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Comment by grey-area | Hacker News Reader

There’s no way this will ever directly make back the salaries and time spent on it so far. It’s not a way to make money for Tesla.

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.

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All this stuff was in motion while Tesla was in its COVID boom. It's hard to believe that this is all some PR stunt due to Tesla's current market posture, when the Cybertruck, Roadster, were all specced the same in 2021. It's not like they suddenly came up with these gimmicks. The gimmicks were there from day one.

Always keep a distraction in your pocket. You never know when you might need it.

Learn from the best: Maskirovka

Maskirovka (Russian: маскировка, literally meaning "masking" or "camouflage") is a long-standing Russian and Soviet military doctrine of deception, denial, and misdirection.

Depends how much they sell them for. It could probably make the investment back if they price it at $5M or something and sell 100 of them to the ultra rich.

That would involve turning a carefully controlled magic trick into a production vehicle that can do the same trick anywhere

They will never sell a car with similar functionality to that demo to anyone

I could maybe see a major movie studio buying one or two, but I think the major problem with the stunt functionality is not so much making the vehicle, its finding a building/structure where it is safe to hang a multi-ton vehicle off the wall or the ceiling.

Never gonna happen. It's trivial to do this with CGI, there'd be no advantage, and a whole heck of a lot of liability doing it practically.

You say that. And yet, most of mad max: fury road was filmed practically. It looks amazing.

I could easily imagine the right films renting these cars for a stunt. Film cameras and practical effects are having a resurgence.

Nope, they'd build something custom if such an effect was required. It would be done on wires with the wires removed in post... Just like Fury Road. The results would be more predictable, the liability would be contained in existing insurance configurations and moreover directors trust their practical effects team.

> They will never sell a car with similar functionality to that demo to anyone

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.

> They're explicitly advertising selling exactly that car

Priced at $420k I imagine.

That's absurdly low IMO. I can't imagine it'll go for less than a mil. I reckon $1.5M - $3M

Ok $690k or $4.20M

There's no way he doesn't go for meme pricing on this stunt

They’ve been selling that car with deposits for 10 years without delivering.

Will they deliver this time?

I’m sure adding jet packs from SpaceX rockets will make that much easier!

> There’s no way this will ever directly make back the salaries and time spent on it so far.

It does if it keeps their valuation in the trillions.

I think 'directly' is doing a lot of work in OP's comment. I agree, this is never going to make sales that pay for the engineering effort involved in this machine, but keeping Tesla in the news, having this amazing POC, and the lessons learned that might apply to other parts of Musk's enterprises (SpaceX particularly) are not worth zero.

Plus, whatever you think of Musk, this is really fucking cool.

I don’t think much of Musk since the Nazi salutes, but why is this really 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.

I think we've lost the plot a little bit if we don't understand why a car that can stick to the road upside down and kick flip over traffic is cool.

It’s not a real car, you’ll never buy it, and it’ll never be road legal so it won’t be near traffic.

Yeah and if you do a kickflip over traffic your drinks will fall out of your cupholder. If that's your standard for cool I don't know what to tell you.

> Plus, whatever you think of Musk, this is really fucking cool.

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.

> 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...

> There’s no way this will ever directly make back the salaries and time spent on it so far. It’s not a way to make money for Tesla.

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.

autonomous driving is a con job? You can stop the trolley at any point but doing so would admit you were wrong.

> autonomous driving is a con job? You can stop the trolley at any point but doing so would admit you were wrong.

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.

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