This video states that it takes 2–6 hours to charge the compressed air for the cold-gas thrusters. And then you can use it exactly once before you have to recharge it. The journalist calls it “beautifully pointless.”
[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
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.
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.
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.