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Comment by simondotau | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

> 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....)

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