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Comment by lberk | Hacker News Reader

Unique in what way?

The Trabant often had wait lists of ten or more years[1][2].

The Soviet Lada often had wait times of five to ten years[3].

Even the Morgan Plus 8 had wait lists of (reportedly) a decade long as recently as 1990[4].

[1] - https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbp016 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant [3] - https://theses.gla.ac.uk/71079/1/10390647.pdf [4] - https://www.morganville.org/history/the-waiting-list

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, no one has taken delivery of the Roadster announced 9 years ago; all of your examples are cars having more demand than supply (and in the case of the Trabant and the Lada, fewer years); as for the Morgan Plus 8, Morgan make a deliberate choice to keep the production figures where they were, despite the high demand. The key difference seems to be between little supply (your examples) and no supply.

Usually, if you had been unable to deliver a product in that time, it's probably about time to cancel it. Of course, I may be wrong, but my understanding is that 9-year-ago-announced Roadster has not been cancelled, and people have not been refunded.

Gotcha, essentially, unique in that the supply has remained zero, and no fulfilled orders/deliveries thus far, despite a nine year duration between initial announcement and the current date. I guess if that bothers you, cancel your order and get a refund? MKBHD has reportedly done so and gotten a full refund[0].

> Usually, if you had been unable to deliver a product in that time, it's probably about time to cancel it.

Why? Seems like demand (in this case) is sufficient enough to still launch the product. If a business has the demand for the product and sufficient capital to continue investing in an area they deem to have a viable product, isn't that their prerogative?

[0] - https://podscripts.co/podcasts/waveform-the-mkbhd-podcast/wh...

Fair, I'll take notion that it's their prerogative. However, my understanding is that it's not trivial to cancel one's order[0], though as both your and my source points out: it is possible, though an unnecessary hassle (particularly for a company that was partially made famous by making ordering their cars so easy).

[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/10/sam-altman-wants-a-refu...

Fair point. There’s an absolute asymmetry between ease of placing an order and difficulty to cancel it. ISTR Nassim Taleb making a similar point on twitter, alleging he made a deposit for a car, on his phone, whilst in his pocket. Definitely worth keeping in mind.

Kinda like Pepsi and UPS. Seven years of waiting for their 1,000+ Semis they had ... 37, that mostly did yard work because... no charging network.

And then this year Musk's band of merry clowns announces that they've "completely redesigned the windows" because, I shit you not, "Turns out there’s a lot of infrastructure in the world, whether it’s a badge reader, or your toll booth, or you’re talking to somebody on a call box. There’s all kinds of stuff right at that height, and it became evident that we needed a roll-down window in order to make that infrastructure easier to interface with."

Spectacular R&D on which to tie your mission critical infrastructure to. Oh, and the charger network, "still a 'hurdle'", says an anonymous Tesla employee in a feat of understatement.

This is a completely different car than the one that was announced in 2017. So they cancelled it, and replaced it with a new one, which is likely never going to ship and will serve as a way to prop up whatever merger scam the CEO has cooking in his drug-impaired brain.

First time I've seen "longer queues than the soviet union" used as a defence.

During the pandemic, Canadians were told that to order a new Toyota Sienna or a Rav4 Prime may require between 3 and 5 years. This is from Toyota and both cars were in full production. If you preordered they would not even guarantee the price, and reserved the right to increase it.

It was so ridiculous that people would buy the car in the US and bring it here. Other people gave up and started importing 30 year old Japanese minivans — I see JDM minivans relatively commonly now.

As such an X year wait for a car isn't new even outside the dysfunctional communist block.

However I'm pretty sure Toyota will deliver eventually, can't say the same for the Roadster.

Exceptional situations should not be compared to normality.

Sure, a space-age flying car which isn’t in production yet might have a waiting list. But what about eastern bloc econoboxes like the Trabant or the Lada? That are literally made of cardboard?

You’ve got to be kidding. If your point is that waiting lists for cars can exist, I concede that. I see no other parallels.

This has to be a satirical response. Please tell me it's satire. If it's satire it's actually a pretty bad caricature of elon fan boys.

Because I can't believe anyone would seriously make a comparison to a 55+ year old car manufactured in a communist country.

It's like saying that an email server that takes a week to send emails is fine because the wait times for a posted letter in the 1960s could take 2 weeks.

Getting tired of all the bystander commentary. It's a toy for rich people. If there's 0 chance you're going to buy it, who really cares about your opinion.

Is this a super-serious discussion amongst committed prospective buyers? I don’t see much evidence of that.

As for the rest, this is the Internet, and a cat may look at a king.

But you HAVE to get karma for having the right opinion.

You think nobody cares about their opinions, but somebody cares about your fatigue?

It's like a sucker's (or a fraudster's) war cry to say that the people who are already hooked into a venture are the only ones who should be allowed to point out that it might be a scam.

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