out at other road users, and it takes up a lot of volume in the car. As do those thrusters.

This is a circus stunt.

You can do a lot with a few megawatts of power for a few seconds.

I believe he also made his own career disappear.

Just be aware you're moving from the territory of reasonable questions to moderately desperate conspiracy theory. Whatever it is we saw, it's clearly not lightweight. That much is obvious from the kinetics.

Well it didn’t have a driver and you can’t see the size of the battery, impressive nonetheless and in the end it’s not like it matters since it has no practical application outside a circus (the flying)

If you think "company might have faked public demo in some important way" is a "conspiracy theory", your conspiracy theory sensor is badly miscalibrated and desperately needs a tune up. Your default presumption should be that a demo is faked to at least some extent because most of them are. If I don't hear an explicit declaration that this is real and live and working exactly the same on stage as it will be for the consumer I assume it isn't. And even some of those declarations have been shown to be false over the years, a particularly popular one being "this is real game footage on the real hardware" except it's actually a developer box with a lot more power than the console in question.

The cybertruck was claimed to be a steel exoskeleton. They ended up releasing a car with heavy steel plates glued on.

It's not at all conspiracy theory. It's just same old over promise and under deliver that Elon does.

What you just relayed is another misleading claim purveyed by obsessives. Cybertruck is not a true exoskeleton design, but neither are the steel plates decorative. It is a hybrid -- the unibody shell carries some minimal structural load, but it's not sufficient on its own. The exterior skin is structurally necessary for torsional rigidity and contributes meaningfully to the overall chassis strength.

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.

Wow high bar there comparing the Cybertruck to a Ford Explorer.

What's misleading? You just said it's not a steel exoskeleton, and that the panels were glued on. If your point is that a true exoskeleton isn't needed for sufficient rigidity and strength, sure, fine, but you should make that claim and point out why it's misleading, all you've said is that the claim is correct, but that other cars are made similarly.

They said that only the "thin upper door trim" is glued on.

I explained that the exterior panels are structurally necessary and that the major ones are welded or bolted on. The response above somehow recasts that as me agreeing they're just plates glued on. That's not a serious attempt to engage with what I wrote. I think it's reasonable to assert an absence of good faith here.

Come on.... srlsy?

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?

Everyone knows the robot demonstrations were remote controlled. It was a demonstration of the hardware capability, not the software.

You do know that bulletproof doesn't mean zero surface damage right?

It wasn't marketed like this. People were not aware of it and assumed autonomisy and grok as a responder.

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

Don't forget the "The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons."

What's the falsehood in that statement? Did you catch that person actuating any of the controls manually? Again, this was a demonstration of the actuator hardware being sufficient and the underlying concept being possible -- ironically relying on the inferior pre-mapping crutch that Waymo still leans on.

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.

Drivers took over during test runs.

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.

> moderately desperate conspiracy theory

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....)

I suspect this is going to be a Cybertruck/Boring Company situation, where we may get something ostensibly called the same and may even do something one could consider similar when squinting (maybe a bit higher than U9 jumps in scope) but with the specs and implementation differing so greatly that it shouldn't be considered the same. Exoskeleton vs body panels, 200kph+ on electric sleds vs Teslas (driven by human operators; tells you how much they trust their FSD tech) in a tiny tunnel, FSD on HW3 vs an upgrade maybe someday, etc.

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...

I'm still baffled by the human drivers for those tunnel runs. I can't imagine a more controlled environment where self driving should be capable.

I used to feel the same way, namely that the tunnel driving would be the signal that unsupervised driving was ready to go. But now that I see their geofenced robotaxis in operation I sort of get it now. Those things do well at driving autonomously, but there are edge cases where the car's safety response is to essentially shut down and wait for human intervention rather than risk uncertainty. That's not something you want happening when you have a single lane of traffic with no passing, leading to a situation where every car in the chain is now forced to deal with the situation in unison. Humans can figure that out pretty quickly, but training the cars to do it will take time. I do expect autonomous tunnel rides any day now, but I can see why they weren't the first use case for autonomous vehicles.

FYI the dawn project was debunked as crackpot scammers who had their feet on the accelerator pedal to fake an "FSD crash", along with a slew of other underhanded and misleading tricks.

Don't forget that the leader of Dawn Project has financial conflicts of interest:

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 insourced their ADAS.

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.

Yes clear conflict of interest, guy cant take being beaten, resorting to underhand tactics, pretty scummy.

this wasn't a promotional video, it was a live demonstration in front of hundreds of people.

dawnproject.com is a well known Tesla critic with commercial ties to Mobileye, a Tesla competitor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/11/tesla-s...

tesla.com is known fabricator of news about Tesla

Does that invalidate their examples? "Did they fake it or not" is a falsifiable claim that can be inspected regardless of personal incentives.

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.

PE of 336?? That's a buying opportunity if ever I saw one!!

Do you buy stocks by sorting by P/E?

Any self respecting trader buys Tesla stocks based on this?! OMG!

It would encourage me to sell, if I had, seeing this nonsense.

You're not alone, TSLA is down on the news. You can only commit fraud so many times before people get tired of holding the bags.

Yeah no, something is very off on this and I cannot put my finger on it, the video looks odd to me. I want to say AIgen feel, but I only saw little tiny vids, rest were blurry as sin.

Makes sense though. First time I saw video of two falcon rockets doing a synchronized landing I felt the exact same way. Our brain is used to this type of stuff in movies and we know it's CGI. So when it happens for real and is filmed in 4K and a cinematic color scheme is added, it's hard for the brain to adapt.

Musk, while a horrible presenter, did say something like “we’re doing this here because otherwise everyone would think it’s ai.”

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