Is your assertion that the car shaped object we watched drive for a distance and then levitate over a distance was something other than a car that actually flies?
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...
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.
I'm not saying its impossible but it seems pretty naive to just assume on face value