I definitely have my issues with Tesla and Elon but this was one of the coolest demos I have ever seen in my life. The engineering needed to do this must have been unbelievable.
People are allowed to criticize things, and many of them are valid criticisms. Personally I'm a lot more interested in what SpaceX is doing in...space. I don't really care at all about this whole flying car thing because who does this really benefit? Pretty much nobody if you think about it.
No it's not sad, the man was basically an unelected official, laid off thousands of government workers and the second order effects of that will affect millions. All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?
"No it's not sad, <I disagree with his politics>." really just proving GP's point imo. Imagine if you couldn't post a thread about Microsoft products on HN without republicans feeling the need to jump in to talk about how much they hate Bill Gates for his donations to Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024. It's really tiresome.
The problem here is that one side of the political debate now uses "hate" as a synonym for "political opinions I disagree with". The political rhetoric has gotten so out of control that it's making it difficult to have a civilized discussion about anything, even topics that aren't inherently political (like a freaking flying car that does 0-60 in 0.8s!).
Not really. It would be very simple for one of these parties to just not use symbols of old hate, or avoid spending hundreds of millions of dollars to remove crucial aid for millions of people. These are active choices. Glossing over these choices is not helpful to anyone.
It's not politics to dislike a guy who fired thousands of Americans from their jobs for fun, disproportionately veterans. Failed to even do the thing he set out to do which is save the country money, and then quit. That's just incompetence with material negative effect on people's lives
Its the character. Buying a global media platform to "promote free speech" and then shunt the entire thing and himself behind a particular political party. This guy uses his money and his twitter account to support neo-nazi hate groups in my country (Britain First, Patriotic Alternative, Hundred Handers, Tommy Tennames). He has no self-restraint. Its abhorrent. Its not "about politics" when the politics is about racial superiority and ethnic cleansing.
> Imagine if you couldn't post a thread about Microsoft products on HN without republicans feeling the need to jump in to talk about how much they hate Bill Gates for his donations to Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024. It's really tiresome.
and if Bill Gate was literally campaigning for the Dems, getting up on stage, handing voters cheques and THEN being employed by the government to run a department then you'd have a point.
He repeatedly crosses the line of what is appropriate. People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes. Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
> People with that level of wealth should stay the fuck away from politics and respect democracy instead of using their money and business to have excessive influence on democratic outcomes.
People with that level of power — because it is power — will do what they will. “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”.
> Its unseemly and disrespects the idea of everyone getting the same amount of votes. I respect that donations have similarities but there's a difference between making a donation and being excessively public.
We have transitioned, it would seem, from the pretence of “goodness” to naked displays of power. Unseemly, definitely.
Justice. Righteousness. Old fashioned words and old fashioned ideas. Oh for a good and righteous king!
Well Mr. Gates didn't publicly gloat about the hundreds of millions of dollars he funneled into some political campaign or boast loudly about how inefficient the government is or get the green light to create an entire department that haphazardly altered core government functions or stir up controversy over a questionable hand salute, so, no, not tiresome for me. It felt like a bait and switch. If I knew that our car purchase was, in part, going towards sponsorsing DOGE, I can confidently tell you I would not have bought in.
This is legitimately the stupidest comment I've seen on HN all year. One of these people have devoted billions of dollars to eradicating disease, providing education, developing living conditions and essential infrastructure, and improving quality of life and life expectancy for the worlds poorest, globally, for decades. The other has cozied up to corrupt kleptocrats and every other manner of scum to benefit himself while enriching himself at the expense of everyone else, particularly in his recent quest to become the worlds first trillionaire.
The temptation to succumb to Godwin's Law is so, so, so strong. How shitty and horrible of a person does one have to be for someone on HN to admit that they are a shitty and bad person? At some point the Big Bang sterotype of "nerd" who jerks off to the idea of a rich guy who "computers" and "businesses" and "engineers" outgrows tiresome and becomes despicable once said rich guy facilitates/encourages/actualizes concentration camps. Grow up.
We also weren't discussing GoDaddy as a registrar without mentioning it's CEO killing elephants and being an all around douchebag. Or Oracle without the lawnmower.
It's tough to ask people to dissociate the CEO from the company, especially when he's doing all the PR by himself.
His lies are what made him rich. He hasn't delivered even close to a majority of what he promised. We are literally supposed to be on mars 5 years ago according to him.
Parting fools from their money is not respectable work in my view.
If they fired 90% of the government employees, nobody would feel the difference. Most people are just paper pushers and part of the nonsense system. He wanted to manage it like a company, and what any CEO would do when they just start working: trim the fat.
They might choose to do that after gaining a cursory understanding of the actual inner workings of the organisation. Especially if that organisation functions differently than corporations.
"If you want a reduction in seat warmers in government you deserve to lose your job where you're actually being a productive member of society"
Guess he hit a nerve, eh? My condolences you got hit by the layoffs, try to not browse Reddit and Facebook all day at your next government job. Or do, but ONLY if you work for the IRS or ATF, they deserve nothing less.
I have seen my share of useless employees in private companies, though. You don't have to work for the government for that. But if it makes you feel better to think that you are useful because you are in the private sector...
I have seen my share of government funding going to private companies that completely wasted that money (or worse, used it to fuel their stupid ideas). The only thing they did well was convincing the government that they would do something useful - of course they did not. I'm sure you would take that as a reason to criticise the government, "not able to spend the money properly", but before you do: more often than not, it's VCs who invest in ridiculous projects. You want to stop wasting tax money? Stop investing in bullshit tech startups, too!
VCs are interesting: they are people put in a position where they are incompetent and dominant at the same time (i.e. they invest in technologies they don't understand, but they have the power of life or death over startups). That's a perfect recipe to create overconfident assholes (similar to getting rich, actually)!
At the very least, government employees contribute to a system that does stuff for the people. Like roads and schools. Not goddamn flying cars.
You want to be actually critical? Most white collars are doing bullshit. At least those who don't work in technology may contribute less to destroying the planet. But they don't get to be condescending assholes for that.
> they deserve nothing less.
I would be curious to learn about what useless job you do for a living.
I normally don't like talking politics on HN, but as someone who actually worked alongside talented and diligent federal employees I really can't abide this slander. Most of the people I worked with were brilliant and technical people. You think we didn't know we could pull down 2-5× the salary in the private sector? We stayed in the civil service because we were mission-driven and we cared about impacts beyond a quarterly profit motive, even though it paid like shit.
We are talking about people with STEM doctorates and 30 years of experience working 60-80 hour weeks for a 120k salary, because that's about where the GS scale caps. People are on the road for weeks, flying economy class and sleeping in roadside motels with a $50 per diem and when they visit a vendor or a lab or a client they cannot accept a meal or a beer or anything beyond a cup of coffee because of government ethics rules. I worked in an office in Washington, DC where all the staff pooled their money to buy a water cooler, and people gave voluntary donations of $2/month to join the "water cooler club" to defray the cost of maintaining an office water cooler because OPM considered that an unnecessary expense.
The first thing DOGE did, literally in the first week, they implemented a "deferred resignation plan" — they paid people 8 months of salary to not work. The smartest and most talented people saw the writing on the wall at that point — folks with PhDs from MIT or Stanford; self-made founders; crusty veteran engineers who preferred work to retirement. They took the money and they had no problem finding alternative employment, or they took it as a sign to hang up their spurs for good. Many of them were subsequently rehired by their agencies as contractors at 2-3× their previous salary when it became evident they were irreplaceable.
(I had friends in the NNSA, the branch of the US Department of Energy that manages the nuclear arsenal. DOGE fired hundreds of employees without realizing what they did, then attempted to rescind 90% of the firings months later. Plenty of the fired employees had already found new employment. Others simply did not want to return to a job with such contingent status where they would be treated disrespectfully. Several fired employees could not be rehired because they were fired so abruptly there was no way to contact them and offer reinstatement.)
You know who didn't take up the deferred resignation offer? The unproductive layabouts you claim to despise. The ones that knew they couldn't get a better job elsewhere. Yeah, there are bad employees in the federal government, same as anywhere else. DOGE bullied out all our best talent and now we're stuck with the dregs. They paid billions of dollars for people to not work for the privilege of doing so. "Department of Government Efficiency".
If you are interested in learning more about excellent and unglamorous work done by underappreciated American civil servants, I highly recommend the book The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis.
Did you not hear the claim that was widely quoted in the media that USAID had saved more than 91 million lives over 20 years? Anyone who believes that hasn’t done any math on it, or even thought about that number at all. I’m too hungry to be eloquent about it, so here’s someone else who is: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4eQZdxlPCU>.
You'll have to disagree with a lot of scholars, in addition to this HN comment, to make your point. This is the '90 million' study:
> This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths) [1]
30B+ is pocket change for the US, but makes a massive impact in poorer countries.
It also had a soft power effect that the current US government seems completely oblivious to [2].
I'll watch the video in full when you read the paper. It starts with obviously flawed math: mortality rate decreases + 'lives saved' doesn't have to add up, and a flat death rate does not equal "no change" because of aging and other factors. It then jumps into mischaracterizations of the study, completely ignoring the data, "it's just a lot of numbers to make it look sophisticated" and false allegations like that excluding high income countries (which do not receive USAID) is manipulating the results. The author clearly has no idea what the scientific method is just randomly finding "holes" in the paper.
The 90M figure is probably exaggerated, but this video is completely nuts. This is exactly why the internet has failed us.
Only the President and Congress were elected. The rest are all appointed.
> laid off thousands of government workers
He did at the direction of the President, who was elected. Government service is not a jobs program.
> the second order effects of that will affect millions
speculation
> All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?
Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
I've worked with engineers "on the spectrum" my entire career. They can be difficult to get along with. None of them were evil, none intended to offend or hurt others. It would just come out wrong.
Once I understood, it wasn't an issue for me any more.
Reporting literally just came out that throttling starlink for ukraine was his idea…but sure he is just a helpless innocent billionaire with no control whatsoever
Musk replied to that post, defending his company's involvement.
"Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS," he wrote.
Musk added that Starlink is for "civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company".
So you don’t dispute this reporting, don’t dispute that this was Musk’s idea, which implies he lied about it immediately afterwards.
And just so i am clear on your philosophy there is no guilt that rides whatsoever with presenting this capability to the leader of the free world who then goes and does exactly what you suggested resulting in many people dying while a nation fights for its life.
How the chain of command works is the person making the decision takes full responsibility. In this case, it's the President. The function of his advisors is to give him options (i.e. ideas) and present the pros and cons.
There's a lot of conjecture and motivated reasoning from all sides, enough that I'm doubtful that we can know what really happened. So park the actual facts for a moment. Let's just consider the situation in the abstract.
Musk is many things, but I've never heard anyone seriously claim him to have any particular aptitude or expertise around military strategy or conflict resolution. So if Trump is unilaterally executing on Musk's musings, we can derive two definite (and highly conservative) observations:
Both him and Trump hate Zelenskyy and want him gone. The receipts are there.
Him possibly suggesting that Trump pressure Zelenskyy to comply with his demands by temporarily crippling Starshield’s performance in an active war zone, which means making it harder for Ukraine to defend itself against Putin’s jet-powered Shahed drones, is not merely an opinion. It’s an attempt to influence policy by proposing a way to harm Ukraine, without regard for the lives at stake.
We’ve seen this behaviour from him before. He doesn’t care whether any of his actions or ‘advice’ will harm others.
Everything you said is highly plausible and potentially correct, but I think my previous post still applies. There's a lot of conjecture and motivated reasoning from all sides, enough that I'm doubtful that we can know what really happened.
Of course you're correct that Trump and Musk both hate Zelenskyy, and this established fact and not conjecture. Nonetheless it all still boils down to:
My comment was more in regards to saying 'Musk has opinions' (who doesn't) is downplaying his involvement.
I'm basing this on what the 4 sources have stated mentioned in Telegraph article and also based on his previous behavior and comments about Zelenskyy / Ukraine and overall affinity and support for authoritarian political leaders.
As far as Musk's opinions are concerned, I'm a fan of YouTube analyst William Spaniel's oft-repeated adage: "Don't listen to what leaders say, watch what they do."
Whatever it is Musk actually said to Trump (reporting of which we should take with a heaping grain of salt, since there are plenty of people with obvious motivations to lie and fabricate) we can see that the service SpaceX controls (Starlink) has remained unaffected, while the service the US military controls (Starshield) is what's in dispute.
Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.
To this day full speed hasn't been restored, continuing to endanger lives.
'Zelensky stated that Ukrainian military commanders, the Ministry of Defense, and foreign diplomats are conducting active negotiations to resolve the constraints. However, he noted that management at SpaceX has declined direct dialogue with Ukrainian military representatives.'
Even in a degraded state, Starlink and Starshield remains a critical strategic advantage for Ukraine, even if it's less so now than before. Being less helpful to Ukraine isn't good, but it's still actively helping Ukraine, and that is worlds apart from actively helping Russia.
If you can't shoot down jet powered Shahed drones to protect your citizens and vital infrastructure, because a key component has been crippled by your supposedly ally and partner, then it equates to sabotage.
Musk, Trump and co know that they can't openly turn things off as it would be a PR nightmare, so the next best thing is to cripple it and deny deny deny that you've done it.
I think it's pretty clear by now that those statements are not speculations anymore and Musk / Trump with their pettiness continue to endanger Ukrainian lives and instead help Putin.
Trump is an idiot and does what the last person told him. When you interact with such a person, you can't wash your hands and say "I just advised, I have no blame".
Not really. Multiple independent sources and reports have confirmed the damage done by Musk during his time at DOGE.
> Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
He is as "thrust" into that position as he was "thrust" into the DOGE role.
What are your thoughts on his illegal state-sanctioned intimidation of ex-FEMA CFO?
You're wasting your keystrokes; it's WalterBright, whose personal mission is to defend the idea that money is virtue, that those with money should be worshipped, and that anything other than laissez-faire capitalism is demonic.
Free markets drive prosperity, socialism does the opposite.
What are the most expensive things in the US? Healthcare, housing, and education. Those are the most heavily regulated and subsidized by the government.
What are the cheapest things in the US? Software (free), TVs, computers, consumer goods. The least regulated and subsidized.
thanks for demonstrating why arguing with you is a total waste of time; you have a very simple set of principles and apply them bluntly and draw the conclusions you want from them. it's childish.
lets not forget that this isn't a thread to argue about economics (which is quite a dull thing to be so enthusiastic about), so I'm not really required to have an argument. It's about how pathetic it is to lick Elon Musk's boots.
If I had paid for a reservation for this car in checks notes 2017(!!!), I'd have some issues with them as well. Very cool tech demo, but come find me when it's getting produced and sold to the people who reserved them a decade ago.
It is sad; I agree. I definitely didn't feel this way when I bought our first Tesla back in 2020. They could do no wrong back then in my book (though some reporters definitely laid the red flags down even then; Elon's pedo guy comment in 2018 was the trigger, it seems, along with the whole "funding secured" thing).
Well unfortunately he's made it necessary to do so. I can like this demo in the same way I can like the V2 rocket as a pioneering achievement in rocketry. There's a very big elephant in the room.
The V2 as a military weapon was a complete failure (due to inaccurate guidance). It also consumed so much of the Reich's resources that it materially shortened the war.
Ah indeed, a new and unheard of piece of cutting edge engineering that is at the same time a completely useless and extravagant waste of resources? My analogy was more on point than I thought :)
He killed thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of people with his DOGE stunts interrupting USAID, for purely selfish reasons or completely mentally deranged delusions (if you take his twitter posts at the time at face value).
This should literally be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of this guy - a mass murderer working his way up to the level of the despots of the early 20th century
Why is it sad? Over 700,000 avoidable deaths from Elon's dismantling of US AID alone, two thirds of them children. Estimated to be 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030.
I think the qualification is unbelievably tame considering what Elon deserves.
Ok, let's examine principle. There are many food charities for starving people in foreign countries. If Bob does not donate to those charities, does that make Bob a murderer?
Donating other peoples' money is not virtuous. Donating your own is.
I am donating my own. But that's besides the point: shutting down an existing aid program, especially in the way it was done directly kills people. You can't just handwave that away as 'we are not donating'. You were donating. The donations were done to such a degree that lives depended on them. If you then shut it down without so much as a slow withdrawal to avoid systemic shocks then you are doing this out of cruelty, not because you want to save some money.
1) What he did was illegal. Those aid programs and the funding they were to receive was written into law by congress - elected by the people - with overwhelming bipartisan support
2) No of course we are not necessarily morally obligated to donate aid in perpetuity. We can decide to stop if we want to. But it was not Musk's or even Trump's decision to make. But since they assumed that mantle of illegitimate authority, they assumed the moral blame that comes with it.
(And yes, every Trump voter also shares significant moral blame for the deaths of all those people. Atrocity was a predictable and likely consequence of a Trump vote in 2024)
its not about virtue and its not even about starving. Its about making a global economy more stable so the world is richer and the US almost always profits from that.
Commodities. They power the economy and they're worldwide. Ofc you want the free flow of goods. From the US's perspective who cares who runs what nation, as long as its not hostile and its stable then the commodities can flow from it. Then manufacturers can make whatever they want to create products to generate growth and wealth, the vast majority of which flows into the US and into their stock market.
As it stands the war in Iran is creating problematic issues with many petrochemicals and their derivative products making it harder for countries to generate wealth to invest in the US stock market.
> Stick to working on programming languages that nobody uses
This is why I always find it a bit funny when people start blowing smoke up his ass. He's just some old guy who spouts points at this thread as a perfect example ideological nonsense and when challenged on it digs in harder in the face of evidence to the contrary - just what you'd want to lead a project (/s).
he directed government money from strategic projects that makes the world more stable to ensure the US could waste it all fighting another dumb war. Its hard to justify, easy to criticise.
its cos he's a prick. The way he pretended to "fairly" sack devs at twitter when he was clearly just trying to cut costs. That he bought twitter to "defend free speech" and then started donating to the Republication party and promoting a very specific political position online. As a euro the Nazi salute alone is enough for me.
The qualifier matters, that guy has serious issues.
And that is precisely all it is, a demo. Reminder that BYDs are held at bay in an anti free market policy specifically because American car companies cannot compete with its low cost and quality. We're wasting time and money on this type of tech.
This engineering in this demo was only designed o get lucrative government contracts.
Automotive tariffs in the US are explicitly to keep the ability to make military vehicles in the United States. GM, Ford, and Chrysler retooled their factories to make planes, trucks, and tanks during WW II.
I wouldn't exactly call it a demo.. more of a marketing stunt, albeit a very impressive one from an engineering POV.
I wonder what the point of this was? Seems likely related to anticipated purchase of Tesla by SpaceX. Maybe meant to (irrationally) justify a high offer price for Tesla?
Can't say I'm a fan of the styling of the car - I guess it'd look at home parked beside a Cybertruck, but something like the Porsche Mission S is way sexier.
I'd take "demo" to mean "product demo", and there is not going to be any product that drives vertically or upside down, nor does aerial flips - i.e. any of the stuff that was "demonstrated".
You seem triggered by the choice of wording. Do you think the upside down rocket car doing aerial flips deserves a more product-ish name like "concept car"? I don't.
Car manufacturers have been doing pointless things for over a century [1], with no plan to even try to make them available to the public. Why is this getting so much heat?
And those rocket drones have a significant proportion of their mass as reaction gas for the thrusters, everything else being designed around lightness, and can still only resist gravity on the order of a few tens of seconds before a full recharge needs to be done. They're very much designed for "small" course corrections outside of atmosphere, or quickly dodging the terminal phase of an interceptor, rather than efficient velocity change.
There's no getting away from the rocket equation - reaction mass is heavy. The sheer number of design compromises that need to be made to allow a cold gas thruster system means I can't see anything but ending up with an awful car for the sake of a few seconds "air time". And the rest of the time you'll still be (at least) doubling the mass of your car from the propellant plus whatever the thrusters, tanks, linkages and everything else weights. I guess you could leave it empty, then only charge it for the "Party Trick", but it still seems a lot of compromises for the occasional "Hey, this looks cool".
And then really only usable in a nice empty, flat, controlled environment - the "real world" driving experience has things like other cars, people, buildings and street surfaces that likly wouldn't appreciate what are effectively localised hurricane-force level winds from the car next to them.
This is a car rigged for a specific stunt. And there's a reason why people don't just drive around rigged stunt cars. They suck as being "cars".
Maybe, but why? Feels like a slap in the face to people who have been waiting ten years for the car. Gimmicky demos just scream waste of money and loss of focus on what matters.
You could make the same argument for hypercars like the McLaren W1, why do you need 1,258 bhp and sub 3s 0-60 times? Seems gimmicky and not practical for the road. But to that I'd argue, why not?
I don't think they're saying its bad, rather, the previous roadster has been in the works for 10 years and still hasn't been manufactured due to issues. Considering that how are they going to manufacture this by 2028? feels unlikely unless LLMs can help them here
Not sure why you're being downed. The Corvette E-Ray was one of the most impressive cars I've ever seen from design and styling to it's incredible performance, at a price point well below many cars it could stand toe-to-toe with. A big part of that impressiveness is that I can open Chevrolet's website right now, and find one to actually buy.
The demos for the future tech are fun for sure, but the Cybertruck and Tesla Semi started this exact same way. The Cybertruck arrived incredibly late, wildly missing even conservative estimates of it's capabilities, and at damn near double the price they teased, AND the units that have shipped have been a fucking mess, to such a degree where Tesla seemingly can't even give them away. And the Tesla Semi has still failed to materialize at all.
So yeah it's a bit of a joke to me to have them hocking a flying car, when their pickup truck can't even drive up a steep unpaved hill, that even my old clapped out F-150 on it's SUV tires would manage just fine.
Edit: and to clarify, I know that it can do that, because I helped a friend move some exercise equipment he bought at auction back to his house, and he has an open-back basement. We backed my truck with trailer down the hill, unloaded it through his basement patio door, and the truck then had to climb back up to the road. And I was a little nervous to be honest, but it did do that, despite as I said having SUV tires on 22-inch rims LOL
F-150s are quite amazing in their ability to climb and maintain an even footing. But you never ever want to get near the point where it will start to roll because of the high ground clearance it is very hard to recover from that. I pulled a bunch of kids with their car out of a Colorado mountain pass near Ft. Collins that had gone 'off roading' in their parents car and it was borderline, almost ended up rolling my own car because of the drag of the other vehicle. Still, it worked and I was even more impressed by the F-150 than I was before then. I live in Europe now and such a vehicle would be completely out of place here but if I would ever end up in the sticks that's the car I would want.
Tracks exist and people can drive there, even if not common. I’m not aware of any real world scenarios you could jump a car like this, except I guess if you have the money to hire a stunt crew on your own massive property. That’s still very different than having an unreasonably fast car you can bring to a track. The closest I can think of are the prototype flying cars… also not practical, but generally intend to be able to take off and land and perform some function. A driving bomb that can perform controlled stunts is in a different class.
One difference being that those in some way relate to performance of a vehicle and engineering ability to achieve it in a package which can be used for its intended purpose. This is just a vehicle with massive tanks strapped in and and obviously non production (not even remotely on path to production) package to make it achieve what has been proven since the 1970s as feasible for stunts.
The people who are waiting for this car are waiting for a gimmick anyway.
If you want a car that will take you from A to B reliably, you can buy one today.
most of the things a Tesla Roadster is advertised with is not street legal.
Some, sure. The one person I know who reserved this owned the original roadster, believed in Tesla (quite wealthy by putting money where his mouth was in stock), and genuinely trying to advance the EV industry. He was so annoyed at this, and generally the last half decade of Tesla.
If you look at Tesla pricing and delivery, prices usually well above what was originally talked about - capability/etc a whole different thing with the cyber truck. The 3 engine "cyberbeast" was originally pushed at about 1/2 it's price 8ish years ago.
Elon doesn't miss with his social media marketing. Compare the announcement tweets from Andy Jassy and the engagement they generate. Meta, with the Muse app (personal AI), is also leaning heavily on social media, but by paying influencers (instead of cool & viral product demos).
Well, given that you’re not a Tesla shareholder, you likely give poor financial advice anyway. How long have people been trying to short Tesla? A decade at least?
A lot of this sentiment is based on jealousy or competiton with Musk, or the pleasure of harassment towards Asperger people: Gimmicky demos are what people remember.
Everyone here can probably still remember the time to the minute that Steve Jobs in 2007 said "an internet communicator, a music player, a phone" and the 3-faced cube transformed into a single device. That's what gimmicky demos are for.
The thing that Steve Jobs was demoing actually released just 6 months later. I'd be very surprised if anything close to what was demoed here is released even 6 years later.
> A lot of this sentiment is based on jealousy or competiton with Musk
Maybe. Another possibility is a feeling of opposition to the idea that the world's richest person continue to accumulate wealth, while using said wealth to dishonestly manipulate elections, support openly fascist and bigoted political parties, and, most recently, tip the scales of international conflict (by limiting Starlink use by Ukraine).
You might love his products, but Elon Musk should not have more power. That's a statement not based in envy, but in a revulsion for what he spends that money on, and how it impacts innocent people.
DHH:
>I put $50,000 on this thing 18 months ago. Not knowing it was going to fucking fly! When it was already years "late". Because investing in whatever Elon does next is not just a great bet, but the most inspiring and fun one too.
Gimmicky? Within our lifetime it will be a common safety feature like airbags. Can you imagine how many terrible accidents can be avoided if the car can fly out of a bad situation? Doesn't need to fly long distance. Engage your imagination and you'll think of many use cases.
Could it theoretically help to avoid *some* crashes? Yes
But in most cases, it'll just trade a frontal crash for a crash against obstacles off/above the road... Which is way more dangerous for pedestrians, buildings, etc.
Driver assistance can in some cases brake before an obstacles. But we've also seen Teslas drive into obstacles. Regardless if it's going to be driver assistance or a human with too much confidence in their ability to avoid obstacles... I wouldn't want to be near a Roadster leaping off the asphalt
Based on the roll over demo it seems the side thrusters can be rotated around - imagine using them pointed forward plus the suction fan and regular tires brakes - it might stop in half the distance of any other car.
Quite interesting how things can be seen so differently, because this was one of the most pointless/dumbest demos I have ever seen in my life. There was no doubt someone could build something like this, the question is always "why"? What problem does this solve?
Sorry, but in world where the vast majority of people can't afford groceries, gas, housing, or healthcare... I just can't look at these silly things the billionaires are spending their money on and get even remotely excited about it. It's just so absolutely tone deaf in the moment we're in right now.
Hagerty has a very good walkthrough video with Lars and it looks pretty real. The thing they failed to mention was that the "flying" version is separate and the entire passenger seat is replaced with a pressure tank.
You can make a brick fly if you strap enough thrust ($$$$) to it. That doesn't mean a human without suicidal thoughts would ever want to be strapped to the same brick.
This is hot wheels. It's pretty clear Musk finally had enough of the culture wars at X and decided to go interfere with Tesla some more. Instead of producing a car people might actually want, he made them do this. This is the worst waste of a company you're likely to see in your life.
TSLA is probably not a good stock to be holding right now.
Not at a PE of ~336 in a world where BYD will eventually arrive in the US.
But TBF if they offered the SpaceX thrusters as an option, the SF effective altruists would slurp them right up to be their daily drivers even if they have to be strapped in next to a tank of toxic boom boom to use them. And Sam Altman would cry into his protein-supplemented energy drink because his Koenigsegg doesn't have them and I'd happily hand over 50 Quatloos to watch that.
1. The kind of person who buys a sports-car often doesn't want the "base version". They want luxury. They want status. They don't want to face the choice of being upsold to an impractical deathtrap or driving around in the "base version" like someone who could barely just afford it.
2. This demo does absolutely nothing to demonstrate the abilities of the base version. I reiterate, a brick could have been made to fly in this way. The base version will no doubt have good paper stats because Musk understands that numbers must be big, but that doesn't mean the base model will be pleasant to drive.
3. The styling of this car is "wankpanzer with a few extra polygons". Given how well the wankpanzer sold, demand for this thing, even if the base model is a competent auto, will be limp.
4. Musk is currently trying to buy another election. With Musk visibly taking an interest in Tesla again, that's likely to backfire on Tesla. They need to cut ties with Musk, not keep doing the sort of puerile things he's known and frequently lambasted for.
5. When does this silly thing even release? They say 2028, but do we believe them? How long has it been since the last model released? We're talking half a decade between models. What the heck are they doing at Tesla? Making bricks fly apparently.
> You can think of the COPV like the fuel tank in a compressed natural gas (CNG)- or liquid propane gas (LPG)-powered vehicle, except the nitrogen mixture in the COPV is stored at a much higher pressure, up to 10,000 psi, similar to the pressures in modern hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
LPG explosions are real combustion due to tank rupture (often due to installation damage or rust). A nitrogen COPV can not rupture (that's why the CO in COPV is there) but it can leak. And that COPV, when it leaks, will be a rocket. But not an explosion.
10,000 PSI? That is beyond absurd. I can not imagine what alloy and how wrapped that pressure vessel is... Or what type of crazy pump is recharging it!
"'Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing,' the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19)."
> LPG explosions are real combustion due to tank rupture…
That first video is terrific - but it demonstrates bringing the pressure vessel far beyond design limitations. Would you like to see what a tank of gasoline does when taken far outside design limitations?
The other two videos are triggered by the copv failing, but the explosion is due to the methane and lox.
My point still stands. The composite overwrap either survives a collision (crash tests will determine this) or doesn't (the vehicle will not be legal for sale in the US and Europe). The crash conditions are inside the design limitations, just like the batteries are and just like a standard fuel tank is.
I'm not able to find solid numbers on that, but given the shared heritage (I presume those gas thrusters come straight from SpaceX) and premium in a space vehicle for payload space, and the fact that SpaceX lost four vehicles to the things, I suspect similarly quite high.
My assumption was that pressures would be lower to help with the longevity of the air chamber, versus a more “disposable” nature of rocket equipment. I am assuming they are replaced between launches.
I hate to be the one to tell you, but you probably pass at least one very explosive tank of something very volatile each and every day on your commute.
This thing is literally a fucking bomb if it fails, through accident or degradation.
The down-force negative pressure aspect they gleaned from McMurtry though? Really cool. Genuinely useful. I just hope they don't claim it as their own invention.
Someone else commented that this tech might make for a good Bond movie car (maybe better suited to the Roger Moore cheesy era), but I assume nowadays they'd just use AI since it'd be so much cheaper.
At a time when Tesla is struggling to make sales? I agree it's an impressive demo, but it has zero practical value. EVs were supposed to help the environment, not make very brief flights. Would this be under control of the driver? Should be part of the autopilot, maybe for collision avoidance?
This is in the same category as the Tesla flamethrower or the Teslaquila.
After Cybertruck and the LARPing as a humanoid-robotics company, I was genuinely unsure if Tesla still had top-tier engineering talent. This shows otherwise. Maybe some of these improvements will trickle down to the Models Y and 3.
(It also looks like a lot of SpaceX engineering. I could see folks there wanting to take a break, particularly if this happened while the pad was busted.)
You have not addressed the main point - this has zero practical value. No this will not trickle down to Y or 3, how would it? What possible use would this have? It’s a silly expensive gimmick.
Also, I imagine the cold gas thrusters and control software are all from spacex, this is what starship uses to orient itself in the air.
Yes, confident none of this belongs in a budget car. It’s not even useful in the roadster, it’s a gimmick, not flying but falling in a controlled way.
Nice pedantry on the thrusters in air, but I imagine the software here to orient the car quickly using thrusters was borrowed from spacex, the thrusters certainly were.
Again, none of this has a practical application - it’s like the flamethrowers- Elon thought it would be cool, so they made it.
> Yes, confident none of this belongs in a budget car.
Your confidence is empty.
Many "trivial" problems had to be solved to make this prototype. How many "smaller" ideas will end up in a budget car is something completely unknowable to you.
Honestly, if you are trying to be funny you succeeded.
But if I am wrong, if you have the volumes of detailed inside knowledge on problems, sub-problems, and all their solutions, and alternate solutions considered, all applied to a car, but none of which are broadly or tangentially non-flying car related; just all the basic information that would be required to credibly make your claim, I will be just as delighted if you post the list.
Nobody would launch an actual payload on the initial flight, and they had to do 3 successful launches to satisfy the USAF´s NSSL requirements before they could launch very profitable payloads for them.
The Roadster was Musks personal vehicle, so Tesla didn't pay for that either.
SpaceX had to do those, not Tesla. These claims that Tesla doesn't have a marketing budget while it's sending cars to space are themselves marketing - you're supposed to believe they don't spend money on marketing.
Yeah, wouldn’t they rather be doing real impactful engineering work, like figuring out means to display even more ads on personal user devices, maximizing the number of hours kids spend doom-scrolling per day, or making robots that are deliberately designed to take jobs away from as many workers as possible?
But, imagine instead being an engineer of any kind today and you’re only getting paid to work on boring things like advanced automotive technology and building cars that can maneuver themselves in midair and might possibly fly in the future? Ridiculous.
(This message should not be taken as support for Musk or any of his views or business ventures.)
Imagine how boring the world would be if we refused every idea that didn't have an immediately practical purpose. Rocketry was probably overkill here but it did achieve at least one thing for the Tesla and SpaceX engineers: you can do things you did not believe were possible.
It does bring up the question of what’s left in car design.
RAM jets?
A car could get 10–30% better energy efficiency than a conventional car at the same speed. Initially, the air jets would reduce and then eliminate wheel drag, and then hold for safety maneuvers. At speed, off-wheel-lift would be generated aerodynamically, with the option to also spot redirect air pressure from the RAM jet, or the air jets.
Then 2.0 would be the fully redesigned one-eyed two-seated flying Tesla Bodywingster.
Is there any evidence/footage that this actually happened in front of a live audience? And not just on a screen that was shown to a live audience? Cause that's all can find.
Sorry for being skeptical but Elons track record of being honest at such demos isn't stellar.
Edit: To the downvoters, this is a serious question. I'd really love to see such evidence.
