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Comment by jeffnappi | Hacker News Reader

Truth. However it's pretty great marketing, fairly certain every car enthusiast on the planet has seen that demonstration. Eyeballs that likely can't be bought otherwise. The flying version will never be made for a human occupant, but if they do make a few they will be collectors items.

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Was it great marketing? Did it move the needle on sales? That’s what marketing is supposed to do. I see Musk do dumb stuff all the time and all it makes me think is “I will never buy a product from this scam artist”.

Probably not good - if you are buying Roadster you'll never get flying model as thats for friends and family, despite car absolutely mogging everything else in the market.

Maybe not the needle on sales, but the needle on stock valuation. The moment the company stops making dreams is the moment the stock start to fall down to a car company valuation.

It was more of a recruiting video than consumer marketing. The whole thing was obviously geared toward 19 year old engineering students.

"Come work for us and you could get to design rocket cars!"

It was marketing for their only real product: Tesla stock.

Jaguar also did extremely well spread marketing campaign. It is really questionable if it moves units. Same goes for this one. You might get notoriety but that doesn't always translate to sales. And I am pretty sure no one was unaware of Tesla at that point.

I was actually surprised. My Fanboy friend did not mention it. It wasn't discussed at work either.

The only thing a stunt like that is going to produce is either A. Nothing, or B. Billions more in losses.

The only thing that demo proved to me is that I will never buy a Tesla. I’m even in the market for a new car and I’d be interested in getting an EV.

Imagine if they put all that engineering effort to building an affordable, reliable, EV? Man that would be something to behold. But America is in the meme economy now, nobody cares about real products for real people. Just hype generators that appeal to the 1%.

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