It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
It's being sold in two modes. One with cold gas (no combustion) seemingly just for extra forwards acceleration (no flying) and one with real combustion rocket engines, the latter was in the video and is "invite only".
Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
Even just the cold gas variant seems like a nightmare for production, there's a high pressure COPV in that thing and that's gonna make crashes much more.. exciting, and Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways. But very few of these are ever getting sold anyways.
It's not a car, it's a car shaped thing that they created for a demo. People will complain because this should not have any impact whatsoever on TSLA, but people act like it will.
That being said, the stock tanked today so I don't think most people are buying it.
That is incorrect - there are three versions slated, one with no cold gas nozzles, one with forward-only (the 4 in the rear) and a tank in the rear "acceleration", one with 10 nozzles (4 under, 2 side, 4 rear) and a tank in the rear and passenger seat "flight". None of the variants use rocket fuel or other ignited propellent, they're all just compressed gas release systems.
I like how "Jetson car" goes from driving George to work through the air to "10 seconds of air time is a Jetson car." No, it is nothing like the Jetsons. It is a cold air bomb waiting to explode and there is zero chance of it actually hitting the road other than in a few fake forms to pretend they did it.
I'm not sure I'd agree that "Traditional wheel powered transportation vehicle" is in the same category as "Useless hovering car with giant dangerous high-pressure nitrogen tank that can cause serious bodily injury to pedestrians and occupants"
I think future technology will allow the car to detect another car or pedestrian too close to the exhaust system and disengage it. I don’t know, some wild thought I just had.
You can't just "disengage" a car that's six feet off the ground. You have to land it gently with the nozzle engaged or you don't have a car anymore, and maybe you don't have a driver either.
my quick search says LPG-installed cars run at 5-10 bar. the roadster apparently at 350 bar. by comparison one is on the scale of car tires and the other is like 35x that.
This is enough pressure to launch a car and flip it in the air, you can't just "safely leak" it at any useful rate of speed in an emergency. In an emergency it will rapidly explode.
You think the jetsons vehicle wasn’t a flying bomb? You’re comparing a real, actually-flying car with a cartoon fantasy and complaining the real one isn’t real enough? I don’t even understand what the point here is
The point is that a car flying for 10 seconds is nowhere near the Jetsons car.
We actually do already have Jetsons style flying cars - those things that look kind of like big drones are basically that, and those are actually practical.
Forget the comparison to the Jetsons if it upsets you, let's just compare to actual flying vehicles.
I was mostly being pedantic in response to the extreme pedantry required to differentiate between “doing a barrel roll using cold gas thrusters” and “flying”. My point is that it is of course flying, and the reason cars don’t fly at all normally is because it’s insanely dangerous, so saying it’s not a flying car because it’s dangerous is both disingenuous and wrong.
I bet Tesla is kicking themselves for not consulting mulletbum before building. They could have caught this if only the actual engineers at Tesla had your input.
If the flying version is ever sold (unlikely) it will be subject to flying thing rules (FAA). Best case it would be like buying a used F1 car from Ferrari. They retain possession and you get to occasionally fly in on the private jet and drive it under supervision on a racetrack.
It’s cool tech demo. I’m not expecting to see one fly in private hands ever.
The cybertruck is so dangerous to pedestrians it would never pass homologation pretty much anywhere outside of USA, and yet it sells there. If the roadster is sold anywhere it will be there too.
I'm wondering if its going to be a model like I think Ferrari calls it Cliente Ferrari. Where the car stays with Ferrari, they put on track days at great tracks all over the world. Bring Pro Driver Coaches, Mechanics , Massage Therapists, five star chefs Data Analysts to review your performance. From my understanding Ferrari makes a lot of money doing that.
If I'm not mistaken, and please somebody correct me if I am mistaken, Teslas meet or exceed the absolute highest safety regulations in the US and in Europe.
Safety of a car is a different axis than safety of the driver. That combines them. Related, it's why performance cars have higher insurance rates: people who buy fast cars go fast.
Your comment is—at best—misleading. See the last two paragraphs of the article:
> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws.... Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well....
> “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities”....
EU safety regs are pass/fail - there's no sources stating Tesla have exceeded anything there, they need to pass in order to be sold in Europe, so they've done whatever the minimum required is for that. To do so, they've needed to make numerous compromises & changes to their cars to make them fit for the EU market - notably no FSD. Hardly indicative of a car brand that exceeds anything.
As for US safety standards, that seems a lower bar...
Reading https://www.tesla.com/roadster, it seems like both variants only use cold gas thrusters, and the difference is that the "normal" (lol) one only has them pointed rearwards while the flying one has them pointed in all different directions as well.
No, that's the mind of a person speaking that is thinking of the motorcycle standing at the traffic light just behind this car. Action, reaction, that sort of thing.
Red flag thing was the UK's Locomotives Act 1865, which dated from before what we call cars were invented. More aimed at traction engines (steam engines that go on the road). Exactly the type of regulation people like to mock the EU for.
Last year I went to a steam show and had to share the street with giant steam tractors for the first time. That law suddenly made sense. The visibility and stopping distance aren't great.
I can think of no better person to have been hoisted on his own petard than Midgley. He also gave us the ozone hole. Veritasium has a great hit piece on this utter maniac.
Best guess is that it's disabled for anything but track/trick stuff. There will be some cool videos eventually showing up with tricks people pull with this. I don't know what else it's for.
I can imagine the lateral thrusters helping it turn faster on the track. Although I wonder if the extra weight is going to net out positive for lap times.
But really, a few very rich people will buy the full-rocket version to impress their friends. They'll play with them on private property.
Solo track use at that. I can't imagine that other drivers are going to be all that happy if they get hit by the exhaust from one of the thrusters in a corner.
Gases dissipate very rapidly, even moreso if doing pulsing or whatever. Probably very unsafe for a human standing literally right behind it, but it'd likely have 0 effect on another car at typical driving distance.
That depends on the landing zone being available in a way that's hard for the onboard safety system to predict. But if the car is, say, spinning out you could use these to restore stability or try to recover from the other sorts of disasters that overpowered cars can end up in even on clear roads.
I suppose I can see this also. It sounds horrifying. A head on collision is a pretty terrible thing but having one of the cars suddenly fly 30 feet in the air and crashing into on coming traffic does not sound like a great option. Reminds me of the cybertruck "this would make the perfect post apocalyptic vehicle."
you might have a better chance of surviving that 30 foot launch than a head on collision with a pole or a semi truck. don't get me wrong it seems wildly impractical but there may be rare situations where it's useful. ejection seats on fighters frequently injured their pilot but that is better than being dead.
This whole thing is incredibly stupid and yet, people are bending over backwards to defend it. There is not a single traffic situation where the ability of a car to suddenly launch itself into the air doesn't have more downsides than it staying put. This includes overhead wiring, other people nearby, tunnels, bridges, overpasses, lampposts, traffic lights and other street furniture. With a little luck you will survive the impact of your toy when it lands but the party that you land on does not. People have a hard enough time predicting trajectories with everything constrained to 2D, if cars start jumping around like fleas that is not an improvement. From a standstill with other parties around you this is already a serious problem, if it were moving forward at highway speeds in traffic it would be utterly irresponsible to trigger this kind of launch.
What, you don’t think the solution to a situation with too much out-of-control kinetic energy is to inject a whole bunch more semi-randomly-directed kinetic energy?
There are three modes: Performance ($50k reservation), Thrust ($250k reservation), and Rocket (invite only). Thrust and Rocket mention cold gas thrusters. Where do you see a combustion rocket engine advertised?
https://www.tesla.com/roadster
I suspect it "actually flies" much the same way the cybertruck is bullet proof and has an ultra hard stainless steel exoskeleton, in that it doesn't. This seems like smoke and mirrors conman shit pumped up to 11.
Is your assertion that the car shaped object we watched drive for a distance and then levitate over a distance was something other than a car that actually flies?
You watched a demo of a car-shaped object flying. Was it an actual car, or just a shell that looks like a car? We won't know until it's actually on sale and in customer hands what this is going to be.
It wouldn't be the first time Musk demoed something and promised something and then never ships.
Watch The man with the golden gun. You’ll see a car do a corkscrew jump. Does that mean all cars of that brand could do that jump?
What we saw was impressive, but it’s a trick. The car’s tanks are surely empty after this, and now you have a loud compressor filling them up for minutes. You can’t use those thrusters near people and cars cause you’re at risk of getting them in trouble.
It’s part of a long history of useless tech in supercars. Impressive, but useless.
What distance did you actually see it "drive"? There is no evidence that the car shaped object was anything but a lightweight shell using compressed air to levitate and do tricks like any modern day drone can do.
The car being filmed and the car that did the stunts are not necessarily the same. See this image for what seems to be an empty husk of the car that actually "flew": https://imgur.com/a/uH9qCxr
That is clearly not the same car considering you can see the car they are talking about off to the right in the distance (it, rather suspiciously, never leaves the curved vertical track area).
Well, Elon said the final prod car would be lighter; whether or not they achieve that goal, the strong implication: the car has a battery and power train in it. Also, we saw it drive up the first part of the ramp without any air seeming to come out the back, and reverse down slowly; there don't seem to be forward facing fans/jets from the looks of the air coming out. I'd say Occam's razor is that the car has a full electric system in it.
I don't doubt it's got an electric system in it. I doubt it's got a battery sized for anything beyond that demo, a sufficiently rigid frame for road use, a reasonable steering and suspension system, etc.
My general assumption is that anything and everything that wasn't necessary for that demo was removed to trim enough weight to make the demo possible.
I certainly don't think it was a car that flies. It could be a car that can do dangerous party tricks for no practical reason but I kinda doubt that do. Hell we live in an AI world now, why are you so confident it's what they claim it is, what in Musk or Tesla's track record indicates that this is anything but a hype effort?
Where the heck did you see combustion based rocket engines? I haven’t seen that come up once. Was it an AI response? And the video feature only cold gas rockets as far as I knew.
Twitter is essentially dead. If I go to my "For You" tab, it is literally 100% pro-Trump bot posts.
Musk keeps it running as a mouthpiece/propaganda and vanity project, but it's not a viable business anymore due to all the $13B Musk borrowed to acquire it, as well as loss of advertizers. It's estimated to break even on an operational basis, but loses about $1B/yr when you include interest on the debt.
Is it dead? I feel like this is more of a "you" thing than you might realize. At least for sports, twitter is 100% still the dominant medium for reporting.
I'm looking at the same post on a players status for this weekend from 2 hours ago on 3 platforms:
- Threads: 5 likes, 2 comments, 15 shares
- BlueSky: 19 likes, 3 comments, 3 shares
- Twitter: 1500 likes, 105 comments, 281 shares
Doesn't really seem like twitter is the one that's almost dead...
Uh isn’t the “for you” literally the algorithm based feed for your direct interests? My for you page shows zero trump. And this is exactly the reason why it’s still so valuable, it can feed the echo chambers for individuals and keep them engaged (and seeing ads)
Tesla's stock price might be detached from reality, but is their actual business in trouble? I ask because anywhere I travel (Europe, UK, HK, NZ for example) there are just tons of Teslas, most of them the latest refresh models. There were more Telsas than BYD in Hong Kong!
> Tesla's stock price might be detached from reality, but is their actual business in trouble?
I am not sure you can detach these two concepts. Tesla is currently valued around 3x the next top 5 auto companies combined, so to an extent you need to judge the company on these expectations. I happen to think they do have a pretty good business selling cars, and maybe a very good business selling autonomous cars, but there's so much uncertainty I think it is hard to see the current market cap as anything other than hugely inflated.
Why exactly do you think he keeps repositioning them as a robotics oh wait no I mean an AI company? Why is he clearly positioning Tesla to be acquired by SpaceX? Why is Tesla investing into xAI to be converted into SpaceX shares?
Tesla’s actual business, making cars, continues to degrade. The Roadster (obviously) is not going to help.
They have a huge balance sheet so it’ll take a while but Musk obviously sees the writing on the wall. The sheen is wearing off their shitty products and he doesn’t know how to add the sheen back or make the products less shitty.
Just wait til all teslas are roving cell towers connected to star link. Always capturing 3d data of every single street driven. There’s still so much room for weird big things with the network being built. Scary.
>You're aware that "beat" means "beat expectations," right?
You're aware that the "expectations" are they run a profitable company, right?
>You're aware that expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is struggling?
You're aware that the expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is stable, and showed record deliveries and backlog in Q2?
>TSLA is down 18% YTD. That's because their business is doing so well?
Auto manufacturing sector (DJUSAU) is down 16% YTD, and Tesla's stock is overpriced to begin with. Tesla's most direct competitor in the US, Rivian, is down 34% YTD. Stop getting your business/economic news from BlueSky/reddit.
October 2: Tesla deliveries fall 2% as US consumers buy fewer EVs
July 23: Tesla shares tumble 11% as discounts hit profits
April 2: Tesla reports weaker than expected 6% rise in global deliveries
January 29: Tesla scraps models in pivot to AI as annual revenue falls for the first time
Tesla growth is slowing, margins are getting crunched, competition is heating up. Tesla knows they're fucked so they're pivoting into AI. The pivot into AI might work, but Musk himself unambiguously thinks Tesla is fucked as an automotive company.
Yes, profitable with slowing growth, shrinking margins, and increasing competition. This is a death spiral for Musk's ultra capital-intensive mode of operating.
That's why Musk is trying to claim Tesla isn't an automotive company (except when comparisons to such suit him and his cultists, of course).
The business is doing fine, they’re profitable and regularly beating various targets. Honestly I think Elon is more level headed than people give him credit for, his companies are consistently profitable and generally produce competitive products.
Operating margin fell from 16% to ~2% over the last 10 years and will probably be negative in 2026 and 2027. They have a big cash pile to burn through but they’re spending it on ummm “a flying car,” humanoid robots, and an AI fab. They’re fucked.
Similar, to the time Tesla was fucked, because they wanted to sell EVs when there was neither demand nor charging infra. Or when SpaceX wanted to build a rocket that could land on legs, whereas every wannabe rocket scientists knew that to be impossible.
I'd be very surprised if the roadster project was particularly expensive. That operating margin tells you they are spending all the cash they are earning on cars on the other stuff, not that the cars suddenly became more expensive to make.
I'm interested to meet someone online who's short both on-shore US silicon fabs and the market for humanoid robots. Can you say more about your thinking?
I'm short on an allegedly successful automotive company that has a rapidly deteriorating automotive business (due entirely to management's own decision-making) pivoting into the most hyped business ideas in the world. I'm bearish on the type of creative accounting and self-dealing we see between the Musk companies.
Musk is similar to Zuck in that they get some credit for sheer courage to turn the wheel on their massive businesses, but they also have to be right. Aside from his anticompetitive behavior, Zuck continues to miss. Musk's pattern has been that the more Musk is personally involved, the worse the outcomes. Cybertruck was his baby. Optimus is his baby.
If Tesla is doing so well as an automotive business, then why doesn't he just continue making it a great automotive business?
I mean the short answer is that it doesn’t temperamentally suit him to do so.
Maybe a mid length answer is if you agree with his assessment on say humanoid robots in terms of market and you believe they might have a geometric growth factor in production (eg robots can make more robots) then you’d want that business build out done by a team that can scale rapidly.
For fabs spacex and Tesla are significant consumers of the output- vertical integration is preferred by lots of companies.
> I mean the short answer is that it doesn’t temperamentally suit him to do so.
Correct, and I think having a CEO who's totally unaccountable to a board and is temperamentally unable to focus on his core business is not good.
SpaceX and Tesla are nowhere near large enough consumers to justify vertically integrating a fab. The demand is predicated on Optimus producing millions of units per year.
This circularity will probably end up being seen in retrospect as so transparently absurd that it'll beggar belief that anyone accepted it.
You've got to take Musk's forecasts with a massive grain (sack?) of salt. Pre-launch he was estimating making 250,000 Cybertrucks per year by 2025. So far, total sales over 3 years have actually been 60-70K.
I'd bet that in 5 years time Optimus total sales are in the 10's of thousands at best, with few to no large scale industrial users (other than self-use by Musk). Customers will be similar to what AgiBot and Unitree currently have - entertainment, hospitality, academic, small scale trials, plus a few Tesla fanboy sales that don't do anything actually productive.
If anything his companies are doing well despite of him, not because of him. There's level-headed and competent leadership in them resisting his bullshit.
The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk
The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies
SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed
Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc
These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.
I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)
> The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk
Three sucesses.
Not so successful: Solar City, Neuralink, TBC, X.
(X exists, but before it was valued-and-bought by one of Musk's other companies, it appeared to have lost about half its value).
paypal succeeded _despite_ musk and required a boardroom coup to remove him from leadership because he was about to tank the company. if he had is way nobody would remember paypal besides a couple people with merch for a long defunct company.
Of course it’s still early days for all these companies and they’re not exactly fiscally solid, but if Tesla had not made all those cars, someone else would have.
I'd still restrict this to an ability to pursue ideas that others find too risky with relentless persistence and a laser focus. He is able to get something off the ground and make others believe in it, but not good at actually running a stable business. And that's fine, mind you, I absolutely respect what has built. But the person who is responsible for turning SpaceX from an incredibly risky bet into a profit machine is Gwynne Shotwell, not Elon Musk.
It's really difficult to see such ridiculous levels of hyperbole in every single Tesla thread and not think people are doing this in a coordinated way for ulterior motives
He says in that video that they opened up the doors to show them that model, so it's unclear it's the same one "driven" for the demo.
Even if it is, they show interior, wheels & a distance shot of the rear opening showing a large air tank - very little can be seen of the actual chassis or engine.
Whatever tricks were done for the demo - whether the car is real or fake - it's highly unlikely what was shown today will ever be like-for-like accessible to consumers in the production model.
I thought somewhere in the video they said that it is just regular compressed air that is held in a tank, and that the car itself has a compressor and regenerates the compressed air over time. Obviously to stabilize that amount of weight the gas has to be ejected at such a high rate it is practically frozen at the nozzle outlet, but it is still just regular air.
And supercars are typically not submitted for NCAP testing, so It'll likely be less safe than a Model Y for example (to be determined, no reports out yet)
Have they announce pricing on the rocket version? I could see it being priced like a bugatti or koenigsegg, where selling 100-500 of these is a great business.
The Rodenator is an applicable device that injects a precise mixture of oxygen and propane into the dens of burrowing rodents, and kills them with a concussive force that collapses the rodents' tunnel system as well.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Teslas evaluation is based on hype. This is as hype as it gets for a car. To me it looks like they were in need for "the coolest thing". To me, this has the smell of desperation implying the beginning of the end of their high evaluation.
The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."
> devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible mode
Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value. There is a huge economy revolving around people annoying other people just for a glimpse of their attention. This captures the attention and pleases people. Other car companies should start getting creative too.
They imply a heavy weight with the suction downforce numbers but I think those numbers are not real. I’m reminded of neural link where the pig food detector was unimpressive, then shortly later a monkey demo was very impressive, they have since had human trials and humans don’t appear to get anywhere close to that same level.
It's compressed air RCS. The compressor, regulators and a ton of hardware take up the entire space from the seats back to literally the very last inch of the car. Hard pipes run along the door frame for the forward RCS, meaning only one person (driver) can sit in it and enter from the drivers side. Huge carbon RCS tanks fill every other space.
No idea how long it would take to recharge the tanks after venting them.
There's no room for 'car' stuff in it.
Interestingly there is a big... sleeve of wizard... that extends down under the car to assist the ground effect fan. Packaging that and the RCS stuff into it is a real engineering feat.
But it didn't look to have crash structures, or any other production ready hardware.
> "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).
I think everyone is getting too caught up in the Thrust and Rocket variants. There aren’t going to be very many of those. But the base model will just be a regular Tesla.
> But the base model will just be a regular Tesla.
A regular Tesla that sucks, you mean?
Even the base model has “active aerodynamics and a multi-mode suction system that maximizes downforce for next-level performance on and off the track.”
I am pretty skeptical that that’s actually what was used in the demo. It would be so much simpler to just use whatever they use for the rockets for the demo, which certainly isn’t rechargeable
>Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
It's only wild if you ignore Musk's role in this. Not even trying to bash him or anything, but he's a trillionaire. This is the kind of shit you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly waste.
I mean, if this is how he wants to spend his money, then I guess that's his prerogative. But I think it's a bit misleading to suggest this is a decision made by "Tesla" when this is clearly an irrational decision for a company to make. This is a decision made by Musk based on satisfying his own personal goals.
In his pocket or what? When SpaceX IPO'd he was valued at over a trillion USD. Currently somewhere over 900MM, and worth more than the 2nd, 3rd and 4th on the rich list combined.
In terms of net worth, you are closer to Jeff Bezos than Bezos is to Musk.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
If this ships, it will deliver a fraction of what's promised here. My money is on the "flying" version being delayed repeatedly until it's quietly cancelled. Anyone remember the fast battery change stations[1]?
The website lists three modes, which all have the fan but differ in thrusters. The variants are: no thrusters (thus no COPV), acceleration-only thrusters, and flying thrusters. The flying one has the disclaimer "Note: Not approved for public road use." OTOH the acceleration-only thrusters may be street legal. However, I expect that the COPV will be kept empty (thus not dangerous) unless you select a special "launch mode".
Hopefully there will also be a warning siren while it is pressurized. "Dangerous enough to need a warning siren" seems like a plus for the target market, honestly.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
It's staggering to consider how many resources we've diverted from people who could use them into building this novelty.
If ever there was a sign of a society of decadence in decline, it's that the most powerful person on earth is free to create toys like this exclusively for others in the ruling class.
Everyone's focusing on the cold gas thrusters, which of course is very cool, but not actually shocking that it technically could be done (economically is another question).
But can we talk about the just casually driving straight vertical or sticking to the ceiling? I didn't think that would be technically possible for a 1000kg+ car with probably at least 2" of ground clearance.
There's presumably very limited stores of compressed gas, so you might get one hop or a couple 0-60 boosts per charge. But with electric fans, suction is a feature with much longer duration (minutes?), so you could feasibly do the batman driving on the tunnel ceiling past traffic trick.
I very much doubt the machine we saw flying was 1000kg+. It was either MUCH lighter, supported by cleverly hidden cables, or some other trickery. The dramatic lighting isn't just for visual effect, it makes it easier to hide the reality of the demonstration.
If there was a live audience anywhere near that stage they wouldn't have been able to use thrusters to fly something that actually weighs as much as a car.
What cable arrangement would you propose to move a car in that way? I think it would be easier to do with gas thrusters than with cables. They'd get tangled in each other.
Remember when Elon announced a humanoid robot by using a dancer in a robot costume? Seems reasonable that he would have some "technical assistance" to make his stage show look great. No idea if it was cables or not, but reasonable people can doubt the veracity of the theatrics.
A dancer dressed in a robot costume was not being played off as a robot, and is not evidence of cables, nor is it evidence of a tendency to fake demos.
It’s strange that people need to convince themselves that this is fake.
I think it was a real demo, but I share in the skepticism that this is something that could reach the market. How big is this cold gas container? What happens to it when it gets in an accident? If the car has dirt and debris under it, what is the risk to people/property around it when the trusters turn on?
10 years from their initial offering of the roadster, I'd like to see them release a well functioning, cool looking car. Why are they spending time/energy trying to make it fly?
Dangle the shiney thing to get everyone’s attention and sell the hell out of the very normal thing. This is basic startup marketing and say what you want about Elon, but he owns this skill, it’s why he’s the worlds richest person.
This is not actually the first time that this idea of using a fan to create downforce. It's been something that's been talked about and modeled for a long while and I think a few years ago, the McMurtury Speirling was released. That set the lap record at Laguna Seca among other achievements. The car is about a million dollars, and the fans are basically completely useless anywhere that's not a curated track (think stones, dust, wood, other FOD going through the fans).
The new roadster is obviously cool, but it looks like a practically useless vehicle for 99.9999% of the population. It's purely going to be a track princess -- with lots of extra weight for frankly pointless (but very cool) thrusters.
Yeah, it turns out that in very specific and controlled situations, using a fan to make downforce is great. It's also a very obvious thing to do in those situations and doesn't do much for you otherwise.
Imagine a normal car having to carry around the added weight of fans, COPVs, and the plumbing to make it work. And only being able to use those only if the track is clean and there are no other cars nearby.
This is like asking to imagine a Hoover vacuum to have those fans. It’s silly because it would never happen. This is not a normal car. Comparing it to a normal car makes no sense.
The Chaparral 2j is one of the most inventive and cool looking cars I've seen.
Not f1, Can-Am but yeah, I'm really surprised this isn't a more common approach to modern track cars. Obviously banned in most motorsport but I'm surprised with all of the one-offs these days that it's not more common.
It would be an extremely cool demo if this thing was even remotely close to a car that can be produced and sold. Alas, this was something that could be used in a circus at best (where people would need to be very very far since it's very dangerous).
A circus showing these would never recoup the cost of even one being built, hah. But it is very cool. It's also neat to see the Brabham BT46 make a return after like 50 years.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
> 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…
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
The funny thing is that during the event, Elon claimed that the car can recharge the tanks itself [0], but in the Top Gear video, the Tesla folks say that it is recharged from an external source [1]. In the Top Gear video, they also say that they are filling it from a "high pressure nitrogen system", whereas Elon claims that the tank is filled with air. They can't even keep their own messaging straight.
The Top Gear video mentions that kind of recharge time using an external system (though they do claim that they are trying to get it down to 30min).
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.
Based on a cursory search, propellant-grade nitrogen requires a high purity (99.99%) [0]. I am no aerospace engineer, but I'd be interested to know what the actual requirements are for a system like that to work reliably. If 99.99% nitrogen is actually required, then I'd assume that the corresponding compressor would neither be compact nor particularly maintenance-free.
The stock market agrees. TSLA continues trending downward.
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.
Not trending down anywhere near enough. Their PE Ratio is absurd, but it definitely proves the adage that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
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!
I'm not sure if the stock price means a lot. Tesla is kind of a meme stock, people buy it based on vibes, not based on what it's worth.
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.
I mean, this is something we want to encourage. Everyone always likes to quote fiduciary duty ad nauseum. Here is a public company flying (lol) in the face of that in the spirit of, well, fun.
We're not just talking about "fiduciary duty". Some people put down large (250k) down payments for the Roadster when it was announced 9 years ago. If I were one of those folks I'd be more interested in getting an actual car I could drive than seeing a cool demo.
But you'd expect if this were being treated as a likely success for Tesla the announcement would have caused a price bump or at least a reversal of the trend.
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%.
Dude it's a supercar that like 1000 people can buy, this thing is a rounding error. Lamborghini's revenue was $3B last year, Tesla's was $94B. Supercars are barely a market.
You'll see the stock go up when Robotaxi and the Semi hit the market.
> 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.
I suppose I should have written "continues recent downward trend." One would hope that a huge marketing investment like this would help hype the stock, no?
This isn't the car though, this is a concept demo to keep people subscribed while they continue to delay the real car. I agree supercars are pointless in a lot of ways, but this is just not the same thing because it's vaporware meant to be provocative.
The maths of the flying is a little puzzling to me.
Back of the fag pack, let’s say it is light for an electric car and weights 1000kg. I’ll also go on a limb and guess the air flow is actually subsonic - 200m/s would make it 0.6 Ma (still insanely fast!). Even then, that requires 50 kg of air every second. Or 40 m^3. Using everyone’s favorite metric, this empties an Olympic swimming pool in 1 minute. It also requires a MW of power. I mean… that’s a lot??? Though admittedly, only about as much as accelerating 0-60 in 1 sec (50% of that in fact). So the flying would draw as much power as accelerating at full throttle.
Power requirements would go down a lot with slower exhaust speed, but then you need to shift more fluid. 40 m^3 already seems like a lot to me.
I get it’s a neat little demo and they have to get SpaceX into the picture somehow, but still I don’t understand how it’s supposed to add up. Also, what do I know - just a humble physicist.
In the video they claim the air is supersonic at exit, and point out the mach diamonds -- and I think they said 60 kilonewtons of thrust max, which is really a lot. So I think the volume of air would decrease roughly 60% from your estimate? I'm not a physicist.
I'm imagining this in two phases: phase one - you drive around, and excess energy goes to compressing air. Phase two - you use that compressed air which takes very little additional power, so you get to double up on force. I guess likely a 'running mode' where it's using some power to keep suction on.
I'm curious how much time you get at full blast vs 'just' enough to keep the car pinned to a wall, e.g. 1 vs 2 g.
So let’s double the speed - 1.2 Ma. You need half the mass now - 25kg/sec. If you want to have 10 seconds worth of hover - that’s 250kg of gas. Plus the weight of the storage tank. Plus - this is the amounts for hover. Not for any extra force on top of that.
It still doesn’t make much sense to me. And that’s before considering what happens when you get rocket stream hitting a tarmac road. Never mind public roads, this sounds like a major hazard anywhere. Plus the quantity of compressed gas son board (if that’s how it works)… not a pretty crash. At these numbers, imagine 10MJ released all of a sudden - apparently that’s about 2.5kg of TNT.
Surely I’m missing something… as I say, I can’t make sense of it.
The "pin to a wall" part uses fans, not the cold gas thrusters. It can probably stay there until the battery runs out. The gas thrusters are only needed if you want to go 0-60 in .8s (with the Thrust version), or if you want to fly (with the Rocket version). Probably those only last a few seconds before the air tanks need to recharge.
> Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?
British officers planning trench raids in the front lines during WWI. Or, at least, that's where I've been told the expression originates.
Really, though, is it impossible to imagine no one, ever, using a cigarette pack to jot something down? It's a colloquialism. It doesn't even have to be taken literally to make sense. What is gained by questioning it on that level?
> Really, though, is it impossible to imagine no one, ever, using a cigarette pack to jot something down? It's a colloquialism. It doesn't even have to be taken literally to make sense. What is gained by questioning it on that level?
I took the OP's question to really be a question about the origin of that phrase, and with your answer, I learned something I didn't know before. So I, for one, am happy the question was asked.
napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.
Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?
---
Implication being that writing on the back of cig packs does not make sense. I'd agree with your reading if not for the "at least kind of make sense" bit.
this is funny because I know so many people who always note down phone numbers and such for the day on cigarette packs. sometimes even carrying a few with them all the time.
So this is a really neat technical demo, using spacecraft cold-gas thrusters and guidance hardware/software to do crazy stunt stuff in a car, but what's the relevance to an actual product that can be sold, even as a small-volume exotic? These are pressurized gas thrusters, so either the tanks, valves, and piping take up most of the interior of the car, or it has a low-single-digit number of seconds of thrust before recharge, probably both. Also the tanks for these things tend to use incredibly high pressures and are apt to explode spectacularly in any sort of accident.
This is sort of like demonstrating a car that softens the asphalt in front of it with lasers to get a better grip; difficult, technically impressive, and zero chance that it will ever be allowed on a public road.
Edit: According to this Motor Trend article, it uses a big carbon-fiber pressure vessel at 5500psi, so basically an enormous fragile bomb. And the one that did all the stunts had two of the pressure vessels which would have filled most of the interior.
Some off piste skiers carry a carbon fiber canister with pressurized nitrogen gas, to inflate airbags from backpack in case of an avalanche. Carbon fiber is not that good with point pressure, but strong for evenly distributed loads.
At this point I look at wikipedia what happened to the submarine bamboozled mentioned. Ooops. Heh, the pressure of water is as evenly distributed as can be. Seems my background in watersports is not enough to moonlight in material engineering.
CF can make a fine pressure vessel it's just difficult to build and they require constant inspection that OceanGate didn't perform (and ignored evidence from their own monitoring system that the PV was responding differently to pressure after a hard bang it suffered when docking in one of the last few dives). SpaceX already has experience building the COPVs that Tesla is probably using and knows their limits pretty well though I don't want to be standing near one in a major crash either.
Different forces: expansive (Roadster) vs compressive (OceanGate). This makes some logical sense since fibers/strands/ropes are good for tensile strength vs. compressive forces.
It's unclear what they'll be classified as and probably comes down to some negotiation and lawyering to decide how restricted they are. You can sell a lot of restricted hardware to US citizens that you can't sell internationally due to ITAR.
Looks like a sensible turning down of the Cybertruck aesthetic into something that looks good.
That said, the production issues with the Cybertruck mean you’d be a fool to reserve one of these. Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls. Tesla has torched their engineering reputation lately and this page is making a lot of promises about revolutionary things.
The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.
This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.
Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).
Lotus did this on their chassis not because it was cheap, but because it allowed them to use lighter, thinner aluminum which would have been ruined by welding. It was almost certainly not cheaper than welding, they had to add little protrusions that kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart, which is what made for the best bonding. They went to a lot of trouble to make this process work, and it resulted in one of the best sports cars of all time in terms of pure driving experience.
Tesla has very different reasons for doing what they did on the cybertruck. It's very much a form over function. Lotus has always been function over form (to a fault, in terms of their financial position).
You can add glass microspheres to adhesives to guarantee bondline thickness. It's often done nowadays whenever you have different metals meeting with a glue bond because it keeps them electrically isolated, preventing galvanic corrosion.
> Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones
That's pretty standard. An M3 has long pushed the tolerances of things in the engine more than a base-model 3 series. An S-class has more whiz-bang-hope-it-still-works-in-ten-years stuff than a C-class. A Lexus has more going on than a boring base Corolla.
This type of vehicle isn't intended to drive at speed, at least not very far. It's targeted at collectors who will park it in a garage with their other supercars. It's a status symbol with wheels, not transportation or even a toy for track days. (And I don't mean that as a criticism, there's nothing wrong with wealthy people buying collectibles.)
Everyone is talking about the Cybertruck, but both the 3 and the Y have plenty of engineering problems as well. I believe both cars are listed as below-average reliability by CR.
Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ on an yearly basis until you get sick of fixing the suspension. Tesla claims to have fixed the issue on newer models (and apparently they did a lot of work on the suspension), but they don't really take responsibility for their old cars so I doubt they will take responsibility when their design causes problems for you.
I do enjoy driving my 2019 SR+ Model 3, but I hate when people do the whole "Well on first principles, EVs have less parts so they are more reliable..." thing. My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
Early Model 3/Ys built in the US were unreliable. The ones built in Shanghai, though, are excellent. Berlin is somewhere in the middle.
FWIW, I'm into my fourth year of (Chinese-built) Model 3 ownership and it's been rock solid, the only services so far were to replace the air filter and wipers.
Kind of a silly question but I want to be sure I’m piecing together a fair picture: both of those are five minute tasks you do yourself outside the auto parts store / driveway, right?
Rip away center tunnel carpet on rhs (lhd vehicle), remove 2 screws from below glove compartment, fold away panel, remove cap from filter compartment, remove 2 filters - put back together in reverse order.
That's literally a 20 minute job if you about know what you should be doing - a.k.a. read about the process in the free service manual of Tesla (only need an account, free) or watched a YT video...
So many things you just said are wrong. The control arms are 100k mile parts, and you can easily replace them with Unplugged Performance versions for under $1k.
And I have no idea what kind of driving he's doing to spend 2-3k$/y . I got Front Upper Control Arms replaced under warranty, exactly once, in the lifetime of my 2019 M3 (also Fremont-built). I do a yearly inspection just to catch issues before they have a chance to become really problematic, but for the past 4 years I've always been told that "the car's underside is just perfect, there's nothing wrong with it".
> My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
This is less about EVs vs ICEs and more about Toyota's engineering quality vs Tesla's engineering quality, which is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Homer Simpson's barbecue pit.
I should note that I didn't mean to imply it was inherent that EVs were less reliable, but rather, that engineering mattered and Tesla's engineering always had underdeveloped parts.
That was my first thought, Cybertruck: The Car. But then it drove up a wall and stopped on the ceiling and flew down. That was awesome. I'm sure it will be a nightmare to own.
- Performance: road ready, seats two, active aero and a “multi-mode suction system.” 0-60 mph in under 1.6 seconds. Available by reservation.
- Thrust: race ready, seats two, adds rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters. 0-60 mph in under 0.9 seconds. Limited release.
- Rocket: seats one, adds thrusters around the perimeter of the car for upward and rotational movement. 0-60 mph in under 0.59 seconds and a top speed of over 230 mph. Invite only.
As an engineer myself, watching the Hagerty interview [0] was an ...interesting experience.
Every time Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering [0] explains the Engineering of the product by stating that they are "breaking the laws of physics", everything he says is losing a bit of credibility...
Cool, but not realistic. This is a prototype, if you have enough money you can build a prototype car that does just about anything. When the car starts shipping the "cool" features will be missing.
FWIW if you’re that concerned about scaring other people out of your way you could just wave a gun around out the driver’s side window. You’d spend less money and get your desired effect.
What is the practical use case of having a bunch of high powered jets all around the car? It could be used to automatically avoid fatal accidents, or at least reduce risk and damage in an accident situation. I thought everybody who watched the presentation video would reach that conclusion.
> SpaceX thinks it knows why its newest Starship spacecraft went boom this week. "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).
you know what happens to you if a jet engine moves your car out of the way? you have the accident inside your car by yourself, you become the accident. physics states that all forces will be equal.
Tesla has lost the battery tech, volume EV manufacturin, and humanoid robotics to China (when trade restrictions don't apply). It's time to hype something different.
This would be a horrible deal for Tesla investors.
Long-term investors would lose about 40% of their investment to subsidize the inflated valuation of X (bought by xAI), the inflated valuation of xAI (bought by SpaceX), and SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
The valuation of both companies was inflated prior to acquisition, and Tesla shareholders will be asked to dilute their investment by absorbing that cumulative inflation.
Not even to mention that Musk would have exclusive control over the entire conglomerate, with not even the pretense of a Board to check his power.
When even Steven Mark Ryan is like "let's pump the breaks a little bit," you know it's bad.
It’s about Elon’s control over these companies. Creating a valuable company with durable revenue that produces products that the market actually wants, with stable governance by a board representing the shareholders of the company? Bah! What am I, a sucker?
He wants control, so that he can use investor’s cash to do epic stuff like humanoid robots, cyber trucks, an AI that tells you that apartheid was actually cool, rocket cars, real life brain controlled robot bacon chungus, etc.
> SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
Well, that and being the only reusable rocket company ever with an even bigger version on the horizon and a global Internet service that's about to get a whole lot better thanks to aforementioned rocket. Both of which are hugely profitable.
You don't know why people value the company and excluding the two very profitable parts of the business in your list is obviously misleading to the point that anyone reading that should be offended that you think they are that stupid.
Their own numbers in the S1 they released before the IPO listed their potential market growth, and it was almost entirely in the AI division. These aren't my numbers, these are Musk's numbers.
“Other shareholder meetings are snoozefests but ours are bangers. Look at this. This is sick.”
Elon’s pay package: he gets 400 million Tesla shares if he raises the market cap of tesla(xspacextwitterxAIx) to $8.5 trillion (nominal). He spent a cool 250 mil on making friends with the republicans, so as to ensure that his incoming epic awesome merger is not blocked.
A merger, plus the amount of inflation this government has already produced over the next decade, will probably see X co hitting Elon’s salary goals.
Yes, let's combine Twitter, an AI company, and a space company with a solar company, car company, battery company, and robotics company, so that we can have one huge valuation that can't be possibly delivered upon and losses will be absorbed for a short period. What could go wrong?
Japanese keiretsu also usually have a bank at their center or have both horizontal and vertical integrations. Where they don't have integration, they at least have financial integration. Whatever Musk is doing is far less cohesive in every way.
The only charitable part of this idea is that it will insulate the stock price from the actual balance sheet. It asks investors not if they want to invest in an EV automaker but in "Elon Musk Inc" essentially. He's been doing some variation of this his whole career, this would just give him the ability to dilute the numbers of each component industry further. The problem is the brand name of Elon Musk is worth a lot less than it was in the 10s.
A payments platform is not a bank. Beyond the services being different and the customers being different (consumers vs businesses), both had to partner with... well a bank, to provide the actual financial services.
Reliance in India basically ran a severe loss for Jio (their new mobile network where they essentially gave the country free mobile internet), but paid for by the profits of their fossil fuel business.
For a while, didn't Amazon do the same? They basically ran a loss with Amazon retail but profits on AWS, until they spun off?
So yes, this is fairly common with conglomerates, (Amazon sold diapers at a loss to put diapers.com out of business). And in fact, this tactic is a target for anti-trust laws where they exist.
I'm pointing out that Japanese companies can do that because they're organized and managed like Japanese companies. Tesla is not, and in fact lacks pretty much all the organizing characteristics and long term planning that enables keiretsu to function.
but... All elon companies. More valuable bundled, because all the elon lovers don't have to pick where they throw their tithes. I'd love it even more if they throw in a tunnel construction and a human brain implant company in the mix while they are at it.
This is the the release of the Roadster introduced 9 years ago. This is what people who put down a deposit (upwards of 250k) back 9 years ago are in line to receive.
Incredible demo but I also have to agree, I will wait for the first Top Gear or Markus Brownlee unsupervised review before believing this project has been achieved.
I”m not going to get into Musk himself. Nor will I get into the artistic absurdity that a moder supercar represents. But I will speak for the hackers amongst us:
The problem with the demo is that it was vapourware. Period, full stop. It is not the car they are selling to us, and they haven't even begun making them. I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown.
Steve Jobs said that "Real artists ship," because the act of shipping is the act of making the incredibly difficult and important decisions that manage the enormous number of constraints that go into the actual product.
If people like concept cars that don't have to actually work or meet a specific price point, fine. It is entertainment, nothing wrong with that. But I am not and will not be impressed until, like Apple, the thing they show on stage is so far along that you can be expected to buy one within weeks, not years.
I am not telling anyone how to judge this. But by my very old-school standards, vapourware sucks.
Doesn't matter if the product is real.
The idea is to cultivate a sense of wonder and adventure.
To get people talking about you.
Then you sell more of the products that are real.
Doesn't matter if the product is real. The idea is to cultivate a sense of hope that the $250,000 deposit should stay where it's at, no matter what people talking about me think of that idea. At least I haven't bought a cyber truck.
Real?! From these circus folks? Their (lack of) sense for reality (practicality, safety) you see in this circus is scary! Same folks and mentality make those other ones too that you are supposed to use!
Concept cars often having been run through either CFD or a wind tunnel and also haven’t been vetted for NHTSA requirements, and both those and coefficient of friction are why cars all start to look alike.
I can’t recall the vehicle now but there was a futuristic car around the turn of the century that had a lot of buzz, but changed dramatically for production and nobody liked it. But an engineer on the project said the concept car had less aerodynamic drag going backward than forward, which is quite an achievement.
That is one of at least a dozen experiences I have had that tell me not to get attached until the prototypes ship to car reviewers for examination.
I've recently come to the conclusion that Musk isn't selling products anymore, he's selling memestocks. He's a master of grabbing attention in an attention economy and it seems to be working out well for him.
This is so spot on. These things work in a bull market and we’ve been in a bull market for arguably 15 years. In a bear market the distortions that were created over the previous years are reversed and usually to an extreme.
It’s somewhat notable that Tesla was up significantly overnight and closed the day down 2%.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a very lengthy period after which people will look back and wonder “what the hell was everyone thinking?”
There are plenty of examples in the world where the one is all that is necessary. It's not like there are more than one Burj Khalifa building in the world. Many people pay for a one off car. There are multiple TV shows based on this very concept.
Just because it's not your hobby or within your budget, doesn't mean that others must feel the same way as you.
Steve wasn't an artist. Did Steve ship a product when Atari asked him to redesign pong into a one player game? No, that was Steve Wozniak. Jobs paid him a cool $350 out of the $5k bonus he got for that. Maybe he was an artist. Con-artist.
Out of curiosity, how do you define flight? To me, I think the Roadster flew because it clearly maintained powered propulsion after leaving the ground. Sure, it only flew for a few seconds, but it's not far from the Wright Bros.' first flight.
I don't think you watched the whole show. The third stunt was taking off from a stop to jump over some vehicles. So it did gain altitude in the air alone.
Well color me corrected. I’d probably quibble that this was a hop/jump the same way humans can jump but not fly, but I don’t have a strong definition at that point to argue for.
I’d need to go deep into something like being able to maintain altitude in the medium of air without positive impulse or something, but again, I don’t have a strong enough definition at this point.
Concept products are not real products. Their purpose is often to make a point, to prove something is possible, to make a brand look cooler, or just to have fun. I don't think I would ever see this car flying on the road myself. But part of me likes the fact that there are people out there making crazy things like this. It is more fun.
I actually think it's impressive that they have a prototype. It's less of a leap to think it could end up getting shipped. Whereas other competitors in the industry like Ferrari (Jony Ive collaboration) are launching cars with renders.
I think the event was a very Elon Musk way to say, we're not making a Roadster. Which makes sense, Tesla is leaning into completely self-driving cars and the Roadster as originally envisioned would be the opposite of that.
> I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown
I am. These machines push the limits of prevailing technology. Strong organizations set stretch goals and pursue them regardless of market viability. Sometimes they share this with everyone, and convention has named this practice "concept" cars. I appreciate when they take the risk to do this. And when they do it well, credit is deserved.
There are real engineers and technicians behind this. A lot of them. And they will tell the story of this event for the rest of their lives. I've known a number of people with such stories. They're among the best people I've ever met.
It is possible to exist without cranking the cynical knob to 11 at all times.
This will not ship with the demonstrated capabilities for reasons discussed elsewhere in these comments. GP isn't calling Tesla a vaporware company. GP is calling this product as demonstrated vaporware.
I don't get it. Musk has an insane track record of shipping things. Well later then he claimed but he usually gets it done. I'm not seeing anyone else leading companies that upended the domination of fossil fueled cars, paved the way for brain implants, build re-usable rockets and create global access to the internet.
"As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine" -- some Reddit comment.
Concepts cars are cars.
What was shown on stage is closer to the Apollo lander training rigs than a vehicle that you could purchase and drive on a public road.
It can never, ever be sold as a production vehicle! The COPV gas storage is under enormous pressure, and would explode with the force of a decent sized bomb if damaged in an accident.
These things would be regularly turning their owners into pink mist, emulating Stockton Rush at a larger scale.
To parrot other people’s claims I would have needed to read them first. So this is my own well informed speculation. I have worked with CO2 thrust and remote controlled cars in my hobby pursuits. This is the simplest way to achieve what was demonstrated.
That wasn't what was demonstrated, so therefore it doesn't exist. With the past dishonest publicity stunts done before, Tesla has earned this extra level of cynicism.
When I saw the headlines “Tesla shows flying car” I got excited, then watched the demo and was thoroughly disappointed. How can anyone write that headline?
Can this be scaled down to a Roomba? Then it would both be more useful at picking stuff up off the floor, and able to recover from falling down the stairs.
Square-cube scaling being what it is, I think it'd be much more reasonable to use propellers (like quadcopters) than try to scale down COPV's to a Vroomba! size. That's actually an interesting product idea. A small flying vacuum cleaner could clean a variety of surfaces; not only floors.
(And you could even mount the charging station on the ceiling, so it doesn't take up floor space).
Much cheaper to make it better at avoiding falling down the stairs (I've had two for years and they have never fallen down stairs). This is about as practical as the idea elsewhere in this topic that the roadster could avoid high speed collisions by boosting out of the way.
Fan cars are pretty old. From that perspective, the driving upside down part is "less impressive" but screw it, still cool.
I want to see it on a track going all out, but something about what they decided to focus on tells me nobody gives a damn about this actually doing anything performance car related.
When you get into an accident with another car, the explosion of that 10 kPSI tank behind your seat. will make sure you are the coffee. You know...Engineering...
On the bright side, we're going to find out if extremely high pressure explosions can put out lithium ion battery fires. I vote no, but it'll likely remove any nearby debris/combustible material/organic matter/pink mist out of the combustion area.
Using suction to create downforce is an idea that’s been built for race track usage in the past (and been successful in F1 in the ‘70s), but the near certainty of mortal injury from the system failing (and thus destabilizing the vehicle at high speed) made it unpopular and its incorporation has been very limited (McLaren and Ariel did versions, I think). I’m confused how this has (or will pass) regulatory approval for road use. Is the idea that the driver should only utilize this on a track?
> I’m confused how this has (or will pass) regulatory approval for road use.
It won't.
And this is also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH. Some cars come with "Donut" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
I think others have used a skirt that needs to extend quite close to the ground to work, so uneven ground can cause sudden loss of suction. Maybe this is solvable somehow?
I'm more worried about the COPVs exploding in a crash, for the thruster version. Hopefully it will keep the tanks empty unless a special launch mode is enabled with a warning siren sounding as long as they're pressurized.
The suction system is interesting. It's possible for it to work on the street but incredibly dumb. The kind of gap you have to keep is millimeters off the ground and your typical streets in the real world have so much damage and inconsistency it's hard to imagine it working for anything but straight line acceleration on a newly paved road. This would be a suicide mission to drive this on Skyline with the expectation to get 2-3g in the bends.
The concerns about debris and so forth are somewhat valid but can be taken care of. Similar to dust collectors for woodworking - this will have a cyclone separator, mesh, and whatnot that will prevent the blades from getting wrecked by a rock. But wouldn't want to tail this thing. It'll be pelting your car.
It'll be another "car goes really fast in a straight line" feature which electric cars have always done well with. While it'd be cool to use the suction system to get incredible g forces in bends - it'll be too dangerous for public roads. You'd immediately fly off the road if you lost any suction and I don't know what public roads (especially in the Bay Area) you could run such a system reliably on.
Please show us the math on wheels and tires and battery and electric motor that would make a car go 0 to 60 in 0.8 seconds and weighs under 500 pounds.
It only has to do it once. Ie it only needs 0.8 seconds of battery. If you think you are looking at a real production car I’ve got a 2017 Tesla roadster to sell you.
If only I had been given fidicuary responsibility for millions of peoples life savings. Then I could build a car that has 0 chance of ever reaching production, just to impress my friends.
Why do car manufacturers brag about hitting 60 mph in 1, 2 or whatever seconds? For a normal person, does this really matter - what is the big deal if a car hits 60 mph in 5 seconds instead of 1? There are more important things like safety, repairability, longevity etc right?
It’s standard measure of acceleration. If you are going to sell a car on performance (like say… a sporty roadster), it’s a great metric.
People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.
That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.
It's just one stat and it makes for a good headline. Obviously those other things are important but they don't exactly fit into a headline. Oh and some people like fast cars. Why is that so confusing?
For the Roadster, it's a supercar. None of those things matter much.
For something like the performance versions of their high-volume vehicles, it's partially for the same reasons people like sports cars, or at least how some people like a sports car that is faster / quicker and gives them more excitement while driving (obviously a lot of the appeal for sports cars otherwise is the sporty look/sound of the engine, which Tesla doesn't really deliver on at all).
As someone who has had a Mercedes AMG that could do 0-60s in less than 4s for a few years, it just gets boring so fast, and it makes you question why you bought the thing in the first place. It's unusable in almost every situation on the road, except for the rare "opportunity" when you stop at traffic lights next to a Golf R and yes turns out you have a bigger.....turbo.....than them. Well done, that 5 second ego boost was really worth all the money and looking like a dick to anyone above the age of 25.
Nowadays as a "petrol head" when I look at stats I want to see weight - as little of it as possible. Horsepower needs to begin with 2, maybe with 3 in some cars, any more than that and it's silly. I want reviewers to say the car puts a smile on their face driving it to work every day, not doing 160mph on the race track. And of course, high speed is "fun" - one of my favourite memories is driving at 158mph past Berlin at 4am - incredible. But the modern obsession with horsepower and 0-60 is...just stupid. Fast 0-60 time does not make for a fun or an engaging car. It just makes it fast.
I'm sure the roads I drive must be different from yours, but when I started driving a Tesla in traffic, it felt like you can just teleport into spaces. The threshold for being able to overtake and pull into traffic without obstructing is so much lower.
Of course, it's also less safe. But the threat of a quick death in a lithium fire is the only reason some of us get up in the morning.
" It's unusable in almost every situation on the road"
Yet it's a useful, comparable, measure for acceleration and is frequently exercised on track. If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it. Image?
Maybe 30-70 would be more useful for determining overtaking capability, but that would require everyone in the motoring industry to agree to change at the same time.
>>If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it.
Oh I have, and it was awesome. But 99% of the time I drove it to work and back, sitting in traffic, thinking to myself I'd much much much rather be in something more comfortable, more quiet, something that isn't using quite so much fuel just sitting there and something that didn't require new tyres every 8000 miles.
Like yes, speed is awesome - fast acceleration is cool. But the obsession with it is destroying the industry - like, it's so clear that a lighter Lamborghini with 400bhp would be a lot more fun to drive than a 2 tonne one with 1000 horsepower, no? Even if the latter does pretty good on the race track. But because everyone only cares about 0-60 times and horsepower we are where we are.
Your just getting old, I mean I agree with u but I'm also old,
Most young boys have the Lamborghini poster on the wall even if it actually sucks to drive, especially the iconic Countach,
I find pure joy in driving my old beetle now, or the past weekend a friends 1957 MGA, horrible safety, tiny engines, zero comforts, not even a radio, just a pure carthat can't even be sold anymore, but there will never be a better driving experience than an proper ancient British roadster.
You answered your own question in your very second sentence. “For a normal person”. The modern economy increasingly does not cater to the “normal person” and they prove this constantly. Granted “normal people” stopped existing a long time ago. You have poor people, soon to be poor people, and people who think they will soon be rich but will really soon be poor. Of course then you have the rest but they are not people.
> Is that a bad thing? Aren't there always a range of products that cater to different levels of interest?
Sure.
I think the poster you are replying to is trying to say that the “k-shaped” economy is incentivizing the market to cater only to the high end and simply ignoring the low end.
A few businesses I own are dealing with this issue now. It’s just much more profitable and logistically easier for them to charge what seems like an absurd price, justify it with some inexpensive “white-glove” service, and just ignore the rest of the market.
On the one hand, this is a tribute to modern marketing that high value-add products and services can match with customers more efficiently. On the other hand, it has the potential to create a bizarre “race to the top” such that only suckers will cater to anything other than the top 1% of their target market (in terms of wealth / willingness and capacity to pay).
Where I currently live, this is happening with frightening efficiency with health care. Almost all of the “good” PCP doctors are going concierge, and the concierge prices are increasing at a rapid clip.
Normal person as in position in economic distribution, not normal as in not quirky or strange. Lots of quirky people all across the spectrum.
But to be clear, in my example products aren’t the only thing to which the economy doesn’t cater to normal people for (lower-middle class but increasingly middle and lower class). War, corruption, and genocide are all bad for the average person. Generally things that funnel money into hurting or enriching individuals. Both of these are inefficient and the inefficient use of resources, is hurtful to normal people. E.g. enriching an oligarch to build roads could be twice as much road if he takes a 50 percent cut. And the money sitting with him does harm, oppresses people. Food for thought.
Not to mention top speed. The US should have a federal or at least NY/CA state law that modern cars be electronically limited to 112 mph, as it is in Japan. There is no valid reason for a street legal passenger car to be travelling faster than that.
That makes sense for Germany, but the US does not have universally good roads or reasonably trained drivers. Many states have no regular vehicle safety inspection. On top of all that, culturally, the US is just very different when it comes to respecting regulation. I have seen germans completely befuddled when they realize that Americans will intentionally ignore laws and regulations. To many Germans it seems like it is almost inconceivable that otherwise respectable people will just not follow rules sometimes.
Speaking for myself I love the quick acceleration of electric cars because it enables you to safely pass other cars quickly on two-lane roads without needing to linger in the oncoming lane.
This is a sports car with a deposit that costs more than an ordinary new car, and with a price that would probably buy you a decent house. Nothing about this is meant for a normal person.
It's one thing they can brag about, you know. Dumbing everything down to a single number, regardless of whether it's meaningful, feels impressive.
The vast majority of LLM users -- not the average person here on HN -- doesn't know which "model" they are using, can't tell the difference and don't care, including many software engineers. You could ask the same thing about those LLM benchmarks.
as with lots of muscles, it's actually the dudes who care about this the most :D get hugely muscular, buy a nice sports car and dudes will absolutely love you.
yup! got a sports bike as well, same experience. actually the biggest fans of my bike are boys between ~3-15 years of age. smiling, pointing at me, telling me to rev or do a wheelie :D
What's so disruptive on these kind of events is, that companies always used to do development for PR-stunts, or to show off their capabilities and vision for the future, but never at this scale of pure engineering investment.
Drawing a parallel, manufacturers presented rollable mobile devices already a decade ago, modular devices with replaceable components, etc. The archives of Nokia and Ericsson (and others) are full with these kinds of products. Car manufacturers did the same. They presented a vision, not a commitment to a product because there is much more to this than just "being able" to build it.
But it was never economically feasible or sensible to do this at SUCH a scale of engineering cost, and presented with the unrelenting confidence of "this will be yours in two years", despite all the fundamental roadblocks still to overcome.
It appears that this is the most disrupting aspect of their presentations: People are not used to being presented a "vision" of such a scale with so little regards for practical execution.
They like the journey they are taken on, and willingly fill all gaps and doubts with "they wouldn't present this if they didn't think of everything already"
That's also true, but I meant to say something different. I am referring to this sheer blindness to the rationality of what's being presented.
This event was like Disney presenting a mass-production rollercoaster you can pre-order for your home, but the general public seems to glance over how utterly irrational this is.
So far companies did alot of fundamental due diligence before making such an announcement (and the prior R&D investment!), because the consequences could be fatal.
The average consumer apparently still assumes that this due diligence phase was passed, thinking it's impossible that a known company presents something that big it cannot deliver on...
It's a cool demonstration, I'll give them that. From what I've seen online, people don't even seem to consider whether or not they would actually want this, just because the novelty of it.
I'd even ignore that and call it good marketing, if that's what they would actually try to sell here - but you need some kind of special invitation access to even get those, while they use this demonstration to boost the pre-orders for a car without the features everyone is talking about (or at least trying to, we'll see how many will actually go for it).
Yeah, that's what I meant. The gap between what's presented as ready-to-order and the actual practical feasibility of the product is so big, it wows people because they are still accustomed to presentations of actually consumable products.
And also your point: It is a company presenting a jet-pack to actually sell a premium back-pack under the same name.
They invested in the engineering of 1-10 jet-packs, to sell 200-2000 backpacks...
The demonstrations seems to be very specific, it probably can't do anything more than fall to the ground. The practicality of actual levitating the car may out of reach.
Everyone calls it a "flying car" the idea is planted in people's mind and they let people's imagination or credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
I agree this is more of a "jumping car" than anywhere near an actual "flying car". My main issue with both is that if ground based cars have an issue, for example an engine failure, in most cases you can still get the car to safely stop at the side of the road. If you're flying, that's a very different story.
Even if we would accept the premise that flying cars will be the norm at some point, I'm not sure what people imagine that would do for them. Technically you could solve traffic jams to some degree, but still not entirely because I can't imagine that at any point flying cars would mean that you just fly wherever you want. It would give us multilayered traffic, which is cool to reduce traffic jams, but does it really do anything else?
But prior to any of that, I'm fascinated by how irrational it is to think that this jumping car is even remotely feasible to participate in any kind of traffic.
That's why I assume that the general public expects that Tesla has already solved all these problems, as they otherwise wouldn't announce such a product.
In reality, we apparently have entered times where they could present a teleporting machine and start a 200k USD pre-order with little to no public scrutiny.
It's pretty cool that someone finally replicated the turbo boost jump function that K.I.T.T. had. Imagine having the boosters to avoid head on collision at 100km/h.
Apart from the supercar aspirational enthusiasts and the usual inspiration of innovation with concept cars give, I'm thinking of other audiences for this product. What's the actual future of this?
Ask yourself who would see the benefit of a vehicle that can jump over obstacles, other dangers or other cars?
Obstacles including barricades, flooded roads, tank traps, rivers, fences and burning cars. Dangers might include IEDs, mines, destroyed bridges, barbed wire, stinger strips, active munitions being fired at it, etc.
Even without such dangers, jumping over moving cars would be useful in pursuits where getting in front of a target gives an advantage.
And the extra mobility would be useful in humanitarian and disaster applications where getting to and from those in need in a timely fashion may save lives.
This is probably just to hype up the stock. The stock is down 5% (5 days), up 1% (1 month), down ~7% (6 months), down ~20% YTD, down ~16% (1 year). It has a PE of 336 and dwindling YOY sales. Tesla’s U.S. vehicle sales fell approximately 14% to 20% year-over-year through the first three quarters of 2026. Rest of the world, Tesla is not competitive and will probably go down rapidly soon.
This Tesla event was apparently performed in front of a live audience. Yes I'm sure there's a hype strategy here but equating this with the Nikola scam is a stretch.
Also Tesla events rarely (if ever) get followed by a durable stock bump.
--
Edit: Credible independent videos have been released on YouTube by reputable people. There's no doubt that the spectacle did happen as shown by Tesla. That's not to say it's anything more than a carefully staged spectacle, but claims that it's fake or AI or CGI are absolutely debunked.
I'm not saying it was a production-ready car, but the notion of it being styrofoam is stupid. These demos are as much for the morale of the engineers as they are for the entertainment of the public. Tesla doesn't need to demonstrate a rocket car.
They need to get their sales up (lots of folks like me won’t buy one now because Elon sucks) but your reasoning I largely disagree with. We don’t have a fuel crises in the US for example. And Chinese EVs won’t be able to gain too strong of a foothold in American or European markets because neither market will permit their domestic industries to collapse due to Chinese state subsidies and industrial overcapacity.
Even if Chinese EVs can't make it into the American market in numbers it's a pretty clear signal that Tesla models are vastly overpriced for their functionality. The subsidies have spurred innovation and do continue to artificially depress the price of vehicles, but the value you're getting for a dollar in Chinese EVs far outshines Tesla without any of the weird built-in design annoyances needing to be present like the door handles or terrible dashboard UX.
Tesla will continue to rule the US for the next two years due to the admin but the Euro and Canadian markets are likely going to continue to close to them. It might be that home-grown competitors will step up to the plate or maybe they'll open their doors to Chinese exports - it's hard to say. So while it's hard to identify a winner, the loser is clearly Tesla.
They have a long history of promising bad dates for future releases, or of exaggerating the capabilities of their ""FSD"", but they haven't rolled cars down hills or built them from styrofoam.
They demoed a non-working demo of solar roof that was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for normal tiles with huge fanfare which turned out to be utterly impractical in real world usage and later quietly killed entirely.
Ok? They’ve still largely delivered products even if the timing has been way off. I am a huge critic of Elon Musk and won’t buy another Tesla but they clearly build cars and products that work and hit consumer markets.
It’s dangerous for you to let your dislike of someone or some company to cloud your judgement like this. You know other companies have launched failed products too, right?
Yes, completely unbeleivable. I mainly think this because SpaceX has committed said engineers to delivering unfeasable amounts of payload to LEO/ISS, etc. Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".
That is of course very very far away from reality (though, progressing to a feasable program faster than any space observers predicted.)
THat, combined with Elon signaling to investors/market that tesla no longer produces cars.....it's hard to imagine the company splitting their very, very , very over-commited engineers to a flying car. At least, they aren't commiting the point that this will be a consumer-market car, or even a halo car.
> Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".
Given that they have largely relied on reusability rather than strongly ramping up production of boosters for Falcon 9, and given that they have performed 3 launches in a single day, one launch per day is clearly achievable without any further advances, and without even using Starship.
To be clear, the stated goal for Starship is one launch per hour throughout the year, which would still be a tiny number compared to, say, airline flights, but quite impressive for orbital flight.
No contradiction between "more than everyone else combined" and "it is unfeasable to launch 36,500 metric tons per year compared to the about-2,500 tons in the last 12 months".
Especially as the working launch vehicle is getting retired and the replacement has only had one circularized orbit, and is currently behind the development pace set by the Saturn V, N1, and even the Space Shuttle.
That is just a one OOM scaling. It's not that difficult, especially considering that Starship just delivered the 3rd largest payload ever launched and it wasn't even at capacity.
Unbelievable? No. A company already caught lying multiple times in big fashion to whole world, never delivering FSD yet cashing in tons of money for it, plus rather mentally unstable owner to keep it polite?
It’s both true that Elon lies and overpromises damn near everything, and that Tesla has the best self driving related features available in the US that a normal person can buy and use.
I think “a fan or 2” is underselling the technology here. It’s not about the weight of the car but the force that the atmosphere presses on its surface area. This is well-established physics that has been demonstrated by others so I don’t know why you’re questioning this and not some of the wilder parts like the flying.
Just be aware you're moving from the territory of reasonable questions to moderately desperate conspiracy theory. Whatever it is we saw, it's clearly not lightweight. That much is obvious from the kinetics.
Well it didn’t have a driver and you can’t see the size of the battery, impressive nonetheless and in the end it’s not like it matters since it has no practical application outside a circus (the flying)
If you think "company might have faked public demo in some important way" is a "conspiracy theory", your conspiracy theory sensor is badly miscalibrated and desperately needs a tune up. Your default presumption should be that a demo is faked to at least some extent because most of them are. If I don't hear an explicit declaration that this is real and live and working exactly the same on stage as it will be for the consumer I assume it isn't. And even some of those declarations have been shown to be false over the years, a particularly popular one being "this is real game footage on the real hardware" except it's actually a developer box with a lot more power than the console in question.
What you just relayed is another misleading claim purveyed by obsessives. Cybertruck is not a true exoskeleton design, but neither are the steel plates decorative. It is a hybrid -- the unibody shell carries some minimal structural load, but it's not sufficient on its own. The exterior skin is structurally necessary for torsional rigidity and contributes meaningfully to the overall chassis strength.
All major exterior panels are welded and/or bolted on. On the earliest revisions, the thin upper door trim strips were bonded using a bad structural adhesive which became brittle with temperature cycling. These were recalled and remedied with a different structural adhesive plus a welded stud. Such recalls are very common; the current generation Ford Explorer had multiple recalls for exterior panels falling off.
What's misleading? You just said it's not a steel exoskeleton, and that the panels were glued on. If your point is that a true exoskeleton isn't needed for sufficient rigidity and strength, sure, fine, but you should make that claim and point out why it's misleading, all you've said is that the claim is correct, but that other cars are made similarly.
A car company that as a long history of making false claims?
I agree: one of us is delusional. I think we disagree about whom.
But hey, you're right. If it's not styrofoam I'm sure we'll see proof of that very soon now. Like a person riding in it. Or it out where someone can actually touch it. Try to lift it.
I was never quite sure if that was a deliberate ploy. The demonstration showed that it quite possibly had enough strength to stop a bullet (it would just smash).
The failure of the demonstration got vastly more coverage than if it would have if the, um rock?, just hit the window, went donk and fell down. If your goal was to communicate to the maximum number of people that you had put bulletproof glass in your cars, it would be quite a reasonable tactic.
Not to disagree that this Tesla event took place, but there was also a "Nikola World" event in 2019 where Nikola presented its product to an audience of 1000+ people.
It's surely not AI, but so far it is little more than all these Jetpack demonstrations of the past decade...
They're not afraid of doing tricks in front of live audience either. Look at the battery swap event. No camera placed anywhere near where the "swap" was happening for a few minutes. Then the car drove off Wow! Amazing! And they never talked about battery swap again
They got about $300 million in extra regularory credits for that demo. The government shut the loophole in 2014 after it became obvious Tesla was faking it and no real Tesla drivers were benefiting.
All car manufacturers demo "concept" cars that are real and work(for most parts) but mass production with reasonable price is just not worth it, in this case there is legal challenges too.
I suspect this is going to be a Cybertruck/Boring Company situation, where we may get something ostensibly called the same and may even do something one could consider similar when squinting (maybe a bit higher than U9 jumps in scope) but with the specs and implementation differing so greatly that it shouldn't be considered the same. Exoskeleton vs body panels, 200kph+ on electric sleds vs Teslas (driven by human operators; tells you how much they trust their FSD tech) in a tiny tunnel, FSD on HW3 vs an upgrade maybe someday, etc.
And inevitably two groups will clash, one pointing out how much this deviated from the original, often decade long promises vs another pointing at the identical naming, how it's still a product they like and of course the all time winner "I don't see you do X"...
For what it's worth, I'd file this as a RCS demo for SpaceXGrokSI (or whatever they call themselves this week) above all else and if I were a betting man, might be a prelude to fusing them into SpaceXSuperXTeslaXIntelligenceX...
I used to feel the same way, namely that the tunnel driving would be the signal that unsupervised driving was ready to go. But now that I see their geofenced robotaxis in operation I sort of get it now. Those things do well at driving autonomously, but there are edge cases where the car's safety response is to essentially shut down and wait for human intervention rather than risk uncertainty. That's not something you want happening when you have a single lane of traffic with no passing, leading to a situation where every car in the chain is now forced to deal with the situation in unison. Humans can figure that out pretty quickly, but training the cars to do it will take time. I do expect autonomous tunnel rides any day now, but I can see why they weren't the first use case for autonomous vehicles.
FYI the dawn project was debunked as crackpot scammers who had their feet on the accelerator pedal to fake an "FSD crash", along with a slew of other underhanded and misleading tricks.
Don't forget that the leader of Dawn Project has financial conflicts of interest:
His software company, named Green Hills, supplies the RTOS for Mobileye, which formerly supplied driver-assistance hardware and software to Tesla (and continues to do so for other car companies). Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
So he has a very real financial incentive to convince the world that Tesla's system is bad.
> Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla wouldn't stop using their tech in ways they did not approve of, turning back all the safety limits to allow the public to do things Mobileye knew were unsafe. Mobileye publicly called them out, saying that Tesla was "going to hurt the interests of [Mobileye] and hurt the interests of an entire industry, if a company of our reputation will continue to be associated with this type of pushing the envelope in terms of safety".
This is one of the reasons why S/X ADAS performance famously got significantly worse in late 2016 with HW2, they had of course been working on their own tech but because they'd already built their brand around ADAS they felt compelled to put it out unfinished when they no longer had the Mobileye system to sell.
Does that invalidate their examples? "Did they fake it or not" is a falsifiable claim that can be inspected regardless of personal incentives.
Also I feel like it should be said that anyone who doesn't like fascism and Nazi salutes should be a critic of Tesla, and if you aren't, that speaks volumes.
Yeah no, something is very off on this and I cannot put my finger on it, the video looks odd to me. I want to say AIgen feel, but I only saw little tiny vids, rest were blurry as sin.
Makes sense though. First time I saw video of two falcon rockets doing a synchronized landing I felt the exact same way. Our brain is used to this type of stuff in movies and we know it's CGI. So when it happens for real and is filmed in 4K and a cinematic color scheme is added, it's hard for the brain to adapt.
I wonder if Musk is entering the brain rot phase, and Tesla will decline from now on. After all, this is something Tesla doesn't need, a second dud after the Cybertruck. I'm sure the decline will take some time though.
There is a huge canyon between launching a car into space for fun (test, actually, dead weight) and having a web page where you can type in your card details to pay advance on your own purely marketing purpose circus car. You really don't see the difference? Of course, calling an impractical technical circus engineering is revealing.
I’d categorize it as ballistic flight. While it was able to control its pitch, yaw, and roll in midair, it did not have sufficient upward propulsive thrust to balance out or exceed the force of gravity while airborne. So it wasn’t the propulsive kind of flight, where altitude can be readily adjusted in the sense that we would expect from an “flying car”.
And let’s keep in mind this is 100% vaporware; the cars sold to actual buyers may differ significantly in their design and capabilities from what was demonstrated here. It is possible that the COPVs in the car on display took up the entire passenger compartment.
I have to admit that the only thing I give Elon the title of “Genius” for is his ways of putting on shows to launder more money or get larger loans… this economy is a circus.
I agree. I remember as a kid getting so excited for Detroit concept cars that never hit the market. Now, unless something is actually for sale, I basically ignore it.
The fact that the one that can fly is invite-only makes me wonder if there would be ITAR issues with the guidance mechanisms that they have to put into it.
I'm not saying that there aren't lower hanging fruit reasons why they wouldn't make more of those, but you can see how the guidance necessary to make this move the way that it does could be dual use.
I suspect it's more because some rando could actually try to use it in public space. The invite only means they could send it to people who will give them good PR, are known not to be idiots, and can be invited to sign many responsibility disclaimers.
That makes a ton of sense, yes! To be honest, I was wondering less about their reasons for invite-only and more about whether this kind of gentle and precise guidance with cold gas thrusters might hit ITAR.
Amazing tech demo. I would have liked to see more discussion of the cold-gas thrusters in the earlier Hacker News article. Some people seemed confused and made claims that the demo was a separate "rocket" version that used a combustion technology.
Well it is a separate rocket version, it just doesn't take jet fuel. "Invite only" for the rocket version means probably less than 5 will ever be made, if that.
I strongly suspect that the invite-only version is the tech that was described in the demo, and differs from the $250K version by the size of the air tank and compression motor.
A rocket engine doesn't require combustion, it just requires expelling a gas to produce thrust, and that the engine not be air breathing. Most rocket engines use combustion to produce the high speed gases, but there are plenty that don't (water rockets, steam rockets, plasma rockets, and... cold gas thrusters as demonstrated by Tesla)
I doubt it is actual air. When compressing gas to 10,000+ psi and then running it through a rocket motor, clean/dry nitrogen is the way to go. Normal air has moisture, which can form ice, and oxygen which gets extremely reactive when heated.
And many a rocket scientist would be insulted by the comparison of a nozzled rocket motor to the simple pipe of an air rifle.
Is this cool? It seems like a typical Elon Musk thing some teenager might like, similar to a monster truck rally mixed with heavy dose of financial fraud.
Comments: Expectations set, expectations unmet. Fits a notable pattern by Musk of over promising and under delivering. In this age of misinformation, it's perhaps more painful than it could be if it were simply an amusing quirk of an eccentric billionaire.
And, speculation by Chris Norland YouTuber is the Roadster being fitted with literal rocket boosters is a portion of an argument to help justify SpaceX financially helping Tesla.
How dare people get excited by one of the coolest demos we've ever seen. These sort of comment are ironically almost entirely politically driven while also claiming anyone who disagrees is a secret Russian bot account.
It’s not one of the coolest demos. The iPhone was a cool demo. I could see how I would use it every day and it would bring value to my life. This looks more like bravado
Yeah, if this was from a monster truck show, I’d think it was sick as hell. But context matters and this is essentially an ad, which inspires more scrutiny and cynicism.
Production and other realities aside, I've seen some cool shit in my life and this demo is high up there! Did you guys catch 0.5 mach target top speed? That's 600kmh. It'd better do that flying because there probably aren't any rubber tyres that could endure that before exploding within seconds.
BYD has made the more practical cousin of this, and you can actually buy it. They have a car which jumps over potholes automatically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIKAn8yDkpA
Just don't press the button where you have wires over the road... or anything hanging over the road... like signs...Don't press the button when you are about to go into a tunnel... or inside the tunnel... Also, check your passengers have finished their shakes, coffee, and other liquids...
One interesting idea for this technology is to prevent accidents. Imagine you are about to get hit head-on by a drunk driver. If only you had a set of thrusters to lift your car at the last second. So basically use this a crash collision avoidance "before" your airbag has to go off.
It's a numbers game. As much time as Waymo had been on the road, it has not been long enough to hit a "drunk driver running red light" situation. It'll happen eventually.
If Waymo hasn't done enough miles for this to happen then it is a statistically insignificant event. They're on pace to do 20 million trips this year alone.
Assuming this never really ships (ahem), this is basically an upper-tier "YouTuber engineer" stunt video with a NASDAQ symbol attached. And the results there seem to suggest that Musk's marketing schtick is wearing a bit thin...
Anyone know the physics of mach diamonds purely from compressed gas? I'm not a physicist, but I thought one of the key aspects of compressed gas is that it can't expand faster than the speed of sound in that gas -- the speed of sound is literally the limit to how fast it can expand?
Gas expanding faster than the speed of sound is called a shockwave - and the Mach diamonds are essentially the expanding gas shockwave “bouncing” back and forth as it hits the atmosphere, forming a standing wave of high and low compression zones.
I genuinely didn't believe they'd ever do more than use cold gas thrusters for a lame boost effect, if at all. Happy to admit I was wrong, that was cool.
I can't wait for them to never actually produce this or, if I'm wrong and they do, I can't wait for someone to seriously injure themselves or someone else.
I guess that puts the final nail in the coffin of the 2019 Roadster that was announced but never arrived. Shame, because I loved how it looked. Some of its aesthetic lives on in the Highland Model 3 at least.
I thought so at first but then Musk mentioned the thrusters can recharge themselves with pumps in the car. So it will actually be something owners can use repeatedly without needing complicated refills from Tesla service.
Not that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.
But where would you (be allowed to) use that and risk wrecking your car and life? They weren’t confident to put a person in either. I guess it’s for shows only, the reservation page says invitation only. It’s definitely impressive but it will probably stay a marketing tool.
I wonder whether they will actually be able to recharge to that pressure level in a production car. I kind of doubt it, plus it will be noisy, consume a ton of energy and take a long time.
Not to mention the mass. Perhaps the pressure vessels could be relatively lightweight, but a pump that could charge such a pressure vessel to the pressure and capacity needed for this type of stunt will not be lightweight.
And mass is one of the top engineering concerns for these types of performance vehicles, even those which do not need to fight gravity.
The Brabham was withdrawn after one race because it sprayed debris at following cars. I the thrusters used for better cornering also might push a car being overtaken just enough to get it off track. Even for track-only this won't fly. Not to mention blasting pedestrians.
As Elon intermingles the company how are investors compensated fairly for this. What does Telsa pay SpaceX for the technology and is there a conflict of interest?
honestly both companies are getting good exposure here for relatively low lift on behalf of space-x team (it's a compressed air tank, nozzles and actuator valves).
They first started taking deposits on the Roadster 9 years ago in 2017 with a 2020 production date. It’ll be shocking if they ever sell this car they showed today. If they do, it’ll be many years late, not fly, and cost twice what they are saying. Just like the CyberTruck.
This car shouldn't be considered just a car. From now on, automotive technology will be used in completely different ways. For example, off-road jeeps may no longer need to cross water.
Been a while since I was impressed with a tech presentation. I was waiting for a clear case of AI assisted movement ( though I personally expected to see it for the first time in a military chopper ).
**
Side note, as I was looking for the right stream, youtube gave me a link to a different deep fake 'Musk' stream where he extolled virtues of sending him money ( https://roadster-tesla.com/#participate ). Everything has changed man. I am sure the scammer actually got some people.
Once was enough for me. The redbull stunts are way cooler. Check out Ken Blocks videos. Its an actual driver in an actual car. Not a plastic hull with 20 year old compressed air can technology attached to it pretending to be an actual product that will ever be made.
The reality of EVs is that they all provide more or less identical driving experience - immense amounts of speed in straight lines and pure control around corners. But you can't really make something nimble or chuckable when it weighs 1.5 tons.
(Calling it a "roadster" is cute, but this has nothing in common with a Boxster or Miata. If anything, the ICE analogue would be muscle cars.)
Because there are no real unique driving characteristics, the only engineering you can compete with is raw speed or price. That and crazy gimmicks.
You should go look up the weight of a 911, Boxter, or Miata. And then, I suspect, you will not return here to reply to this comment. You'll invent some other reason why EVs can't be "nimble" or whatever, because it can't be your worldview that's wrong, it has to be the world.
Have you actually taken any of these cars along a twisty country road? They are not at all similar.
911 is not really a roadster - it's a full on sports car. Even then the older ones top out at about a ton. Same as the Boxster and Miata.
Most serious sports EVs start at 2 tons or more. It's really impressive what they can do to hide the weight, but because it's all digitally controlled, it's really not a dynamic driving experience in the same way.
More importantly to my point - all of them have nearly identical drive characteristics. Outside of raw performance, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe the difference in handling between a Tesla, Mach-E, or a Polestar - I'm not sure I could give you anything.
This thing is covered in cold gas thrusters, I'm betting it can go around a corner faster than almost any other car. The limitation might be G forces on the driver. Maximum performance may only be achievable in self driving mode.
Are you referring to the Tesla Roadster? Because, if not, I am pretty sure that most EVs, except for maybe small compact EV cars, usually weights 2 tons or more.
tesla roadster weights 1.6-1.7 tons, thats prob without compressed air. But common, if you buy a rocket car, that is capable to suck itself to the road, you will not care about this extra 300-400 kg of weight, that probably will be compensated by perfect low center of gravity and several motors.
As Doug DeMuro would say, this is a “rich guy go fast” car.
Is it going to be fun and engaging to drive? Absolutely not. It doesn’t even have a steering wheel.
Finally, a vehicle that’s perfect for the CEO in your life who wants to upload his brain to a data center powered by the body heat of his employees hooked up to the pods from The Matrix.
It has a steering yoke. F1 cars also have a steering yoke. Are F1 cars not fun and engaging to drive?
It also has steer-by-wire which makes the steering yoke practical as they can tweak the steering ratio to prevent the need to go hand-over-hand. As they did for the Cybertruck.
Driving an F1 car is fun in the same way that cycling in the Tour de France is fun. Everything about that experience is purely for function and competition.
I think Louis Hamilton has a lot more fun in his Ferrari F40 than in his F1 car.
This is a showpiece at this point. but I can see these on the roads in ~10 years; but it felt more like a frog car than a flying car? in my mind flying quadcopters felt much safer in videos than this frog. It feels overly complicated based on what i have read; rocket boosters?? why? quadcopters and other flying taxis seem much more economical and using tech that's been reliable for at least last 20 years.
Elon should read Anti-Grav Unlimited. It's a good book, actually a very good book. We want that tech. Time to invent the antigravity rods. AI is here, sorry, SuperIntelligence is here, AGI is on the doorstep, just ask the SOTA models to figure it out.
Also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
Cars seem so full of gimmicky features these days. A friend's car yesterday stopped us when exiting because it thought we left behind belongings in the back seat - it was just an empty package. That was not something I would have ever thought a car would flag. It's not that fancy of a car (entry level SUV) but it is fairly new, it just kind of bothered me.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
The back seat thing is probably the things cars have been adding to try to combat those freak memory accidents when parents forgot to drop the baby off at daycare and left them in the car in the sun all day with disastrous consequences.
Good point, I don't have a kid and would have never thought of that as something that system was hedging against. I'm not sure it changes my mind overall (I think also this particular implementation was still rather clumsy) but it does at least make that feature far more defensible in theory.
I don't think this is true: drag increases with the square of velocity, so that's close to double the drag from 150 to 200, and I believe somewhere above 60/70 mph, aerodynamic drag starts to overtake road resistance as the main friction source, i.e. it takes significantly more horsepower to be able to do 200 than 150.
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
Tyres also throw stones and dirt at cars behind, sometimes with remarkable force. But you're right, road debris is a serious question here. I can only imagine that this is so obvious that it cannot have been overlooked.
Surely the intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
List of cars I know to go over 90MPH. Supposedly. 2000 Dodge Neon with 800 pounds of man in it and only 3 out of 4 cylinders functional. 2004 Toyota Camry with broken O2 sensors, and it loves it. Anything by VW. Pretty much anything parked in your local highschool.
Most modern cars can hit 90 MPH with ease, that's what modern aero and 145HP being "underpowered" means! Supposedly cars are electronically hard limited to 115mph and I have never been able to confirm that in practice
Of course, this implies that you might be able to own some of these features, with the actual crime being using them. Like that Beetle with a helicopter jet turbine.
It's an awesome performance, but I don't know why you'd want this in your actual day to day car and pay a premium for it, all power to you if you do but I wouldn't call not sharing that preference 'poo pooing the incredible tech'.
The one with the actual rocket engine is not being sold to the public and Tesla website explicitly states it's not legal to drive it on public roads. It's mostly just a cool demo/prototype and I'm sure there will be privately run tracks that let people drive one.
The generally available car will have cold-gas thrusters which boost acceleration but is nothing like what was demo'd.
And it's sure going to increase the blast radius when these get into a collision. Even if you can't fire the thrusters, that pressurized tank can't be safe.
Teslas already have very strict (annoyingly strict) gating keeping specific functionality off of public roads (Summon). The drag mode thruster-assisted boost will probably leverage that. I also imagine that cameras on the car would stop it from being engaged if it detects humans in its firing area even when not on public roads.
The flying trim will never be sold to general consumers. Even the rear-thruster trim is currently listed at a $250,000 pre-order fee, which is a deposit for a fraction of the full cost of the car. Final cost will be over $1M. Any of the thruster variants will be extremely rare; like, the one guy in your city that has one will show it off at car shows twice a year, McLaren P1, level of rare.
Yeah they'll make a few dozen of them and sell them to people like Joe Rogan. There is zero chance that any individual who doesn't have the personal phone number of a Tesla leadership team member will be able to buy one of these.
I watched the ~16 minute presentation on YouTube and it was as if Elon and the two other guys presenting were doing a skit at a talent show. They seemed extremely unprepared. Maybe they were intentionally trying to come across as off the cuff, but it felt unnatural and cringey. Together they have the charisma of a paper clip. These guys are so full of themselves that it’s difficult to appreciate whatever accomplishment this may or may not be. And, of course, no
way it will be street legal with air thrusters. What a complete joke.
When presenting the world with a flying car, one doesn't need much extra charisma, the demo does it all. I think most people would be pretty excited (or full of themselves) knowing what they were about to show.
Tesla presentations (and Musk presentations generally) have always been weirdly awkward.
As an engineer who dislikes polished presentations of unimpressive things, it encourages me that it’s still possible to do a bad presentation about an amazing thing and (most) people don’t grumble too much.
I don't know why - they said there was a significant chance of failure, they have quite mature technology for it to be driverless. What's the point of putting a meat puppet in there?
The inspiration from the F35 seems to be quite literal. Spent a lot of time and money making vertical takeoff happen, but forgot to give the vehicle any useful capability once it's actually in the air.
Can't wait for these things to endanger my family's life on some Colorado mountain highways. If the suction works at speed, people are gonna drive even more recklessly.
You did say "consumer tech" - so you're probablt aware of the BT-46. But this has been done a few times before... though it's probably more dangerous than ever with up to 1MW (1000kW) output from electric motors. Some of these were actually sold afair.
I'm not sure about those thrusters though, I doubt they'd be legal?
No advance. Its engineering gimmicks to hide the fact self driving is 15 years late, and all recently announced Tesla models are worst, and more expensive, than any Chinese alternative.
The jumping car used a 600L canister of 10 kPSI compressed air behind the seats. Musk claimed the car will be able to refill the canister itself, but he didn't demonstrate that. In reality, the size of a multistage compressor to reach those pressures and the heat dissipation for compressing that much air to 680 atmospheres makes that impractical and would use several times more energy than the batteries store. You would have to get filled up at whatever specialized system they used for the demo. The weight of the compressed air in that canister alone is over 750 pounds. It's a fun one-off trick, but I wouldn't worry about this showing up on an actual public road.
Which may have been tailored for the demo - for example, put a very small battery pack in there, so that the weight is much lower than the weight of the actual car would be - it only needs to drive a few meters, doesn't it?
Based on the record of Musk & co straight out LYING in such events (remember Solarcity?), I am very confident in saying that a large portion of what they demonstrated they have not actually solved how to fit in a real production car.
Tesla did it to themselves. They have a long history of claiming stuff and never actually delivering. Or delivering a washed down version that never makes commercial difference.
Unfortunately, it's impossible for us to verify what parts of the demo are 'realistic'. Did they use assisting technologies (e.g. a wire rig)? Is anything repeatable, or are the components one-and-done?
The software industry has taught me how sneaky a demo can be ;). That's without considering Tesla's history of bonkers claims and sus demos (anyone else remember the bulletproof windows?).
Edit: Removed a rhetorical question about the demo. Apparently there was a live audience, so they couldn't have just made a very tiny Roadster haha.
I'd really like to understand how you think a wire rig could support the flipping in mid air and stuff; that would be some great engineering. How do you imagine that would work?
Pinned at the front and back on a rotating axis down the centreline of the car, with the "car" itself being mostly lightweight composite with zero internal components other than the necessary air tanks and a large RC car motor to get it to roll up to the jump point? For the support structure, just put some dark matte scaffolding in the background so it stays out of shot and hidden by the light show. It wouldn't be too far off from standard wirework for movie stunts, and the compressed air could still do enough work to fool the eye. It's not like people have an innate sense for what a gas thruster powered flying car should look like anyway.
I don’t think that would work here where you have to support a 170 degree y axis rotation and then a 180 degree x axis rotation with a wall on one side. I think it would work for the jumping the semi demo though!
I wouldn't say the bulletproof window demo was "sus" - that was just a Windows-crashing-during-the-demo screwup. They didn't fake the stress test on stage :)
This is a tech demo until it actually ships. Actual engineering requires things like cost effectiveness, reliability, and reparability that are yet to be seen.
It’s not like this is the first time that Elon has overpromised and underdelivered.
It is incredible engineering and also a enormous waste of effort by a car company that seems to have stopped caring about releasing cars for the mass market.
The video goes against my intuition for how much performance you can get out of cold gas thrusters. I wonder if someone could do some back of the envelope maths on how much thrust and impulse you can get from a setup like this?
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
Based on the statement that the suction fan generates 2g of downforce, and the telemetry showing the fan operating at 4,700 kg @ ~95% load, the Tesla Roadster weighs approximately 2,300 to 2,500 kg.
Back in the days we used to call these kind of demo cars as concept cars which rarely see the markete. But Kudos to Elon Musk who single handedly running entire Tesla's marketing compaign and keep its stocks and markete value higher than the next 10 car brands combined. Tesla Robots, Robotaxies and now Roadster, these are R&D and concept projects.
It’s cool, I’d love this if I had the money to afford it. Maybe in a decade, it will be more practical and have more legitimate use cases, I’m not sure!
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
Why Musk would spend probably tens of millions of dollars on this prototype which clearly will never be drivable on roads. One explanation is he is a trillionaire and the 14 year old in him thinks it would simply be cool to do it.
I think there is a more rational explanation. Tesla sales have slowed, other companies are catching up, and if it weren't for import issues, Chinese cars would be eating Tesla's breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yet Tesla is trading at a 330 P/E and Musk has to do something to make it seem like Tesla is still light-years ahead of everyone else and just wait, that 330 P/E will be justified any quarter now. Just like shooting a roadster into deep space was just a PR stunt, this is a PR stunt to boost the brand with no actual market relevance.
Absolutely, but an even more likely explanation is that he's going to "acquire" Tesla with Space X and pay a premium (on top of the 330 P/E!). The SEC in this country is completely useless. Sure you can't invest in private companies if you're not an "accredited investor" but Musk is free to scam trillions of dollars.
A though for the people doing the "boring" engineering at Tesla (like, you know, enhancing the range of the vehicles, improving security, making FSD closer to reality, etc...), who used to get some light (remember "battery day" ?), and are now on the backbench while the sycophants gets the budget for vanity projects like this. At least, at Tesla, the sycophants are _smart_ and pull out cool demos. Not the case in every "new clothes" kingdom.
I don't know the practicality of this car, or if the production version will have these thrusters, but the demo was epic. It tickled my childhood dream of working with mechanical stuff.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
I've been recently playing a game called Approximately Up. You start from simple building blocks, thrusters and can use the in game logic system to build complex controls. One of the things I came about to learn was something to make a hover system for my ship was a simple PID controller. The side and bottom firing thrusters just remind me of my ship in the game. While the game is oversimplified and a bit arcadey, does anyone know what actually goes into this in the real life and is the huge feat the improvement on the weight of the whole car?
I was making my way on my rented scooter to drone bomb the Bezos BrainVat R&D center when the new model Roadster suddenly swooped over me in a mighty roar of liberated gas. Oh no, I thought! My mission is in jeopardy... but this is unparalleled quality content for the livestream viewers. I could see the Roadster's laser assembly lazily begin to track me, as if controlled by a joystick. A human pilot! Probably some one percenter out on a pleb hunt. The fool thought that I was unarmed. Heroically, I banked the scooter in a sharp turn while the machine gun on its back acquired the target, multiplying matrices furiously on its ancient low-fi GPU. As flames began to pour from the flying vehicle, I angled the scooter around a corner, timing it so that my black outfit would blur into the Apple ad projected on the side of the building. The Roadster's pilot was leaning out of the window screaming in rage and fear as his machine began a fiery descent toward the city shelter for abandoned kittens. I was torn between feeling bad for the kittens and giving in to the dopamine surge in my cortex as my viewer count climbed toward the stratosphere.
This sounds more or less like the car my 5 year old son dreamed up a few months back: "Dad, dad! What if we put a bunch of rocket thrusters on the bottom of an electric car? We could even add a really powerful fan as well. And then the car could just hover past traffic jams, and it could even drive along walls or upside down if you put the fans in reverse!".
I'll be listening even more closely to his ideas from now on, even when they defy the "common sense filter" we adults tend to have.
The real feat would be to actually ship the gas-equipped models. The on-stage demonstration was certainly quite impressive but handling real world terrain is a whole different story. Not to mention compensating for drivers who will skew lead-footed without any experience of handling a third dimension.
I am skeptical that this feature will prove to be much more than a publicity stunt, especially since the availability of these models will be so limited.
The suction and air recovery part might be forward thinking for how we design roads or tunnels. They might not all need to be flat. Especially when autonomous.
Definitely not upside down, I was thinking of short inclines, possible as a sort of tunnel bypass. Assuming all the cars are networked for mechanical failures and the batteries can handle it. But that's only after the 5 minutes I spent considering the idea and mostly stolen from I Robot movie like most of Tesla's ideas.
You've got to be kidding. That's mighty uncomfortable when the angle is only a bit steep, the inclined lanes would be exclusive to expensive cars with this kind of capability (which no tax payer will want to subsidise), and when there's a traffic jam that takes a minute longer than your battery capacity, your car will just fall on top of another?
Yeah I was thinking it would suck for a passenger which is why it would only be useful for temporary bypass situations, since tunnels can clog up if cars fail. But that's a lot of engineering just for that one usecase. But I do except tunnels to become much more popular as cities become more dense and cars become automated.
If we’re going to have a network of underground tunnels in a city, wouldn’t it make more to fill them with subway trains, rather than thousands of autonomous cars?
I don't spend much time thinking about transit but I believe the dynamics of it will change dramatically when ever car is self-driving and whether western city governments finally allow the sort of building density and pace that is in demand.
I don't see much difference between a more affordable autonomous bus or van option vs a subway. The benefit will eventually be access to the tunnels more than the fact it's large and on a track. But in cities it's also incredibly expensive to build anything without a hundred stakeholders interfering so a large amount of new tunnels is probably DOA just like most high speed rail projects have been.
This is bending over backwards so hard I think you had to invent new geometry and discover new dimensions.
Fan cars are old. Nothing about them is new or special or unique. Trying to build infrastructure dependent on such a feature would be the dumbest thing since monorails.
It's a cool demo and all but I can't help but feel like it's not that impressive considering these companies control such an absurd amount of capital and this is all they can do with it. A stunt for a launch showing off features that obviously won't be in any real product.
A lot of public funds go into these companies and it just feels like they are playing around with toys instead advancing humanity. I sometimes wonder if we are not allocating resources very efficiently.
I mean if I saw this at a monster truck derby I would think it was cool. When it's companies that represent trillions of dollars it feels a little underwhelming I was expecting more. It's also clearly a gimmick it's not like this is a real product. Even from their own marketing it's obvious.
If it was like "we figured out this technology and it will be available to the public and we will be working with regulators to usher in a new age of flying cars!" I would be pretty stoked. But it's pretty obviously just a stunt for the launch.
I don't know I just...I feel crazy but I feel like these resources could be doing something amazing and we getting like stunt tricks.
I mean Chinese EVs have already surpassed Tesla in global volume sales and their CEO helped elect the man who gut the EV industry in America. But I guess it's cool we are doing cool tricks while that happens?
Would you the same thing if it wasn't Elon Musk at the helm of this company? I'm not a big fan of him either, but I get the feeling some don't want to like this demo.
Also the public government funds being received are in the form of contracts. It's not like they can just use the money anywhere. Both Tesla and SpaceX are likely using private money (that is to say, funds not from the government) to fund this.
If it was a smaller scrappier company I would think it was neat, but this company and associated companies represents so much of the market and so many resources. And I don't know it just seems like they are doing like...monster truck derby stunts?? It's just kind of underwhelming to see this is what they are spending their time on for me. I was expecting a lot more.
> It's not like they can just use the money anywhere
I mean SpaceX was literally caught buying Cybertrucks it's clear there's some corruption. But aside from that, they also just represent such a large chunk of the market that it's hard to argue that they aren't just siphoning funds from other ventures somewhat even outside of public misappropriation. I wouldn't even mind that if I felt like they earned it, but it just feels like the stock was pumped as a meme or something. The engineering is impressive but not impressive IMO for what they are worth.
> it just feels like they are playing around with toys instead advancing humanity
You don't think electric vehicles and battery storage advance humanity?
On the contrary I would rather my big companies didn't try so hard to advance humanity. Elon has a lot of takes around creating a Utopian society which do not sit right with me. Really it's not the advancement that's the problem, it's the requisite power and resources necessary to achieve the elaborate visions. Humanity should be advanced by a collective, not by a few gifted individuals, even if that means more bureaucracy and less efficiency.
If helipads can only handle one chopper ever few minutes, and they are surrounded by clear and open space, then that tells you that theres no way flying cars with the frequency of typical roads or even quite streets will ever happen.
I think that's to do with the wake/vortices a helicopter creates. Apparently, the effect is so strong that it can affect lift in a fairly large area over a few minutes. There's a recent case where a light plane took off in the neighborhood of a heli that just landed, and it veers off course, and hits the heli.
there are approximately 450 in existence.. (ever made)
Lets assume this car costs 1M each. (i bet its less)
so if they sold 450 of these they'd make less than 500 million.
If they ever deliver a single unit that's a low enough bar to make it completely economically infeesable.
if they somehow managed to sell a couple of thousand... it might become profitable.
this has to be just a fantastic bit of marketing to jazz up their share price.
also.. I'd love to see a blooper roll of making it do these things...
I suspect the blooper reel is less interesting than we’d expect. SpaceX has demonstrated competency at putting cold gas thrusters on arbitrary masses and making them move as desired.
On takeoff you can stabilize against opposing forces, so especially without the weight or inertia of a driver it is quite straight (rockets also don't need to stabilize on take-off).
But once that phase is overcome, how stable is the car actually mid-air?
It looks to me that they added the barrel-roll because everything else would have looked worse...
Sure, you'll get a finely chopped hedgehog [1] (the video doesn't depict any animals, it shows roadster suction fans). Things happen. With a conventional car you can get a tendered deer.
I am amazed at how steady and in control the car was when flipping and jumping. If that kind of control on a vehicle is achieved today, it seems like flying car tech just took a giant lurch forward. Just in time for America's crumbling road infrastructure.
I hate Tesla for their politics, broken promises, and all the drama that we are all aware and tired of hearing about.
That being said, that was the coolest damn thing I've ever seen a car do.
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that it'll never make production like this, but what I see as being demonstrated is a suborbital lander/off-world ground transport concept that can work in low gravity environments etc. This will aid autonomous delivery vehicles etc to be dropped from low orbit and find their own landing sites, and then drive to location.
I wonder how many maimed kerbals are stranded around the space X facility while testing this.
Very cool stuff but all the "extra-terrestrial" stuff is complete bunk. This thing wouldn't survive Max-Q, let alone any kind of landing that isn't on a clean slab of concrete. It's a cool rich person toy, no other notes.
You miss my point. They're demonstrating a landing system, it's just wrapped up in a car to fool the idiots that are going to pre-purchase it again so they can use that money to build more space X technology.
The car is just a façade.
Edit: And to expand on this. Owners of GM T.50' say they can't use the ground effect fan anywhere in public due to the debris it picks up and throws, and are ineffective on anything but near perfect roads. So that's not impressive to me. And the jet boosters are also ridiculous, there is not real-world application where you could use them outside of completely closed environments with no one nearby. It's a huge investment into reaction thrusters for a car that would never, ever be used - unless it was to demonstrate thruster technology for another reason.
Ah I see. Yeah looks like it's pretty much just RCS for cars. Space landing systems are pretty well understood from the rocketry side afaik. The hard parts seem to really be around autonomous landing site selection [1][2] in novel environments. We'll have to see if the Roadster can do significant in-flight landing manoeuvrers.
If I'm understanding this correctly, it uses the electric motor to compress air into large tanks? How much thrust could that generate (and for how long)? It'd be amazing to jump over East River or the Hudson.
Very impressive prototype. Certainly an attempt to disrupt a specific segment of the car industry - "race cars", or "sports cars", or whatever you want to call it.
A few considerations, just my own thoughts.
1) I would bet that the actual car shown in the demo weights less than what will eventually be sold to the public. I am not an expert, but the way in which the car reacted to the air boosts suggests a relatively "lightweight" vehicle. Plus, I would imagine perhaps a smaller battery (again, for demo purposes).
2) It is a nice "exercise" as a game, or an expensive hobby for billionaires. I doubt, as Elon hinted, that using these thrusters will be allowed on public roads. Perhaps just on circuits?
3) Overall, Elon said that Tesla's strategy will no longer be about cars, but about robots and AI, and then proceeds to show a car that will cost billions to develop, and might not be the commercial success that justifies the investment.
4) Twitter (now X), Tesla, SpaceX... things are moving, tricks are being shown, and who knows, perhaps next year everything will be merged under ElonX, and he will finally be happy.
Also amazing stupidity of people believing anything close to this will hit the streets. Lies and lies for a decade, and now after a flashy demo it is again "2028".
I worked at Tesla when they announced the Roadster 2 and said they’d start production. That never happened. Funny to see everyone eat this up, let’s see when or if they deliver.
So this is a completely obvious scam, right? I don't see anyone else calling this out and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell, it would basically be a bomb. Also, the battery pack that would go in the car would be so large that they couldn't do the stunts they showed in their drone vehicle.
Are we not calling an obvious stock pumping charade what it is out of some sense of politeness?
I feel like it's also crazy irresponsible to sell this deathtrap to the public, since it's pretty much guaranteed buyers will joyride this on public roads.
- The cold-gas only version will shotgun debris into onlookers, and possibly yeet anyone behind it.
- Active suction is very cool until a rock punches through your intakes.
- Lithium batteries and pressurised tanks in the same package, yippee!
Thank god it'll take them years to manufacture this thing.
It isn't being sold to the public. Of the three versions, the one that is "road ready" doesn't have the gimmicky thrusters. The one that is displayed is available by invite only, and even if you have a quarter of a million to reserve the racing model, you aren't likely to get a license plate for use on public roads.
They'll make a handful that a select few billionaires will get to keep in a hanger somewhere for bragging rights.
There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I agree with the first two points, but why do you think the thrusters have to be manually controlled? My expectation would be it'd just perform one of the pre-programmed tricks taking in the sensor data to adapt mid-way, the same way they do auto-landings in SpaceX (no one is controlling the landing booster manually, right?).
Explain what you mean please. First, this is not going on a public road anytime ever, so in an unlikely event this product will actually see the light of day, it’s very likely that anyone who attempts this will do it on mostly static controlled circuit/pad. I don’t know how they did the demo, but I don’t see it as something outside of the realm of reality to calculate ‘kickflip’ on the fly using whatever sensors they put in this thing.
I wouldn’t want to sit in it tho (and I’m guessing no one in the demographic this will be sold to would want this level of risk either).
> There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I'm not even sure if a fighter pilot could. The passenger compartment of the "Rocket" model is probably packed full of tanks and other equipment, to deliver total of a few seconds of flight time. Doing anything in the air would probably require such precise timing no person could do manually, and it probably can't even be done automatically outside very controlled conditions.
The demo literally has it flying without a pilot controlling it. There's not going to be like 8 joysticks that a driver has to use at once to make it fly
No kidding. Musk is SIX YEARS late on delivering the previous version of the roadster, which has been superseded by today's announcement, promising its delivery in a few years, and everyone is just lappin' it up.
Well we could examine the history here, for instance when he bought Twitter that it would immediately collapse (now its more popular than ever and Bluesky is the one that's falling apart) and when the Cybertruck was announced there were lots of people saying it could never be made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437
You forgot about how everyone was insisting the Hyperloop would never work and then it became the principal mode of transportation. Or how we couldn't possibly have a Mars colony in 2024. Or how twitter would never become the West's everything app. Etc.
Elon Musk causes incredible amounts of historical non-examination. There are now so many examples that it's actually difficult to list them all. My guess is that people just get very confused by the difference between late delivery and non-delivery.
It’s crazy how many Cybertrucks I see in my hometown, and I don’t live in that big of a city. They are incredibly popular. This car will be incredibly popular to. Peoples are getting bent out of shape about the “thrust” and “rocket” variants, but who cares? Those will be few and far between. For rich collectors mostly. How about just the base model? It looks wild, I’m sure it will be fun as hell to drive. They are going to sell a ton of these things.
Maybe if you don't like driving? It's really a solid car. Much better than the WRX, which is quite good. Make sure you set steering to low assist. The performance models in general are serious machines. Top of class in their price range by a long shot.
Dude this is crazy, kind of embarrassing if I’ll be honest.
There is no universe in which I would compare any Tesla model to an M3 or WRX.
First of all we should consider that their direct competitor the Ioniq 5 N is a better performance car.
The M3 finishes Willow Springs faster than the Model 3, so we can’t even go by raw performance. In track conditions the battery thermals and stock tires on the Model 3 can’t keep up.
Comparing the emotions you’re going to get from a V8 gurgling and thrashing through gears compared to a silent EV motor is just not even in the same league. The Ioniq 5 N actually does something about that and reviewers are impressed. They directly state that it is more fun than Tesla performance models.
Then your other problem is that the Model 3 performance looks identical to your uber driver’s car. Someone dropping $60k on a performance car wants to feel special. The trim and upholstery options on the M3 alone are more exciting than the Model 3.
Also let’s talk about the production of the video. It had all the signs of those magic videos you can find on YouTube where the trick is only a camera trick. Dark background, you never see the entirety of the audience, it’s all camera cuts. I’m sure it’s not fake per say but it’s super weird still.
Well I see no numbers saying how long it will fly. Perhaps it "hops", could easily see that happening with a burst of air below the car. (While standing still, accelerating the car upwards for 1 second with a burst of air)
> The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell
The cybertruck is for sale and FSD is active in the US. The US lets automakers "self-certify" that they are safe. So although I don't think this thing should ever be sold, it may end of on US roads.
My big question is, would anyone want one? It's an interesting life size hotwheels car but who would want one other than to show at a monster truck rally. The original Tesla Roadster was a masterpiece compared to this new one. Talk about missing the mark by a mile...
I suppose at least we can say there is a working car that seems to be able to actually do the things as advertised, which is more than one could ever say for e.g. the Moller Skycar.
I was #12 Tesla Roadster owner. I spoke across the country with my father. We drove from coast to coast in 2014 at a time when there was a lot of doubt. — I supported elons “mission” and now we know it’s a neo Nazi front of a company. This company and Elon has been a scam since he stole JB Straubel. How do I know? JB Straubel is my father.
> (or want to go to the island other than to have a party).
with the most notorious pedophile on earth?
> Virginia Giuffre alleged in a lawsuit that in the early 2000s, when she was 18, she participated in an orgy on the island with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and eight girls who "appeared to be under the age of 18" and did not speak English.
He spent 18 months in jail in 2008 for "soliciting prostitution from a minor". If you associated with him after that date, you were ok with hanging out with a pedophile.
> Everyone that went to the island is attracted to pre prepubescent children?
There's absolutely an argument to be made there but in this case it's a bit more specific.
Anyone that repeatedly emails the most notorious pedophile on earth, begging to be invited to the wildest party on their private island is absolutely a pedophile.
If you wanted another pretext to merge Tesla and SpaceX this would be a good way.
The existing tech fab plus this car maybe makes it harder to sue once the merger happens - but he will still be sued. “Look we’re making it rocket cars with AI of course we should be one company”
A bunch of the Model S production vehicles did ship with the capability. It was removed from later models. So that part absolutely shipped. Tons of cars on the road to this day still have the hardware in the car to support it.
And they did build one pilot station that did the battery swaps and did some swaps with real owners cars, but drivers didn't like the idea so they abandoned it.
And yes to my point, I said Tesla product, namely something that is sold to customers as is. So yeah it's relevant.
He actually says in the video that it might not be legal to operate but they could still sell you one. Anything is legal off-road on your own private property.
FAA jurisdiction over the airspace is not the same as a rule prohibiting every form of powered lift-off within it. There's a lot of grey area in FAA regs - for instance you can land a plane on your lawn in class E (if you could manage it).
I think it’s real, the “invite only” version could probably do the kickflip over the semis, but would probably completely exhaust the tanks and require special equipment to refill or take hours with an onboard pump. And the flip is certainly a scripted stunt, not something you’d actually be able to do live. The math doesn’t seem to be completely unreasonable as a one off demo
They said there is a compressor to re-pressurize the tanks while driving. It made it sound like a power-up in a video game. You can't use it all the time, but if you wait for it to charge up, use it as many times as you want.
I think the bigger issue with be making it street legal. Kickflipping over traffic, and refusing visibility for everyone to 0 in the process, can't be good.
I wouldn't be surprised if the presented "invite-only" variant will mostly be aimed at Saudi investors, and they will get an invite if they invest a billion into the company.
This would even be a sensible choice for Tesla, because it will put that car in a garage far away from public scrutiny...
(thinking just about all the debris damage-potential of those thrusters here, not even any potential quality issues)
When I searched for Tesla on YouTube at the start of the event, the first live event returned was this, an AI generated Tesla presentation with Elon telling users to send bitcoin and he'll send you back double as a promotional event like an X Money thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5EDp2rEbFA. The QR code went to this site: https://roadster.tv. I reported it to YouTube.
China has had flying cars since 2023 so I don't see how this is a scam. The flying mechanism is unique for the Roadster so that's still to be seen how it would perform out in public.
XPeng has been spruiking flying cars (really just giant quadcopters) for a while now, but while they exist and can fly, they're more of a publicity stunt. For example, while you can buy the X2 in Australia, you can't legally fly it.
I mean, Tesla demoed, promised, and took reservation money for a roadster reboot that _also_ didn't contain any technology China didn't have in 2017, and at this point they still haven't delivered on that and it feels safe to call it a scam.
Just because the technology is technically feasible doesn't mean that a specific company is not scamming you when they promise it.
And Tesla already has enough of a history of fake promises (your tesla will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep within a few years, FSD will take you across the country while you sleep by next year, humanoid robots, the new roadster is taking reservations now and will deliver soon, regulation is the only thing holding up FSD, etc etc).
To be fair the main reason why FSD hasn't been a wide spread thing is mostly due to local regulations. The technology exists and performs fairly well. FSD is allowed in pretty much all the same cities Waymo is allowed to operate so we can see from this that its a regulatory issue not a technological one.
I mean it looks cool but considering they haven't produced any of the other Roadster models in any meaningful quantity, and have repeatedly come up short on much more reasonable product offerings... Idk I have just the slightest doubt about a flying electric car hitting the market any time soon. Hasn't it been nearly a decade since the promise of a software update that would turn your Tesla into a self-driving taxi that can earn money while you're not using it?
What's up with wheels not being round anymore? How is that supposed to work? I understand it for Formula 1, but for real world driving, it doesn't make any sense
Given how Tesla's profitability nearly vanished due to Elon outing himself with the "roman salute", I don't see why he thinks his company will be around long enough to actually get this out the door.
I have no reason to believe this isn't another Deplorean.
At least the fans will allow for really short breaking distances.
I historically argued for a sort of horror-vehicle that would achieve autonomous driving "early" by exploiting downforce from powerful fans, but I mostly imagined it being used for autonomous deliveries and never imagined there being people inside it.
idk about the safety of involving jumping cars into car crashes, I'd still prefer the brakes (obviously not always enough time). The one useful situation I could see is if you're driving (accidentally I hope) off a cliff.
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
This would only work until the next Democratic administration, at this point he's put almost half a billion dollars into Republican pockets. All it takes is one President AOC to pull every government contract he has. And he knows this, hence the election spending.
This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.
I hope not, I use "full self driving" every day! I'm sure your statement is based extensive experience, but mine is that for 2 1/2 years over 40k miles, it has worked very well. Not perfect (parking spot selection has frequent regressions), but astonishingly well.
What's wrong is all of the older models they sold do not have what you experienced. They were sold FSD but their car's hardware can't run the latest software, and the older implementations required much more babysitting (aka not FSD).
What a wonderful illustration of the technofeudalism that many seem eager to push our world into. That doesn't diminish the engineering feat it embodies, in fact it rhymes pretty well.
All Musk cares about is Mars. The CT is going to be a Mars vehicle, that's why it looks like that by and large.
And this tech is simply part of the Tesla/SpaceX merge, and right in line with flamethrowers, tunnels, and chainsaws. It's going to funnel loads of cash his way, which was the idea.
The rocket flip part looks like CGI, in my opinion. I get the same feeling as when I see CGI on some random B movie. Would be happy to be proven wrong if there was a crowd of people filming from their angle though.
Also "Beyond The Limits of Physics"... would any actual engineers at Tesla/SpaceX agree with that marketing statement?
The thing that made the design of the original Tesla cars successful, before they went all in on this "future looks like the future" idiocy, is that they just looked good. Tasteful. All that crazy new tech was put in a package which hid it and it just became a sleek, good looking car on the road. Now Tesla design is obsessed with it cosplaying a Ridley Scott 80's wet dream and it looks stupid. The cars look like a show at universal studios theme park. When you do the "future looks like the future" it's always a sci-fi author's idea of "the future" which is cheesy and outdated as soon as its done. This is a boomer's idea of "future" aesthetics and it's not what the actual future looks like.
I'm so glad Elon exists. He must have spent over $100 million to build the flying variant with no hope of ever profiting off it. I can't imagine any other CEO ever doing that.
Nobody needs that kind of acceleration on a car designed for use on public roads, and anyone who uses that capability in the vicinity of other people or vehicles deserves to be arrested. Its just criminally dangerous.
Like the Cybertruck, this is just the Musk "fuck you, get out of my way" worldview realised as metal and plastic.
Even if it does, these features aren't useful and can't be used in any realistic scenario. At best they're just party tricks.
1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem.
2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.
These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.
When I first saw this I was convinced it was AI slop. Nope! This is absolutely incredible. I've also never really resonated with Tesla aesthetic in the past but they really nailed it here imo. This car looks phenomenal - I hope this style trickles down to other models.
Absolutely incredible demo. Jesus Christ, I don't know what I was expecting. Didn't know this was planned and skipped forward to see what they were showing off and thought it was CGI for how outlandish it is. My god, man. This is amazing.
Yes, Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip (and damn near every other skate trick), but the reference here comes from a time when Tony Hawk would drive around and yell "do a kickflip" at skaters, if they did a kickflip he would sometimes give them a signed board or other things. Example video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0dI05Xz8s - it became a thing for a little where people would yell "do a kickflip" at skaters they saw on the street.
I mean, this is the gimmicky of gimmicks for the ultra-rich.
It just means you can do jumps and stunts programmed into the vehicle at the push of a button with zero skill at being a stunt driver.
The Dukes of Hazzard had to do that without the thrusters.
Can't wait to see how people kill themselves and other people with those things by being stupid...
Hopefully that shit gets blocked by the DOT and kept off public roads--which is probably the goal to get a bunch of drooling simps outraged over "government overreach" keeping them away from their "flying cars".
I absolutely detest the leadership and what he is actively doing to this country... but holy fucking shit. I want to reserve one, but when you're broke as a joke... ooph.
Very useful in England’s countryside, imagine all the puddles you can jump over! Eliminate these passing bays when cars can jump over each other in the narrow lanes!
Jaw-dropping stunts aside, I am really disappointed with where all modern car design is going. What is that ugly low poly shit? The previous Roadster concept had a style, it had sex and taste. How did we get from there to here?
It's a tech demo marketing presentation with a jumping car in it, not a flying one. It does look pretty cool though. Let's first wait and see if/when this will even be available and not just a marketing stunt.
I make flying stuff all the time. Not as heavy but I don't see a reason why I couldn't and I won't need a couple of billion to do so. This thing 'flies' for a very narrow definition of flying. Call me when it stays in the air for a couple of minutes. Prediction: that will never happen.
It's apparently not fuel but pressurized air being refueled by the car itself.
> "Will it even be maintainable?"
Probably doesn't matter. I don't think it will be permitted on public roads anyway.
The presented variant is invite-only, so I guess it will be made to put in the garage of some (Saudi) investor who commits a billion dollar investment...
To be fair, I think this is very doable with modern technology. If you've seen their rocket landing videos the technology is quite similar in nature.
The gimmicky part is not the engineering but the fact that it is not a flying car but a proof of concept of a flying car in a very controlled environment, with no regard for cost, with no actual viability of real world use.
Its like the breakdancing humanoid robots in China, a cool feat of engineering for sure, but it makes you think that robots can do human tasks, when the reality is much further away.
Well, the first thought is that they borrowed the thrust technology and software from spacex. This makes sense, because in starship, they used to have a lot of pneumatic powered actuators for things like thrust vectoring control, then they switched to electric motors, because they are instaneously responsive for one thing (and I think more reliable as they aren't fluid based). From what remember, they originally used electric motors from Tesla, so makes sense that Telsa would in turn borrow from Spacex.
This is one of those products that offers a thrilling demo but I have no desire to own one. I much prefer the 2020 design that never made it to production.
Really disappointing to see such low quality discussion here. Feasibility aside, we would not be seeing such reactions even 5 years ago. Polarization ruins everything.
Musk built the first rocket capable of transporting a base, and humans, to Mars. NASA has nothing close to Starship, and if they ever did, it would come at a trillion-dollar cost to the American taxpayer.
NASA is currently the only organization to ever take humans beyond LEO.
Starship has only even achieved LEO once, in an unmanned mission a few weeks ago. Starship has so far cost about $15 Billion, the entire Saturn V launch program (excluding Apollo, to keep things apples-apples here) cost about $35 Billion in today's dollars.
Why blame this on “polarization” and not on the guy who did the polarizing? Nobody forced Elon to do all that stupid shit that got so many people hating on him. He did it if his own free will. He ruined it.
If you don’t like his politics and lean into that difference in opinions to criticise something orthogonal, like his technical innovation, then it’s YOU that is being divisive and partisan.
Why is it my responsibility to carefully compartmentalize every aspect of someone no matter how loud and outrageous they are, and not their responsibility to stop being a colossal asshole in public? He gets to publicly disown his children and support proto-fascist political parties and call people pedophiles for displeasing him, but we are the ones who have to carefully manage our feelings so we don’t accidentally let them spill over? Nuts to that.
You think he's being terrible in public. I don't, and I'm not alone. The way certain people judge his actions is quite obviously partisan and a subject of great emotional overreaction. Those exaggerated, sensationalised negative traits you described (which were fed to you by a leftwing media with vested interests) actually have zero effect on your life - so you are simply choosing to be offended by them.
If, instead, you had a grounded, balanced opinion about the man, you'd understand the great good he's delivered, and continues to deliver for the world, from Tesla (making electric cars desirable and mass-market) to Neuralink (making viable brain computer interfaces to give heavily disabled people back their lives), to SpaceX (giving humanity hope for a brighter, more exciting future in space, as governments once did, but have since failed to do).
(I assume your instinct will be to defend him because said rescuer was mean first. Don’t bother, as you can see I am well aware and it doesn’t change my opinion.)
I can totally understand if you think the good outweighs the bad. I tend that way myself: I own two Teslas and I eagerly watch every Starship launch. But I also think Musk has shown himself to be a real piece of shit. A real piece of shit who has done some great stuff, but that doesn’t negate it.
I need a cheap car. Sub 25k that I can use to drop my kids and get groceries and is electric so I can get some respite from these war inflated gas prices. Nobody is offering this. I dont need all the fancy gadgets and the flying and the jumping.
Looks like it truly is a K shaped economy. Flying cars for 1% and loans for the rest
I've had two EVs and have been driving EV only for about 10 years. I've been driving an ICE vehicle lately due to an issue with a wiring harness on my EV that it is getting service for. It's been so long since I regularly drove an ICE that it has been an unpleasantly shocking experience.
- The cost savings are as much as a car payment. >$100/week in gas when my entire household electric bill averages only $200/month. Up until this recent issue at 85k miles, I've had $0 in maintenance costs (excluding tires). Those same miles in an ICE would have cost me about $2000 in oil changes and brakes by now.
- Getting gas sucks. Sure, it is easier to get gas than charge an EV at a public charger. But it is far more convenient to charge at home every day. In 10 years, I've used a public charger maybe 10 times, but I have to get gas at least once a week. Would you rather have a phone with 6-7 days of energy but you had to drive to a dirty gas station to fill it, or just plug it in every night?
- ICE range anxiety when I have a quarter tank left. I know I can get gas all over the place, but it is pretty rare that my EV has as little range in it at the start of the day as this ICE vehicle with a quarter tank left. Either I go to the gas station more frequently, or I have to account for going to a gas station before driving 30-40 miles away.
- EV powertrains are so much better than gas powertrains. More powerful, smoother, quieter, drive better especially due to the better weight distribution (front to back, and height of the center of gravity).
Another thing is that an equivalent ICE version of the Roadster would most likely use premium gas. There is no such thing as premium electricity - an electron is an electron. So the cost savings are even higher.
But personally I would recommend people consider a used Model 3. They can be $25-30k which is new Prius territory. I don’t recommend other manufacturers because IMO the competition only started making good electric cards in the last year or two, so these tend to be higher-priced because they’re newer.
EVs are nice, and Im full EV on all my cars at this point. But I concede I would not own any EV if I could not charge at home. If I was still in an apartment, I'd be ICE all the way
EV driver for 10 years, and that is absolutely the big difference maker. The economics and time savings disappear if you have to use public charging infrastructure. I feel like it is almost like a tax that is put on people who can only afford to rent an apartment.
I own an ICE car and an EV. We use the EV for long trips and it is great. The only time we hesitate is when we are going out into the middle of nowhere.
EV advantages on trips:
- Smooth ride
- Always-ready A/C
- Pet mode
- Self-driving
You do have to plan a bit more. The Tesla route planner is excellent. Having a charger at your destination really seals the deal.
that's interesting. we have both ICE and EV and would never think of using the ICE over the EV for long trips, that's primarily the reason we keep the ICE vehicle.
So it sounds like you're solving for different problems here. If I'm taking a long trip, the primary problem I'm solving for is "time to location" and "difficulty planning" and ICE wins, period, if charging is required mid-trip.
Maybe people want to take leisurely strolls while charging up or will be stopping for lunch at that truck stop anyway, but that does not solve for my problems as well. I don't have a pet, my car's heating/cooling is perfectly cromulent, and I enjoy the act of driving a car.
Also, what is "smooth ride"? Are we talking suspension or accelleration/braking?
This is particularly nice when you're warming the car up in the garage during cold snaps. Hard to do this with ICE vehicles without risking carbon monoxide buildup.
Can we just say it out loud? Because it's good for the environment and we don't want our children or their children to have an unlivable planet. This should probably be the number one reason, but yes EVs are better in many other ways too.
Driving cars is not good for the environment whether your fuel is electric or diesel. The billions acres of concrete and asphalt to support car commuting, the electricity that charges the cars, the rubber microplastic tire dust made 100x worse under hard acceleration of heavy vehicles .
Best I can say about EVs is they’re quiet and don’t wear out their brake pads, and the lack of other service is economically efficient, so in that sense they are progress towards a vehicle less likely to fail on you (software updates not withstanding!)
If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil. A thousand pound lithium battery per household is not a tenable way out of destroying ecosystems.
> If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil.
This is not realistic nor scalable. The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars, and even if we had huge transit projects there would still be a need for roads and vehicles due to the size and rural/industrial areas.
Lithium batteries can be recycled. All the studies have shown that electric cars are a huge net win for the environment, and the cries about the environmental cost of building the cars in the first place don't actually match the reality. Especially when you consider that future ev ecosystems should and hopefully will have a strong battery recycling operation.
not having much maintenance and charging at home are huge ones. i don’t understand why there is no creative advertising around that. such obviously huge wins
Because most car brands and especially the dealership network make a lot of money with maintenance. The maintenance frequency and cost of my electric Audi is not much cheaper than my previous Diesel. It is a rip off. Only Tesla is more aggressive with longer intervals and they kind of communicate the cost savings in their ownership cost calculator.
For one, renters are largely locked out of reliable home charging in most cases. No apartment complex I've lived at had any charging stations, never mind the quantity needed if most residents opted for EV.
I think this reason is understated. A friend was attacked at a gas station years ago, and since then she's had a major fear of gas stations. Her husband would fill her car for her so she could commute to/from work. She bought an EV a few years ago, and this was a major reason for it - she can fuel-up on her own without being a pain to her husband.
In my experience electric cars aren’t significantly smoother or quieter. Most noise in a modern passenger car is generated by the tires and air drag, and for some reason I found these more pronounced in the electric cars I’ve tried (maybe for the lack of engine noise).
My wife and I share a plugin hybrid and an EV. You'd think the EV is as loud, because you notice the air and tire noises in the absence of the engine noise.
But in the plugin hybrid, the change in noise is very noticeable when the car goes from pure EV into hybrid and the engine kicks in. It's specially loud when the engine revs up as you're accelerating, but even when the car is cruising, I can still hear the engine noise.
That is true above 50 km/h right? In many european cities you drive below that. In many French cities the max speed is even 30 km/h. Then EVs are much quietee.
I'd say the majority of the reason is no engine noise, but also keep in mind EVs are heavier than ICE cars. More weight means more road noise. Regenerative braking means they have significantly less brake wear than ICE cars despite the weight, but the tyres take more stress.
As Hannah Ritchie (Our World In Data) has pointed out, even with the worst coal powerplant powering the grid, an EV is getting a much better CO2 per mile driven than an ICE. As the grid powerplants improve, that only gets better. An ICE car is always an ICE.
Of course, if you look at the energy mix for our grid. But the possibility (maybe even the inevitability) exists that the grid will be powered by cleaner sources over time. No such possibility exists for an ICE vehicle...
I generate 80% of the power I drive on (PHEV + 10kW of PV on the roof), though I mostly commute by bike so I don't drive a ton.
Grid electricity generation is more efficient than ICE. Fossil fuel extraction is a major emitter even before the fuel is burned. Decarbonising the grid is underway.
True, but that's not a limitation of EVs but rather the state of energy production in most countries. An economy that moves towards solar/nuclear/wind will see blanket decreases in emissions across the entire fleet of EVs it supports.
It's not really magical thinking; if the grid moves to solar/nuclear/wind then there are virtually no emissions here.
Yes, we're not there yet, and that's why I prefaced with "True", but I think this kind of splitting hairs is part of the problem. EVs are vastly better for the environment and have no emissions of their own. Yes emissions do come from somewhere in the current state, but path to a cleaner environment is not radically far away and the thesis that "emissions come from somewhere so that's not a reason to buy an EV" is ludicrous at best and disingenuous at worst.
This is the natural flow of things. People with disposable income buy nice new stuff, suffer the rapid, early depreciation, and then they trickle down to the next tier of consumer who can't afford or doesn't want brand new things.
Cars and houses all work like this. Very rarely have the lowest income tiers ever gotten brand new, expensive things.
And if you're high income and smart, you still get used things because you recognize this is the most fiscally responsible thing to do and a great way to build and preserve wealth.
If you don't need a lot of range, a used Leaf is pretty cheap as EVs go. Though you do want to avoid the 1st generation models (before 2017?) as they had much worse battery degradation.
Of course right now EV prices are probably inflated for the exact reasons you cite. Even with $4-5/gallon gas, an economical ICE can still be overall more affordable because you can buy them for a few thousand dollars.
The problem with the Leaf is the lack of fast charging. It’s great if you can charge at home but it’s definitely not a road trip car. You get what you pay for, which is especially true for earlier-generation electric cars.
Drop any one of those, and you'll have plenty of options. This isn't about a K-shaped economy -- it's about adding significant constraints and being unwilling to compromise on any of them.
Also what's wrong with "loans for the rest"? Most new cars are bought with financing and have been for a long time.
Agreed. You can buy a lot of gas for the price difference between an old economy ICE car and an EV. Plus cheaper insurance and in many places, cheaper registration fees.
But only a mini amount, how much energy do we spend making the new car vs maintaining the old one. Young people need opportunity to buy cars as well, but the price jump can be too big for many. My experience with transit around Vancouver is great unless you need to get to the next spoke over, or went for a drink downtown and then have to walk an hour to get home in the evening (not solved by having a car obviously, but a shame there isn't an affordable responsible option after 8pm)
Well we live in the real world. We're not going to be rebuilding cities anytime soon. And most people like being able to drive, it allows you to live your life and not be confined to a couple of square miles or the limits of a transit system.
I have a feeling that you can and do work on it, because maintenance otherwise would easily be triple the market price of that car yearly. That significantly changes the economics of old cars.
In 20 years:
I got a garage to replace a radiator after a stone hit it, for $600
Also 2 tires once, for like $200.
I might not drive as much as you all, but when I do its at a relaxed pace and the roads are good where I live. I have a manual transmission and Im always careful how I accelerate and how I brake and change gears. It has about 100k on the mileage now
What do you mean crazy high? The amount of shops that will take an old European car like that are few and far between and they'll certainly charge you a premium for it.
Say, you go for the cheapest option and get minor services done at around 500-700$. Okay, a medium or major service is going to be over 1K and you're bound to have one. Down 2-3K if nothing goes wrong, at all.
But if something breaks, you're going to be down 2K at minimum for the part itself (not counting labor) and your car is going to be in the shop for two months while the part that broke is imported, and that's if you bought a Chinese replica. Original parts might as well equal the total value of that car.
In England if I go to my local garage and ask them to replace something like A radiator or water pump it will be like $200 for labour plus maybe $250 for the part ( unless I get it myself off ebay for like $30 and install it myself ).
For example a plastic fender came off, I just bought it for $15 and all I need to do is click it in place when it arrives by post. Im not a mechanic.
EDIT > Incase you all think Im crazy I did the numbers as Im not "a poor man" and quite fancy a cool new car even if 2nd hand, if I get a 2nd hand Landrover Hybrid for 40k, the MPG will be double my old Mini, ONLY if its charged at home, I dont stop at petrol statinos etc, otherwise it would be more!
Wat? We have a 2005 Toyota and a 2005 Mitsubishi. We've had them for 12 and 8 yrs. They don't need anywhere near that much maintenance. And if something really expensive came up that exceeded their value, we'd replace them with another 10yr old car.
I assume you're in the US? Are things that much worse there?
Try criticizing political figures or having a slight attitude to the police in Germany and tell me that old ghost is gone for good. Or that our new push to label calling out government overreach hate speech (Oh Canada!) Something cut from the same cloth.
As for VW the brand that has a long and terrible history when it comes to electrical faults for ICE cars (and diesel gate) I'm not holding my breath until the other shoe drops. I like the look of the newer electric van, maybe they'll have a better reputation by the time I look for a 15 year old one!
The good news is you can still buy a Model 3, since fascism is a dead ideology that is in no shape to rise again anytime soon. The reason it is still being used is as a prop by deluded boomers to make them feel good about themselves for being groovy anti-authoritarians, and simpletons with no understanding of politics, history or even the last 24 hours.
It's on the rise right now, just under different names.
Ironically it's the supposedly freedom loving tech bro libertarians who tend to go down the neoreactionary/fascist pipeline after they "give up" on democracy. They just don't like being labeled as fascists. Since you're on HN and willfully blind to what's going on, I think it's safe to assume that if you voted in 2024, then you voted F. Yes?
If you can, wait for a Slate. It's not just cheap for brand new it's a company working hard to move the auto industry in an actually positive direction. I hope to make it my next car as well.
The idea of cheap, modular base and a focus on user accessibility/customization is in my view a very cool and sorely needed model in an industry that looks more about shoving in features, consolidation and ever increasing costs and complexity. Not to mention the rampant protectionism in the United States because Musk is terrified of Chinese EVs.
IIRC the difference between new and used has shrunk quite a bit recently (at least for desirable models and types) because many consumers are frustrated by the new-prices and all look towards used.
I've heard it said (literally, it was a podcast) that US car-companies are caught in a kind of prisoner's-dilemma: They all want to be the ones selling expensive (high profit margin) cars, and nobody wants to be serving the low-end. But in the long run, somebody has to, or else the market gets... Weird.
BYD could give us this tomorrow, at the cost of completely gutting and decimating domestic American manufacturers, who are unable to actually compete on price and performance for various reasons.
The problem is not inflation, it’s that America sucks at manufacturing low cost electric vehicles. BYD has demonstrated that tenfold
America sucks at manufacturing anything that involves paying a wage because countries like China can undercut them. Even if we could the Chinese govt would fund the undercutting like they are with BYD.
What, USA never subsidizes her essential industries?
American labor is expensive but BYD owes its success to vertical integration more than cheap labor. They are moving into Europe to build there before long. Americans have an uninformed notion that China simply couldn’t have superior technology, they’re just cutting corners, dumping chemicals in the river etc (as if American companies would never)
It might just be that china is better at building cars.
If they were actually trying, then a dozen or so budget-model cars - from the Hyundai Accent to the Toyota Yaris - would not have been discontinued in the U.S. in the past half-dozen years. And replaced, if at all, with much more expensive models.
If you can increase your budget to 30k, you could consider a Slate EV.
Electric cars are still an underdeveloped form factor, so it makes sense that you can't get a car big enough for many passengers that is cheap enough for your budget (the battery needs to scale for passengers/weight, so the market so far is tiny cars or big expensive cars. The middle comes as the tech develops)
Why does your neighborhood car have to be electric?
Get a Mitsubishi Mirage and pocket the extra $10k for gas.
What you want does not exist because EV buyers are mostly "look at me" types with deep pockets. That's why they're all luxury vehicles full of gadgetry. They build what the 90% customers want and you ain't it.
10K in gas melts away quickly. I know some people who have ran through that amount in six months. Also, you have to factor in frequent, expensive and time-consuming maintenance with either awful, cheapskate shops or the wildly overpriced dealership.
Also, it shouldn't come as a surprise, but if you're spending upwards of two to four hours daily sitting in traffic, you want it to be the nicest experience possible. Punishment boxes like the Mirage are desperation plays, and people upgrade as soon as they can.
That's partly because the USA has artificially low gas prices. Over here, diesel is around 7$/gal and gas is around 6$/gal. That adds up quickly, especially vis-a-vis 0.2$/kWh.
Though, to be fair, that one specific case is a bit extreme (someone with a 100-150km round-trip daily commute and a not-especially-economical car). My commute is about 20km round-trip daily, but I also end up saving money over the long term because a lot of that time is spent sitting idle and wasting gas with nothing to show for it.
and yet non-American cheap bare bones EV exist for other parts of the world but we wont let them in because Detroit dinosaurs only want to make gigantic SUV and pickups because they are higher margin. the US is afraid of the Chinese doing what japan and korea did 30 years ago and force the dinos to compete again.
It's a shame the infrastructure is so poor in most of the US that a high end electric cargo bike isn't an option most people will consider. I love mine for exactly those use cases.
Elantra owner here, just be prepared to have to pay for broken windows and replacing the ignition cylinder every few months. The kia boyz are still active apparently and will try to steal your car repeatedly. Even if you have the newer model or the upgrade that prevents them from actually being able to steal it, it doesn’t prevent them from smashing up your car while trying
This was in a gated parking garage in a nice neighborhood. Every few months is admittedly a bit dramatic but it’s happened once and we’ve only been living here a year
Haha I get that you don't want to share. I was just surprised to hear that! I got one a couple of months ago and am now wondering what kind of a risk I've been exposed to
55K miles over the last 6 years. One really odd issue (a faulty headlights control handle leading to occasional switching lights on at night just to empty the battery by the morning) replaced using manufacturer's guarantee years ago.
47 MPG on the highway (but it goes down dramatically when driving around town to ~35). My Limited trim has a glass cockpit with all the popular safety features. Its exterior also looks more expensive than it is and at the time was way cooler than Civic or Corolla.
It remains to be seen what happens around 100K miles/10 years though and how it compares to my previous Corolla experience.
I've been pulling somewhere between 35 and 40 doing mostly hills and 45-55mph highways, I've been thrilled with that as well as the interior space. I'm very tall and I'm arguably more comfortable in this than in my minivan.
Adam Curtis had a great line in the 2016 doc HyperNormalisation [1] about Donald Trump turning Manhattan into a playground for the rich from the ~70s-00s.
Now we're turning everywhere into a playground for the rich. The sad part is that they're unimaginative and in such poor taste that it gives you pause about the dynamics of human hierarchies. Wealthy people used to be dignified; I'm not quite sure what you call today's crop. Insecure chic?
Those smaller / cheaper EVs might not be street legal in the US due to safety regulations: they need to allow occupants to survive a crash vs the massive monster trucks on American roads.
Not a massive hurdle. BMW got the i3 to be street legal in the US without much trouble. And I know, the i3 was only a smaller car, it wasn't a cheap car (I think they went for around $40k new)... but that's just BWM.
Getting Renault e-Twingo / Citroen e-C3 street legal in the US wouldn't really rise the production cost much. But nobody is going through all the trouble, because (obviously) almost no American would buy such a car, even though they start at <$20k new.
That's like commenting about needing a Chromebook on a post the newest Blackwell GPU that can serve inference workloads of thousands of people. Just irrelevant.
Tesla's efforts on the original Roadster made them be able to transform the whole EV industry to the point that EV's are nowadays actually affordable. Not everything is exactly about your specific needs, and you shouldn't shout people down when they're lifting the whole field.
If there is limited supply of memory production, and an 16GB student laptop is $800 instead of $500, then I would say the poor folk are justified with naysaying the new 128GB top shelf exotics.
Back to the K shaped economy, it’s not just annoying that some people have more money than everyone else, but given the gap in economic power, the goods that are produced are made for the people with money. With limited resources to produce material, are you going to sell to the bottom or the top? So the people not buying flying cars are left behind in more ways than one.
Of course a roadster is not the car to "drop kids and get groceries". I think op was not trying to imply that. But Musk stated his big plan was to sell an expensive roadster in order to afford building an affordable car. That was 20 years ago. The closest it ever got was a promise of a 35K Model 3 which at launch cost 50K. So, yeah, from that perspective, op's comment is relevant.
Seriously. It’s pretty clear that the new Roadster is not intended to be a practical car for the masses. And that’s Ok. There’s room for a “halo” product in any lineup.
I do not get this kind of complaint. Every thing you consider an important part of your life today (including cars and smartphones) started out as toys for rich kids. Complaining about it is asking to go back to the stone age, because all the advancements since were brought to you by someone's desire to make money and someone else being rich enough to afford it, till economies of scale made the poor old you able to afford it too.
Musk really is the master of fraud. Twitter gets bought by Space X to conceal the massive loss in valuation, Tesla gets pumped with endless "we'll have self-driving cars next year", for 10+ years... now that the Tesla bubble is finally popping he needs to dump it on the Space X/Twitter shareholders, so we get this demo of a thing that will never hit the road. Bag holders beware, Musk's masterpiece of market manipulation is about to execute with the merger of all his lies.
No, he bought it because he was contractually obliged to do so even after he tried to wriggle out of it.
I mean this isn't even ancient history, it only happened in 2022. He sent three termination notifications before it was determined that he had no grounds to refuse to buy.
Oh, it doesn't require a person to continually monitor it now? I missed that change. Until that happens I don't think it qualifies as "full" self driving.
Only from a regulatory perspective. Anyone who drives a Tesla for long enough knows how to defeat the monitoring system, and doing so is extremely safe; significantly safer than a human driver. I would have no concerns summoning it autonomously over 100 miles, once the law allows for that to happen.
Well, you're insane for thinking that. Drunk driving is very unsafe, and population-level statistics don't lie. They're quite conclusive when it comes to grading the safety of drunk driving as being dangerous relative to sober driving, and Tesla's full self driving system as being safe relative to sober driving.
In a single 5 mile trip within the last month, an FSD Tesla I was in made four mistakes that were saved by the actions of other drivers on the road. I have concerns about you summoning it autonomously over 100 miles.
Amazing to see Elon making his childhood dreams reality. It's something to behold.
I hope we don't lose that spirit. The amount of negativity is very worrying.
One of the coolest tech demos in 2026 and it's on the 3rd page of HN morning after because of the downvotes.
If Doc Brown's time machine was real and posted here, HN would be complaining that it's noisy, unimpressive, not street legal, uninsurable, and attacking Brown's personal character because he's a dangerous nutcase.
The time machine actually accomplishes something. I fail to see what this accomplishes other than a very cool circus stunt. Straight out of fast and furious. Which is great and all, but not a production car.
Honestly, the fact that they are talking about this being a production car is what kills the cool. If they just said they were showcasing some cool technology that they could do, then I think it would at least be honest and people wouldn't shit on it so much. But with how many times they said the new Roadster would be on the market, can you really blame anybody for not believing it?
Remember concept cars? Companies have been doing gimmickey shit forever and nobody expected those things to make it to production.
Yes, Elon Musk and Doc Brown are really, really comparable. Great metaphor. Who can forget when Doc Brown famously stole a bunch of government data? Or tried, numerous times, to overthrow democracy? Or bought a heavily used social media site to turn it into a propaganda box?
What a well-thought out comparison. You've definitely got something, here.
Well this isn't real so that's not a very good analogy. I also don't think Doc Brown (who's also not real) was famous for committing fraud and lying habitually to manipulate the market.
Maybe it makes for a closer analogy. Neither the time machine or the flying car are real, but we react to the "inventors" differently. We're not haters. We just have taste.
You gotta admit the car looks nice compared to the Cybertruck, and the technology is indeed impressive. I think it's an organic reaction, unless they're defending Elon personally.
This is another expensive marketing gimmick nevertheless, and I'm struggling to see the value of it, especially when Tesla is not doing that well.
Rapid adjustment of drone flighpaths with micro-thrusts?
Getting interceptors out of tubes faster without explosions/temps/fumes?
Anything where rocket propellant, heat is a problem?
Breaking, emergency braking in trucks? Kind of like reverse thrust in airplanes.
(i do not think he's a nazi, I think he is an edge lord who dogwhistle to Nazis to look 'cool'. Which honestly is fine for a teenager influencer, but should stop once you're 25)
> just endless anti-tech hate, downstream from idiotic TikTok politics.
The hate and politics obsession of the people you're complaining about on here pales in comparison to the guy doing this presentation. He is doing it 24/7 I'm not even sure he sleeps he is so engaged in it.
IMO reinforcement learning on par with teaching quadcopters to do weird things.
But the real question: does the roadster come with SpaceX thrusters? If so, they have my attention. Otherwise, boring, even more boring than the boring company. False advertising too. People need to demand that SpaceX thrusters are now an option if only to reboot the Dukes of Hazzard except with a smart car.
Edit: Hi there Elon fanboys! Hope that all meat diet is working out for you. Have you considered taking up smoking knowing full well that AI will cure cancer?
The car is not using momentum and centrifugal force to stay on the ramp. It has fans providing tons of downforce - so much downforce that it's able to stick to the road nearly completely inverted
Pretty big nothingburger. Production starts 2028 and honestly, the taunted feature... it's not a flying car, it's a jumping car. Do people actually want this for themselves? I'd wager the valuation would go down after this presentation.
OK sure. I don't have a lot of use cases in my day to day commute that would be better handled by this jumping over a semi like it's the TF2 soldier, hence, a big nothingburger.
yes its a nothing burger no one will be able to use this other then a few billionaires... just like that BYD car that can jump wtf are we doing? why do we need cars to jump... we need them to drive us from point a to b
> Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Bullshit, no it can't.
> Advanced cold-gas thrusters use all-electric actuators to offer precise thrust, completing micro adjustments within a fraction of a second. This helps stabilize the vehicle in flight.
In flight? What? Did I miss the joke, or what? It's a fucking car... The image even shows it hovering off the ground. How is this not blatant false advertising?
ETA: okay, skimmed some of the livestream. These is absolutely no way that any of these features will ever be part of a production model. People get serious whiplash injuries just from being rear-ended at low speed. What do they think is going to happen to the occupant when they tell their car to jump over a semi and do a fucking barrel roll? Seriously, what are we doing here?
Watch the video - the car jumps into the air. Not exactly flight or what we’d consider a flying car, but it’s careering through the air off the ground.
I mean, this isn't crazy. In fact, it's already been done. Ever heard of McMurtry? (https://mcmurtry.com/). They're notorious for exactly this - using fans to provide extreme downforce (urr... upforce if you're hanging upside down?).
> In flight?
Did you see the stunt where it literally flew over vehicles? I mean, maybe it's a bit closer to a controlled super-leap like the original Superman, but... yeah, my personal reaction to that was more "holy shit" than "well, that's not flying".
If you scroll down on the page, it shows that the "rocket edition" is invite-only. Probably gonna sell it to a few friends in hopes that the 3-5 they make sell for millions down the road, so to speak.
>> Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Well, think you're only seeing the most splashy uses. For instance, at high speeds, could use the thrusters to first, increase acceleration and speed, and second, have them also able to do a bit of thrust vectoring to help push the car's tires on to the pavement for better traction. And then on turns, have thrusters firing to help push the car into the turn.
Also, maybe the car is able to hover for short to medium distances, which for a military and offroad vehicles, could be very useful to cover all types of terrain
May come in handy if someone blocked your car on a parking and you don't have time for the tow truck to arrive. Or when you're stuck on I-95 during a major snowstorm.
It can only fly for a few seconds, no? Where are you going to land in a snow storm if the literal Interstate is impassable? Everywhere else would be worse.
Have you ever slid into a ditch? I have a couple times. It's a fair amount of work to get the car out of the ditch. With thrusters, you only need a couple seconds to get out of the ditch and back on the road.
Let's get real, the entire point of a roadster is to look cool and have good sensations. Try to beat that!
If you want a sensible car, get a Toyota Corolla, or a Model Y if you want to stay with Tesla. They will get you to your destination just as well for cheaper and with more space for your stuff.
After Elon almost died in 2000 when he lost control of his McClaren I wonder if the real reason for these thrusters isn't actually to recover when controlling this beast proves too much for the driver and it starts to spin out or accidentally launches into the air.
The somber music, darkness, 3 awkward people presenting it with 0 presentational skills. Just a random comparison - if Steve Jobs were to present this, he would've killed it. I was watching the demo, impressed by the car so much, but I couldn't help but feel irritated at how badly is was presented. The choice or music, lights, everything.
Yeah no thanks. I think I will stick to BYD and other reputable chineese brands for my EV needs. Safety is a thing for cars. Teslas were not the safest cars before and now they are adding gas thrusters, oh boy, what could possibly go wrong. I would not feel safe driving behind or infront of this car.
Ok, so it actually flies. That was unexpected.
It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
It's being sold in two modes. One with cold gas (no combustion) seemingly just for extra forwards acceleration (no flying) and one with real combustion rocket engines, the latter was in the video and is "invite only".
Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
Even just the cold gas variant seems like a nightmare for production, there's a high pressure COPV in that thing and that's gonna make crashes much more.. exciting, and Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways. But very few of these are ever getting sold anyways.
I can't believe people still believe Musk's demos. Can we wait with rhe excitement until this is actually real and in customer hands?
you can make cars fly and people will still complain
It's not a car, it's a car shaped thing that they created for a demo. People will complain because this should not have any impact whatsoever on TSLA, but people act like it will.
That being said, the stock tanked today so I don't think most people are buying it.
There's a new flying car every year. They're just never very practical, so there's a lot to prove when a new design is proposed.
> you can make cars fly and people will still complain
Until everyone who wants to buy a flying car can buy it and have it delivered next week, yes, we have every right to complain.
Until then, this Tesla demo is no different than an AI generated video. Can’t buy the car yet.
"No one is allowed to build anything that I'm not allowed to buy immediately." --cheonic4040
it's more like "don't lie to customers" but sure
I go back periodically and watch the bulletproof glass demo on the cyber truck.
It beggars belief that was not scripted by a comedian. Comedic timing was perfect.
That is incorrect - there are three versions slated, one with no cold gas nozzles, one with forward-only (the 4 in the rear) and a tank in the rear "acceleration", one with 10 nozzles (4 under, 2 side, 4 rear) and a tank in the rear and passenger seat "flight". None of the variants use rocket fuel or other ignited propellent, they're all just compressed gas release systems.
This is explained in the deep dive video with Lars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts
I like how "Jetson car" goes from driving George to work through the air to "10 seconds of air time is a Jetson car." No, it is nothing like the Jetsons. It is a cold air bomb waiting to explode and there is zero chance of it actually hitting the road other than in a few fake forms to pretend they did it.
I felt the same way when they were calling the Segway skateboards "hoverboards" and referring to back to the future.
I'm not sure I'd agree that "Traditional wheel powered transportation vehicle" is in the same category as "Useless hovering car with giant dangerous high-pressure nitrogen tank that can cause serious bodily injury to pedestrians and occupants"
It doesn't have to be pressurized at all times!
You could only pressurize it right before your jumping stunt.
Highly practical. Basically a clown car.
It's basically the batmobile from Dark Knight. A small bridge jumper. Still pretty cool
Didn’t that also actually work? IIRC they wanted to develop something that could realistically do it. This seems to confirm: https://batmobilehistory.com/tumbler-batmobile.php
>A small bridge jumper.
Or an easier way to escape rioters blocking the road and threatening your life.
Imagine what these air blasters would do to a pedestrian. This is never going to hit the road like shown.
I think future technology will allow the car to detect another car or pedestrian too close to the exhaust system and disengage it. I don’t know, some wild thought I just had.
You can't just "disengage" a car that's six feet off the ground. You have to land it gently with the nozzle engaged or you don't have a car anymore, and maybe you don't have a driver either.
Not just pedestrians. Nearby car windshields.
I guess any LPG-installed car is also a "bomb" by your definition?
my quick search says LPG-installed cars run at 5-10 bar. the roadster apparently at 350 bar. by comparison one is on the scale of car tires and the other is like 35x that.
Using Brode's equation a rupture can release 52MJ of energy or 12kg of TNT. An high explosive tank shell only has 11MJ of explosive energy.
But also LPG is extremely flammable, while air isn't, and air can be safely leaked in emergency.
This is enough pressure to launch a car and flip it in the air, you can't just "safely leak" it at any useful rate of speed in an emergency. In an emergency it will rapidly explode.
For reference, tractor trailer tires run about 7 bar and we’ve all see those videos.
Do you feel the same way about every Red Bull stunt?
Now do the definition of AGI.
You think the jetsons vehicle wasn’t a flying bomb? You’re comparing a real, actually-flying car with a cartoon fantasy and complaining the real one isn’t real enough? I don’t even understand what the point here is
The point is that a car flying for 10 seconds is nowhere near the Jetsons car.
We actually do already have Jetsons style flying cars - those things that look kind of like big drones are basically that, and those are actually practical.
Forget the comparison to the Jetsons if it upsets you, let's just compare to actual flying vehicles.
I was mostly being pedantic in response to the extreme pedantry required to differentiate between “doing a barrel roll using cold gas thrusters” and “flying”. My point is that it is of course flying, and the reason cars don’t fly at all normally is because it’s insanely dangerous, so saying it’s not a flying car because it’s dangerous is both disingenuous and wrong.
I bet Tesla is kicking themselves for not consulting mulletbum before building. They could have caught this if only the actual engineers at Tesla had your input.
You know the force from these thrusters is going to injure a pedestrian and the whole idea will be scrapped.
They can’t even build a proper Mini anymore because the hood was so low it elked pedestrians face first into the windshield.
If the flying version is ever sold (unlikely) it will be subject to flying thing rules (FAA). Best case it would be like buying a used F1 car from Ferrari. They retain possession and you get to occasionally fly in on the private jet and drive it under supervision on a racetrack.
It’s cool tech demo. I’m not expecting to see one fly in private hands ever.
It's never going to be street legal, and I doubt there was ever a plan to try.
The cybertruck is so dangerous to pedestrians it would never pass homologation pretty much anywhere outside of USA, and yet it sells there. If the roadster is sold anywhere it will be there too.
Honey, did you remember to also charge the compressed gas tank on the Tesla?
Sorry, I'll start it from the app!
chug chug chug chug
From the interview, they says it takes 6-8 hours to fill and you get 1 "launch" before its depleted in under a second.
This is just gooning with a drivetrain.
Opposite of gooning no? More like Mr. 2 seconds leaving one's partner stimulated but unfulfilled.
I think they more meant the "6-8 hours to fill and you get 1 launch" aspect. The gooning starts in the garage.
Of all things, how is this the most reasonable, even-handed disagreement in this thread?
Because that's how things work now. But also, no disagreement, the gooning is absolutely in the 6-8 hours not the 5 seconds of joy joy.
I'm wondering if its going to be a model like I think Ferrari calls it Cliente Ferrari. Where the car stays with Ferrari, they put on track days at great tracks all over the world. Bring Pro Driver Coaches, Mechanics , Massage Therapists, five star chefs Data Analysts to review your performance. From my understanding Ferrari makes a lot of money doing that.
> Ok, so it actually flies.
For a few seconds. It's a parlor trick. And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.
They have the highest rate of fatal accidents across all car brands, more than double the average.
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a62919131/tesla-has-highes...
Safety of a car is a different axis than safety of the driver. That combines them. Related, it's why performance cars have higher insurance rates: people who buy fast cars go fast.
paid
I would claim "has a most basic understanding of statistics".
Your comment is—at best—misleading. See the last two paragraphs of the article:
> The study's authors make clear that the results do not indicate Tesla vehicles are inherently unsafe or have design flaws.... Many of the other cars that ranked highly on the list have also been given high ratings for safety by the likes of IIHS and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, as well....
> “The models on this list likely reflect a combination of driver behavior and driving conditions, leading to increased crashes and fatalities”....
You forgot to point out which part of the comment was misleading
EU safety regs are pass/fail - there's no sources stating Tesla have exceeded anything there, they need to pass in order to be sold in Europe, so they've done whatever the minimum required is for that. To do so, they've needed to make numerous compromises & changes to their cars to make them fit for the EU market - notably no FSD. Hardly indicative of a car brand that exceeds anything.
As for US safety standards, that seems a lower bar...
Like the people who get trapped in case of accident when the electricity fail and is burned inside?
The “Cybertruck” (ffs …) is not legal in the EU due to safety regulations, so I would say that you are mistaken.
It's not legal because it's unsafe for pedestrians, not for people inside the car.
Says more about the EU than about the Cybertruck.
That feels like it's much more "by design" than "cannot meet regulations".
Immaterial to the original claim.
“We designed the Tesla Deathtrap 300 to explicitly break any regulations regarding danger to human life”
>Ok, so it actually flies
I'm going to quote Buzz Lightyear: this is falling... with style.
On a serious note, this was unexpected. You can't deny, he has style
Reading https://www.tesla.com/roadster, it seems like both variants only use cold gas thrusters, and the difference is that the "normal" (lol) one only has them pointed rearwards while the flying one has them pointed in all different directions as well.
I'm sure having a cold gas thruster is going to be no problem at all for road approval. /s
That’s the European mind speaking.
Mind you that when Karl Benz invented the automobile in Germany, he didn’t have a permit as well
So many things that were invented in Europe couldn’t be invented today.
Somehow I feel like "putting highly explosive canisters all around a car" is not the best example for why regulation is bad.
No, that's the mind of a person speaking that is thinking of the motorcycle standing at the traffic light just behind this car. Action, reaction, that sort of thing.
Not like those genius Elon and American minds thinking "oh yeh rocket engines on cars makes a lot of sense", you're saying?
The very first cars required to have a person walking in front of it with waving a flag as a warning.
Red flag thing was the UK's Locomotives Act 1865, which dated from before what we call cars were invented. More aimed at traction engines (steam engines that go on the road). Exactly the type of regulation people like to mock the EU for.
Last year I went to a steam show and had to share the street with giant steam tractors for the first time. That law suddenly made sense. The visibility and stopping distance aren't great.
Funnily enough, he was also the first person to get a driver's license IIRC.
> That’s the European mind speaking.
No. That's the road safety mind speaking.
>So many things that were invented in Europe couldn’t be invented today
Like leaded gazoline, whose effects can still be seen presently...
That was invented in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
I can think of no better person to have been hoisted on his own petard than Midgley. He also gave us the ozone hole. Veritasium has a great hit piece on this utter maniac.
How long is the US going to allow a car able to jump over Hostile Vehicle Mitigation barriers?
Like everything else we regulate.... right up until it becomes cheap enough that "undesirables" might get their hands on them.
Best guess is that it's disabled for anything but track/trick stuff. There will be some cool videos eventually showing up with tricks people pull with this. I don't know what else it's for.
I can imagine the lateral thrusters helping it turn faster on the track. Although I wonder if the extra weight is going to net out positive for lap times.
But really, a few very rich people will buy the full-rocket version to impress their friends. They'll play with them on private property.
Solo track use at that. I can't imagine that other drivers are going to be all that happy if they get hit by the exhaust from one of the thrusters in a corner.
Gases dissipate very rapidly, even moreso if doing pulsing or whatever. Probably very unsafe for a human standing literally right behind it, but it'd likely have 0 effect on another car at typical driving distance.
Great idea to use something like that in a tunnel or a garage. Suffocation - no breathing ... and probably some blown doors/walls from the pressure
How are you going to suffocate when the thrusters are sending out compressed air?
Car tunnels should be able to handle that level of bad gasses.
Except for the bit where you can't see a thing.
The crash photos are going to be Darwin-award-worthy
I could see a safety feature where it launches itself into the air to avoid an imminent crash (providing the area above is free)
What goes up...
That depends on the landing zone being available in a way that's hard for the onboard safety system to predict. But if the car is, say, spinning out you could use these to restore stability or try to recover from the other sorts of disasters that overpowered cars can end up in even on clear roads.
once your wheels leave the road, its hard to slow down. Just getting to zero mph before flipping 100 times and rolling over would be immensely useful.
I suppose I can see this also. It sounds horrifying. A head on collision is a pretty terrible thing but having one of the cars suddenly fly 30 feet in the air and crashing into on coming traffic does not sound like a great option. Reminds me of the cybertruck "this would make the perfect post apocalyptic vehicle."
you might have a better chance of surviving that 30 foot launch than a head on collision with a pole or a semi truck. don't get me wrong it seems wildly impractical but there may be rare situations where it's useful. ejection seats on fighters frequently injured their pilot but that is better than being dead.
This whole thing is incredibly stupid and yet, people are bending over backwards to defend it. There is not a single traffic situation where the ability of a car to suddenly launch itself into the air doesn't have more downsides than it staying put. This includes overhead wiring, other people nearby, tunnels, bridges, overpasses, lampposts, traffic lights and other street furniture. With a little luck you will survive the impact of your toy when it lands but the party that you land on does not. People have a hard enough time predicting trajectories with everything constrained to 2D, if cars start jumping around like fleas that is not an improvement. From a standstill with other parties around you this is already a serious problem, if it were moving forward at highway speeds in traffic it would be utterly irresponsible to trigger this kind of launch.
What, you don’t think the solution to a situation with too much out-of-control kinetic energy is to inject a whole bunch more semi-randomly-directed kinetic energy?
You see, when you are about to have a crash, and you only have a few milliseconds to react, the best option is to put more energy into the event.
I think every buyer should receive a complimentary nomination for the award.
It's for the ultra rich and a tech showcase, so probably will be classified as off-road use only.
Here's to hoping it will end up with the same reputation as the e-type.
I mean, Leno drives around with a jet engine motorcycle that can melt the guy behind him.
There are three modes: Performance ($50k reservation), Thrust ($250k reservation), and Rocket (invite only). Thrust and Rocket mention cold gas thrusters. Where do you see a combustion rocket engine advertised? https://www.tesla.com/roadster
I'm glad that marketing was able to talk Elon out of modes Suck, Blow and Boing.
SpaceX Tesla crossover. Not exactly what was on my bingo sheet today.
I suspect it "actually flies" much the same way the cybertruck is bullet proof and has an ultra hard stainless steel exoskeleton, in that it doesn't. This seems like smoke and mirrors conman shit pumped up to 11.
Is your assertion that the car shaped object we watched drive for a distance and then levitate over a distance was something other than a car that actually flies?
You watched a demo of a car-shaped object flying. Was it an actual car, or just a shell that looks like a car? We won't know until it's actually on sale and in customer hands what this is going to be.
It wouldn't be the first time Musk demoed something and promised something and then never ships.
Watch The man with the golden gun. You’ll see a car do a corkscrew jump. Does that mean all cars of that brand could do that jump?
What we saw was impressive, but it’s a trick. The car’s tanks are surely empty after this, and now you have a loud compressor filling them up for minutes. You can’t use those thrusters near people and cars cause you’re at risk of getting them in trouble.
It’s part of a long history of useless tech in supercars. Impressive, but useless.
How is that a trick? So far it seems that was exactly what was advertised?
What distance did you actually see it "drive"? There is no evidence that the car shaped object was anything but a lightweight shell using compressed air to levitate and do tricks like any modern day drone can do.
Here's an RC car that can drive on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
Here's the evidence: https://youtu.be/_lq-DpCE9rU?si=DF8YVr5AB35pKN4i&t=924
The car being filmed and the car that did the stunts are not necessarily the same. See this image for what seems to be an empty husk of the car that actually "flew": https://imgur.com/a/uH9qCxr
That is clearly not the same car considering you can see the car they are talking about off to the right in the distance (it, rather suspiciously, never leaves the curved vertical track area).
You fell for Elon's three-cup monte.
Well, Elon said the final prod car would be lighter; whether or not they achieve that goal, the strong implication: the car has a battery and power train in it. Also, we saw it drive up the first part of the ramp without any air seeming to come out the back, and reverse down slowly; there don't seem to be forward facing fans/jets from the looks of the air coming out. I'd say Occam's razor is that the car has a full electric system in it.
I don't doubt it's got an electric system in it. I doubt it's got a battery sized for anything beyond that demo, a sufficiently rigid frame for road use, a reasonable steering and suspension system, etc.
My general assumption is that anything and everything that wasn't necessary for that demo was removed to trim enough weight to make the demo possible.
I can move my gas powered car that far if I leave it in gear and run it with the starter. Is my car electric?
I'd assert that it being something other than a car is an extremely reasonable assumption given all evidence available.
Would you say a bullfrog that can hop from pad to pad can fly?
A frog can't hover for any amount of time.
What is demo'd and what actually ships are two completely different things
I'm not saying its impossible but it seems pretty naive to just assume on face value
I certainly don't think it was a car that flies. It could be a car that can do dangerous party tricks for no practical reason but I kinda doubt that do. Hell we live in an AI world now, why are you so confident it's what they claim it is, what in Musk or Tesla's track record indicates that this is anything but a hype effort?
If they used AI to fake a live demo in front of a bunch of people, that would be exceedingly impressive.
The cyber truck is more bulletproof than any normal car, there are tons of videos of it stopping handgun rounds.
For what it’s worth, my $600 hunting rifle will go clean through both sides of any bulletproof vest, and it’s nothing special.
For everything that is bulletproof, there is always a calibre of projectile that will go through it.
Where the heck did you see combustion based rocket engines? I haven’t seen that come up once. Was it an AI response? And the video feature only cold gas rockets as far as I knew.
In the Top Gear interview, they even state that using a fuel "would not be a Tesla thing to do".
> kinda wild they devoted this much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Watch Ford v Ferrari for an idea of what auto companies are willing to invest for bragging rights.
Endurance racing has 100% more practical uses than stunt car.
Ford and Ferrari aren’t on the brink of extinction
Yeah, I hear twitter won't survive the weekend too.
Twitter is essentially dead. If I go to my "For You" tab, it is literally 100% pro-Trump bot posts.
Musk keeps it running as a mouthpiece/propaganda and vanity project, but it's not a viable business anymore due to all the $13B Musk borrowed to acquire it, as well as loss of advertizers. It's estimated to break even on an operational basis, but loses about $1B/yr when you include interest on the debt.
Is it dead? I feel like this is more of a "you" thing than you might realize. At least for sports, twitter is 100% still the dominant medium for reporting.
I'm looking at the same post on a players status for this weekend from 2 hours ago on 3 platforms:
- Threads: 5 likes, 2 comments, 15 shares
- BlueSky: 19 likes, 3 comments, 3 shares
- Twitter: 1500 likes, 105 comments, 281 shares
Doesn't really seem like twitter is the one that's almost dead...
Uh isn’t the “for you” literally the algorithm based feed for your direct interests? My for you page shows zero trump. And this is exactly the reason why it’s still so valuable, it can feed the echo chambers for individuals and keep them engaged (and seeing ads)
Tesla's stock price might be detached from reality, but is their actual business in trouble? I ask because anywhere I travel (Europe, UK, HK, NZ for example) there are just tons of Teslas, most of them the latest refresh models. There were more Telsas than BYD in Hong Kong!
> Tesla's stock price might be detached from reality, but is their actual business in trouble?
I am not sure you can detach these two concepts. Tesla is currently valued around 3x the next top 5 auto companies combined, so to an extent you need to judge the company on these expectations. I happen to think they do have a pretty good business selling cars, and maybe a very good business selling autonomous cars, but there's so much uncertainty I think it is hard to see the current market cap as anything other than hugely inflated.
Yes their actual business is in trouble.
Why exactly do you think he keeps repositioning them as a robotics oh wait no I mean an AI company? Why is he clearly positioning Tesla to be acquired by SpaceX? Why is Tesla investing into xAI to be converted into SpaceX shares?
Tesla’s actual business, making cars, continues to degrade. The Roadster (obviously) is not going to help.
They have a huge balance sheet so it’ll take a while but Musk obviously sees the writing on the wall. The sheen is wearing off their shitty products and he doesn’t know how to add the sheen back or make the products less shitty.
Just wait til all teslas are roving cell towers connected to star link. Always capturing 3d data of every single street driven. There’s still so much room for weird big things with the network being built. Scary.
>Yes their actual business is in trouble.
No it's not.
>Tesla’s actual business, making cars, continues to degrade.
False. Revenue and deliveries beat so far this year, Q3 also a beat.
Don't let your Elon Derangement Syndrome cloud your ability to think rationally.
You're aware that "beat" means "beat expectations," right? You're aware that expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is struggling?
TSLA is down 18% YTD. That's because their business is doing so well?
>You're aware that "beat" means "beat expectations," right?
You're aware that the "expectations" are they run a profitable company, right?
>You're aware that expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is struggling?
You're aware that the expectations are increasingly that Tesla's business is stable, and showed record deliveries and backlog in Q2?
>TSLA is down 18% YTD. That's because their business is doing so well?
Auto manufacturing sector (DJUSAU) is down 16% YTD, and Tesla's stock is overpriced to begin with. Tesla's most direct competitor in the US, Rivian, is down 34% YTD. Stop getting your business/economic news from BlueSky/reddit.
> Stop getting your business/economic news from BlueSky/reddit.
And where should they get them? From Twitter?
>And where should they get them?
Credible business/economic news outlets.
>From Twitter?
No.
Like FT?
October 2: Tesla deliveries fall 2% as US consumers buy fewer EVs
July 23: Tesla shares tumble 11% as discounts hit profits
April 2: Tesla reports weaker than expected 6% rise in global deliveries
January 29: Tesla scraps models in pivot to AI as annual revenue falls for the first time
Tesla growth is slowing, margins are getting crunched, competition is heating up. Tesla knows they're fucked so they're pivoting into AI. The pivot into AI might work, but Musk himself unambiguously thinks Tesla is fucked as an automotive company.
Yes, profitable with slowing growth, shrinking margins, and increasing competition. This is a death spiral for Musk's ultra capital-intensive mode of operating.
That's why Musk is trying to claim Tesla isn't an automotive company (except when comparisons to such suit him and his cultists, of course).
The business is doing fine, they’re profitable and regularly beating various targets. Honestly I think Elon is more level headed than people give him credit for, his companies are consistently profitable and generally produce competitive products.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tesla/earnings/
Operating margin fell from 16% to ~2% over the last 10 years and will probably be negative in 2026 and 2027. They have a big cash pile to burn through but they’re spending it on ummm “a flying car,” humanoid robots, and an AI fab. They’re fucked.
Similar, to the time Tesla was fucked, because they wanted to sell EVs when there was neither demand nor charging infra. Or when SpaceX wanted to build a rocket that could land on legs, whereas every wannabe rocket scientists knew that to be impossible.
Or similar to the time Cybertruck was a giant success, FSD was ready in 2022, and Falcon 1 would launch 600kg for $7 million.
I'd be very surprised if the roadster project was particularly expensive. That operating margin tells you they are spending all the cash they are earning on cars on the other stuff, not that the cars suddenly became more expensive to make.
I'm interested to meet someone online who's short both on-shore US silicon fabs and the market for humanoid robots. Can you say more about your thinking?
I'm short on an allegedly successful automotive company that has a rapidly deteriorating automotive business (due entirely to management's own decision-making) pivoting into the most hyped business ideas in the world. I'm bearish on the type of creative accounting and self-dealing we see between the Musk companies.
Musk is similar to Zuck in that they get some credit for sheer courage to turn the wheel on their massive businesses, but they also have to be right. Aside from his anticompetitive behavior, Zuck continues to miss. Musk's pattern has been that the more Musk is personally involved, the worse the outcomes. Cybertruck was his baby. Optimus is his baby.
If Tesla is doing so well as an automotive business, then why doesn't he just continue making it a great automotive business?
I mean the short answer is that it doesn’t temperamentally suit him to do so.
Maybe a mid length answer is if you agree with his assessment on say humanoid robots in terms of market and you believe they might have a geometric growth factor in production (eg robots can make more robots) then you’d want that business build out done by a team that can scale rapidly.
For fabs spacex and Tesla are significant consumers of the output- vertical integration is preferred by lots of companies.
> I mean the short answer is that it doesn’t temperamentally suit him to do so.
Correct, and I think having a CEO who's totally unaccountable to a board and is temperamentally unable to focus on his core business is not good.
SpaceX and Tesla are nowhere near large enough consumers to justify vertically integrating a fab. The demand is predicated on Optimus producing millions of units per year.
This circularity will probably end up being seen in retrospect as so transparently absurd that it'll beggar belief that anyone accepted it.
I respect the perspective, of course, and cannot argue with the risk assessment.
That said I think these bets will pay off. Let’s check in in five years!
> Let’s check in in five years!
Do you have particular predictions we can evaluate in five years?
1) The fab will have been a highly profitable investment, possibly worth spinning out
2) more than 1mm optimus produced and sold in the US
Happy for any counters :)
You've got to take Musk's forecasts with a massive grain (sack?) of salt. Pre-launch he was estimating making 250,000 Cybertrucks per year by 2025. So far, total sales over 3 years have actually been 60-70K.
I'd bet that in 5 years time Optimus total sales are in the 10's of thousands at best, with few to no large scale industrial users (other than self-use by Musk). Customers will be similar to what AgiBot and Unitree currently have - entertainment, hospitality, academic, small scale trials, plus a few Tesla fanboy sales that don't do anything actually productive.
In five years? It would be an achievement if it's operating in five years. Absolutely zero chance it will be profitable by then.
1MM Optimus sold in the US is hilarious too.
Want to make bets on these?
It will be his robot typing the message for him at that point
If anything his companies are doing well despite of him, not because of him. There's level-headed and competent leadership in them resisting his bullshit.
The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk
The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies
SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed
Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc
These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.
I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)
> The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk
Three sucesses.
Not so successful: Solar City, Neuralink, TBC, X.
(X exists, but before it was valued-and-bought by one of Musk's other companies, it appeared to have lost about half its value).
Richard Branson he aint.
If the boring company potentially slowed competition for other Tesla focused options, is that not success?
> Neurolink
They put out this video of a patient with ALS regaining the ability to communicate.
https://youtu.be/_j806JHhCRo
Hard to see that not being successful, once it passes the FDA, assuming it's real.
paypal succeeded _despite_ musk and required a boardroom coup to remove him from leadership because he was about to tank the company. if he had is way nobody would remember paypal besides a couple people with merch for a long defunct company.
Rivian, Polestar, Slate etc. Would like a word.
Of course it’s still early days for all these companies and they’re not exactly fiscally solid, but if Tesla had not made all those cars, someone else would have.
Revisionist history at its finest.
I'd still restrict this to an ability to pursue ideas that others find too risky with relentless persistence and a laser focus. He is able to get something off the ground and make others believe in it, but not good at actually running a stable business. And that's fine, mind you, I absolutely respect what has built. But the person who is responsible for turning SpaceX from an incredibly risky bet into a profit machine is Gwynne Shotwell, not Elon Musk.
It's really difficult to see such ridiculous levels of hyperbole in every single Tesla thread and not think people are doing this in a coordinated way for ulterior motives
you should read the comments on the ars technica segment of the roadster. hn isn't even close to that.
The demo car they showed most likely has no batteries or even a metal frame. They basically built a car shaped drone powered by compressed air.
Example RC toy car that drives on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
I don't think so: https://youtu.be/_lq-DpCE9rU?si=DF8YVr5AB35pKN4i&t=924
He says in that video that they opened up the doors to show them that model, so it's unclear it's the same one "driven" for the demo.
Even if it is, they show interior, wheels & a distance shot of the rear opening showing a large air tank - very little can be seen of the actual chassis or engine.
Whatever tricks were done for the demo - whether the car is real or fake - it's highly unlikely what was shown today will ever be like-for-like accessible to consumers in the production model.
Un incredible achievement that betters humanity. Amazing
I thought somewhere in the video they said that it is just regular compressed air that is held in a tank, and that the car itself has a compressor and regenerates the compressed air over time. Obviously to stabilize that amount of weight the gas has to be ejected at such a high rate it is practically frozen at the nozzle outlet, but it is still just regular air.
Tesla has a very good record for crashworthiness
And supercars are typically not submitted for NCAP testing, so It'll likely be less safe than a Model Y for example (to be determined, no reports out yet)
https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/tesla/model+y/0961/
It's not about sales numbers, it's about putting rockets in cars, so that SpaceX can acquire Tesla and give Musk supervoting shares
It's cool as fuck but calling it flying is misleading. It jumps and can maneuver in space.
Documented in this immortal scene from Samurai Jack: https://youtu.be/l2KCUaKK_0A?t=12
Aku: You can fly?!
Jack: No, jump good.
"That wasn't flying. That was falling with style!"
It’s a flying squirrel.
> moving or able to move through the air with wings:
Okay, so I guess it doesn’t fly in the same way a rocket doesn’t fly? Distinction without meaning in this case.
It doesn't fly in the same way I don't "fly" when I jump. You need to be on more than a ballistic trajectory.
uh. it doesn't fly as in it can't sustain flight...
Have they announce pricing on the rocket version? I could see it being priced like a bugatti or koenigsegg, where selling 100-500 of these is a great business.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Can't help but think of the not-a-flamethrower
(friend bought one for $500, now they seem to be worth $1500-$2000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Merchandise
Isn't it just a relabeled weed burner?
Reshaping of a classic blowtorch - if you're looking for a level up, try the Rodenator - less immediate flame, way more bang at the end.
The Rodenator is an applicable device that injects a precise mixture of oxygen and propane into the dens of burrowing rodents, and kills them with a concussive force that collapses the rodents' tunnel system as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_B_Meyer_Inc.
that sounds quite amazing, and it looks like something out of ghostbusters.
It isn’t “just” a relabeled weed burner, it’s a relabeled weed burner... with a fancy plastic shell.
And that makes a big difference, right? Right?
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Teslas evaluation is based on hype. This is as hype as it gets for a car. To me it looks like they were in need for "the coolest thing". To me, this has the smell of desperation implying the beginning of the end of their high evaluation.
> and one with real combustion rocket engines
The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."
> devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible mode
Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value. There is a huge economy revolving around people annoying other people just for a glimpse of their attention. This captures the attention and pleases people. Other car companies should start getting creative too.
> Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value
The power to shape governments to his liking is worth a lot more than what he paid for Twitter.
The power to shape governments to his liking is exactly why we've got to demand those governments to rein him in.
New account comes in to insinuate support about government taking over Musk’s businesses. Hmm.
Like the Biden administration which essentially forced Twitter to censor posts to their liking? Those governments we want?
Seems that is what both parties that control our government want
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/how-the-military-will-hack...
No chance it will get a permission to drive on the streets in my country. It also is a completely useless feature but it is still awesome.
Guess it is for advertising mainly.
It is concept art and a bunch of promises.
They save on advertising to spend on mind-blowing demos.
The rocket version is also just cold gas thrusters, not carbon fuel based.
It's very economically feasible if it pumps up the stock price
> and one with real combustion rocket engines, the latter was in the video and is "invite only".
I don't think they'll sell these, at all in the future. No way they'll hound out actual rocket engines to en users. Too much IP in there.
They might not consider the cold gas thrusters to be particular trade secrets. They're very simple devices.
Plenty of concept hypercars barely scrape 100 sales, the point is largley marketing in most cases
to be fair we don’t actually know yet that this is a high performance car. We only saw it drive a few mph without rocket assistance
I would like to know two things:
1. Why don't they show a driver entering or exiting? 2. How much do that particular "car" weigh?
They said there was no real driver in it for safety reasons
They imply a heavy weight with the suction downforce numbers but I think those numbers are not real. I’m reminded of neural link where the pig food detector was unimpressive, then shortly later a monkey demo was very impressive, they have since had human trials and humans don’t appear to get anywhere close to that same level.
Good point. It can't have much battery. Also wonder if the propellant/s are cryogenic. Monopropellant? You could tell from analyzing the plume.
I've seen a clip that shows under the skin.
It's compressed air RCS. The compressor, regulators and a ton of hardware take up the entire space from the seats back to literally the very last inch of the car. Hard pipes run along the door frame for the forward RCS, meaning only one person (driver) can sit in it and enter from the drivers side. Huge carbon RCS tanks fill every other space.
No idea how long it would take to recharge the tanks after venting them.
There's no room for 'car' stuff in it.
Interestingly there is a big... sleeve of wizard... that extends down under the car to assist the ground effect fan. Packaging that and the RCS stuff into it is a real engineering feat.
But it didn't look to have crash structures, or any other production ready hardware.
SpaceX lost a Falcon 9 to one of these things rupturing. A car accident with these onboard sounds… unfun.
https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/03/13/nasa-releases-summary-...
So the GP describes compressed air, while Falcon 9 rockets use cryogenic helium, oxygen, and RP1 kerosene.
So I got no idea how you can even compare these two completely different systems and go from a launch failure to an explosive car accident?
At these pressures, it doesn't matter to the human body what is in the tank if it is at all compressible. If the tank fails, its gonna go badly.
Just for reference this is 50% more pressure than the pressure that crushed that submarine at the titanic.
They've had several COPV failures.
Including boring old nitrogen blowing up a Starship: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
> "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).
If you SCUBA, your tanks need regular checks (https://dan.org/alert-diver/article/inspecting-and-testing-s...), because pressurized air can indeed kill (https://divemagazine.com/scuba-diving-news/diver-killed-in-s...) if the tank fails. The gas for these thrusters will happily accelerate you with the same force they're using to make a car fly given the chance.
If a tank of 10k PSI compressed air ruptures, you're going to know it.
Not if you're close enough!
Link? Sounds interesting.
Found a link, I saw it on instagram initially but here's a screen recording on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/s/efxEqCJxQR
I think everyone is getting too caught up in the Thrust and Rocket variants. There aren’t going to be very many of those. But the base model will just be a regular Tesla.
> But the base model will just be a regular Tesla.
A regular Tesla that sucks, you mean?
Even the base model has “active aerodynamics and a multi-mode suction system that maximizes downforce for next-level performance on and off the track.”
Sounds like it was just compressed air (rechargeable on the fly). Impressive if true.
I am pretty skeptical that that’s actually what was used in the demo. It would be so much simpler to just use whatever they use for the rockets for the demo, which certainly isn’t rechargeable
Only if you don't mind killing the audience:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Draco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomethylhydrazine
> Ok, so it actually flies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhVLgTsoMhQ
"That wasn't flying! That was... falling with style!"
> .... into a high performance car
If that is what they have done. That may just be a large drone looking like a car.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
You could say the same thing about the Cybertruck.
>Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
It's only wild if you ignore Musk's role in this. Not even trying to bash him or anything, but he's a trillionaire. This is the kind of shit you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly waste.
I mean, if this is how he wants to spend his money, then I guess that's his prerogative. But I think it's a bit misleading to suggest this is a decision made by "Tesla" when this is clearly an irrational decision for a company to make. This is a decision made by Musk based on satisfying his own personal goals.
Musk does not have anywhere close to a trillion US dollars.
In his pocket or what? When SpaceX IPO'd he was valued at over a trillion USD. Currently somewhere over 900MM, and worth more than the 2nd, 3rd and 4th on the rich list combined.
In terms of net worth, you are closer to Jeff Bezos than Bezos is to Musk.
And we are all closer to being millionaires than both of them.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
If this ships, it will deliver a fraction of what's promised here. My money is on the "flying" version being delayed repeatedly until it's quietly cancelled. Anyone remember the fast battery change stations[1]?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj6LaYFall4
The website lists three modes, which all have the fan but differ in thrusters. The variants are: no thrusters (thus no COPV), acceleration-only thrusters, and flying thrusters. The flying one has the disclaimer "Note: Not approved for public road use." OTOH the acceleration-only thrusters may be street legal. However, I expect that the COPV will be kept empty (thus not dangerous) unless you select a special "launch mode".
Hopefully there will also be a warning siren while it is pressurized. "Dangerous enough to need a warning siren" seems like a plus for the target market, honestly.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
It's staggering to consider how many resources we've diverted from people who could use them into building this novelty.
If ever there was a sign of a society of decadence in decline, it's that the most powerful person on earth is free to create toys like this exclusively for others in the ruling class.
When has frontier engineering ever gone directly to low cost mass production?
"Crazy new thing also crazy expensive" is the norm, not a regression.
Everyone's focusing on the cold gas thrusters, which of course is very cool, but not actually shocking that it technically could be done (economically is another question).
But can we talk about the just casually driving straight vertical or sticking to the ceiling? I didn't think that would be technically possible for a 1000kg+ car with probably at least 2" of ground clearance.
There's presumably very limited stores of compressed gas, so you might get one hop or a couple 0-60 boosts per charge. But with electric fans, suction is a feature with much longer duration (minutes?), so you could feasibly do the batman driving on the tunnel ceiling past traffic trick.
Saw pictures of its undercarriage on Twitter and it looks like it well have been a empty shell of a car
I saw the pictures but it wasn't clear to me that it was empty. I certainly saw comments saying it was. It looked like it was flat.
Link?
https://mcmurtry.com/upside-down-driving/
That is very clearly not what is happening
You're right. The McMurty is an actual car with a driver in it.
I very much doubt the machine we saw flying was 1000kg+. It was either MUCH lighter, supported by cleverly hidden cables, or some other trickery. The dramatic lighting isn't just for visual effect, it makes it easier to hide the reality of the demonstration.
If there was a live audience anywhere near that stage they wouldn't have been able to use thrusters to fly something that actually weighs as much as a car.
What cable arrangement would you propose to move a car in that way? I think it would be easier to do with gas thrusters than with cables. They'd get tangled in each other.
The audience wasn't that close.
Man, you guys are nuts. Cables? really?
Remember when Elon announced a humanoid robot by using a dancer in a robot costume? Seems reasonable that he would have some "technical assistance" to make his stage show look great. No idea if it was cables or not, but reasonable people can doubt the veracity of the theatrics.
A dancer dressed in a robot costume was not being played off as a robot, and is not evidence of cables, nor is it evidence of a tendency to fake demos.
It’s strange that people need to convince themselves that this is fake.
I see nothing strange about questioning the reality presented in a highly controlled on stage demonstration of a literal rocket car.
I think it was a real demo, but I share in the skepticism that this is something that could reach the market. How big is this cold gas container? What happens to it when it gets in an accident? If the car has dirt and debris under it, what is the risk to people/property around it when the trusters turn on?
10 years from their initial offering of the roadster, I'd like to see them release a well functioning, cool looking car. Why are they spending time/energy trying to make it fly?
Dangle the shiney thing to get everyone’s attention and sell the hell out of the very normal thing. This is basic startup marketing and say what you want about Elon, but he owns this skill, it’s why he’s the worlds richest person.
This is not actually the first time that this idea of using a fan to create downforce. It's been something that's been talked about and modeled for a long while and I think a few years ago, the McMurtury Speirling was released. That set the lap record at Laguna Seca among other achievements. The car is about a million dollars, and the fans are basically completely useless anywhere that's not a curated track (think stones, dust, wood, other FOD going through the fans).
The new roadster is obviously cool, but it looks like a practically useless vehicle for 99.9999% of the population. It's purely going to be a track princess -- with lots of extra weight for frankly pointless (but very cool) thrusters.
There was a Fan Car in F1 decades ago. Was good until it was banned!
Yeah, it turns out that in very specific and controlled situations, using a fan to make downforce is great. It's also a very obvious thing to do in those situations and doesn't do much for you otherwise.
Imagine a normal car having to carry around the added weight of fans, COPVs, and the plumbing to make it work. And only being able to use those only if the track is clean and there are no other cars nearby.
This is like asking to imagine a Hoover vacuum to have those fans. It’s silly because it would never happen. This is not a normal car. Comparing it to a normal car makes no sense.
The Chaparral 2j is one of the most inventive and cool looking cars I've seen.
Not f1, Can-Am but yeah, I'm really surprised this isn't a more common approach to modern track cars. Obviously banned in most motorsport but I'm surprised with all of the one-offs these days that it's not more common.
It has pretty good filtration [1], and redundant fans. Some rocks aren't a problem. But, you can't be driving through LA.
[1] https://youtu.be/xkXvL8YCtIE?t=721
You can’t drive it anywhere that manhole covers might exist, lest you destroy the car and/or turn the manhole cover into a deadly projectile.
Really doubt that demo was on a 10k kg car. It was probably stripped down to practically a shell for that trick.
> 10k kg car
Did you typo this? Absolutely no way it's a 10 metric ton car.
Tesla faking it at its best !
It would be an extremely cool demo if this thing was even remotely close to a car that can be produced and sold. Alas, this was something that could be used in a circus at best (where people would need to be very very far since it's very dangerous).
A circus showing these would never recoup the cost of even one being built, hah. But it is very cool. It's also neat to see the Brabham BT46 make a return after like 50 years.
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.
> I definitely have my issues with Tesla and Elon but...
Sad that people feel the need to add this qualification. I see it regularly.
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?
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.
> the man was basically an unelected official
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 must defend the pdf billionaire
White knighting for a delusional trillionaire. Bizzare
> laid off thousands of government workers
Preferably those tasked regulating his companies.
He's a neo-nazi that killed millions with his illegal USAID cuts. That qualification is the bare minimum.
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.
> Over 700,000 avoidable deaths from Elon's dismantling of US AID alone
google: did congress restore food aid funding?
How much does the car actually weigh? It feels more sleight of hand than actually a flying car.
About 3800 pounds. (from Hargety interview)
I would put good money on the flying demo one being a custom lightweight version.
Honestly, I think what is shown is sleight of hand, it was probably a step up from this DIY project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MybApXQIO5Q
We've had rocket powered drone for 30 years https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NL1UF2bvaEM this is just a larger version
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
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.
Those are cars you can drive. This is not.
Well yeah you have to fly this car.
Have you seen it fly? Hovering for a is not flying
OK, it was falling with style. :)
the difference here being that hypercars actually exist in the real world
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
> Seems gimmicky and not practical for the road
By that logic any performance car is useless. There are, albeit few, people that do track these cars.
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.
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.
Not a lot of tears to shed for folks waiting a long time for a $250k (starting, at least at the time) toy.
I'd bet most of them see this as a cooler, shinier toy.
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.
Still waiting for high speed rail
yeah if I had a preorder for a roadster, I'd be wondering about how much time they're spending on this compressed air thing.
That's exactly how I see it too. Not a tesla shareholder but if I was I'd be running for the hills.
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?
There's 3 trim levels. Flying is the top tier. They already publicly announced that.
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.
https://x.com/dhh/status/2110983188910923926?s=20
Why the second hand outrage. If you didn't buy a car and feel bad about the wait time, just enjoy the demo! :D
Birds of a feather I see
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).
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.
> or the pleasure of harassment towards Asperger people
I expect that motivates exactly zero percent of the criticism that Musk gets.
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.
Yeah, and it showed up in 2007.
--
Sent from my iPhone
> 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.
Out of curiosity, I checked how Musk's wealth of $1.02T is allocated.
His political donations for the 2025-26 cycle are apparently $366M.Careful. You will be flagged.
Getting downvoted by Musk fanboys is a badge of honor
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.
Flying/jumping doesn't instantly kill momentum.
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
No, it will not.
It can also create terrible accidents by blowing up in a collision
Fly out of a bad situation and straight into another one.
[flagged]
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts
> and the entire passenger seat is replaced with a pressure tank.
That sounds extremely explosive and not something any random person should be irresponsibly driving around.
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.
> Instead of producing a car people might actually want, he made them do this.
Looks like the base version would be the one for that.
There are a few problems with this approach.
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.
Yup. SpaceX lost four spacecraft to issues with these.
CRS-7, Amos-6, Starship 36, and Super Heavy 18.
How is that different than having my wife there?
You should look into hydrogen fuel tanks found in Toyotas! Much more terrifying.
If you go on the website that version is listed as "Invite only"
Where I live aftermarket modified LPG cars are extremely common. We don't have explosions often.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-roadster-thrust-system...
> 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 cars have somewhere between 100 and 300 psi.
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!
> A nitrogen COPV can not rupture (that's why the CO in COPV is there) but it can leak.
They'll happily burst (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ-__PlU4gM) and blow up your vehicle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71AwkBt3_ts).
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
"'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…
They're mostly designed to vent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupture_disc) to prevent a BLEVE. Big fire, big mess, but without oxidizer in the tank and much lower pressures, relatively safe by comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQDyNjCNxVY
How do gas pressures in the COPV in the Roadster compare to pressures in lost rockets?
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.
And the P in LPG stands for Probably not flammable.
Tank pressures are of different magnitudes. With LPG it's only for storage, here it's for thrust.
Big Elon fan boy here but you are 100% right. It’s basically the “Titan” submersible in reverse.
May he drive this toy everyday and face the same fate.
I know you are a kind person irl and don’t really wish that!
Why would you call yourself a fanboy? I can't get past his meddling in governments worldwide and clear self-seving in DOGE.
Purely because the tech he (or the companies he funds) build is otherworldly ..
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.
Perhaps, but not at quite this level of pressure.
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.
Which they will, because Musk is all ego.
Still frames showing the underside appear to show that it is basically hollow, so fake.
Making a car with a heavy EV battery and powertrain fly like that is probably not something they're able to do.
I think it's not that difficult when you have full access to SpaceX know how and infrastructure.
My only issue with it is that beyond being impressive and very cool, it's pretty useless.
> I think it's not that difficult
First you have to build SpaceX.
Of course, that's why I start from the premise of owning both Tesla and SpaceX.
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.
Distinguishing “demo” from “marketing stunt” here feels like a distinction without a difference and smells like motivated reasoning.
> wonder what the point of this was?
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_car
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.
Movie special effects has been doing this forever, lol
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.
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.
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.
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.”
https://youtu.be/JdkIOhFmbKI
The funny thing is that during the event, Elon claimed that the car can recharge the tanks itself [0], but in the Top Gear video, the Tesla folks say that it is recharged from an external source [1]. In the Top Gear video, they also say that they are filling it from a "high pressure nitrogen system", whereas Elon claims that the tank is filled with air. They can't even keep their own messaging straight.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/qt5p-_tE8d0?si=V5csPghK02wwd0or...
[1] https://youtu.be/JdkIOhFmbKI?si=ULvyIRWDRZRWlIWA&t=1340
Elon _always_ lies and exaggerates during these things. He seemingly can't stop himself.
He's only 78% correct.
I assume it's both...
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.
The Top Gear video mentions that kind of recharge time using an external system (though they do claim that they are trying to get it down to 30min).
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] https://www.bauer-kompressoren.de/en_en/pe-ve1
promise everything now, work out everything else later.
Air is basically nitrogen. It can probably use both.
Based on a cursory search, propellant-grade nitrogen requires a high purity (99.99%) [0]. I am no aerospace engineer, but I'd be interested to know what the actual requirements are for a system like that to work reliably. If 99.99% nitrogen is actually required, then I'd assume that the corresponding compressor would neither be compact nor particularly maintenance-free.
[0] MIL-PRF-27401
It's pretty simple, actually, Elon is a pathological liar.
The stock market agrees. TSLA continues trending downward.
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...
Not trending down anywhere near enough. Their PE Ratio is absurd, but it definitely proves the adage that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
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!
I'm not sure if the stock price means a lot. Tesla is kind of a meme stock, people buy it based on vibes, not based on what it's worth.
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.
> people buy it based on vibes, not based on what it's worth.
There's a little secret you should know about the value of all stocks...
All fancy sports cars are useless. Like really. To race them? What’s the point?
I mean, this is something we want to encourage. Everyone always likes to quote fiduciary duty ad nauseum. Here is a public company flying (lol) in the face of that in the spirit of, well, fun.
But, this version of the Roadster is just a concept car with many extra steps, isn't it?
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?
Propane powered cars were (are) on public roads, for better or worse.
> 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?
We're not just talking about "fiduciary duty". Some people put down large (250k) down payments for the Roadster when it was announced 9 years ago. If I were one of those folks I'd be more interested in getting an actual car I could drive than seeing a cool demo.
> TSLA continues trending downward
uh.. zoom out a bit? The stock price is double what it was two years ago
But you'd expect if this were being treated as a likely success for Tesla the announcement would have caused a price bump or at least a reversal of the trend.
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%.
Dude it's a supercar that like 1000 people can buy, this thing is a rounding error. Lamborghini's revenue was $3B last year, Tesla's was $94B. Supercars are barely a market.
You'll see the stock go up when Robotaxi and the Semi hit the market.
> 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.
Not the base model, the base was supposed to be more generally available for regular rich people not just hypercar people.
I suppose I should have written "continues recent downward trend." One would hope that a huge marketing investment like this would help hype the stock, no?
You're arguing that correlation = causation
There are 1000 variables that go into it
It's just a supercar. Supercars are allowed to be pointless.
This isn't the car though, this is a concept demo to keep people subscribed while they continue to delay the real car. I agree supercars are pointless in a lot of ways, but this is just not the same thing because it's vaporware meant to be provocative.
That sounds fine. Charging time isn't the problem though.
It's a typical Tesla/Elon marketing stunt and nothing more.
The maths of the flying is a little puzzling to me.
Back of the fag pack, let’s say it is light for an electric car and weights 1000kg. I’ll also go on a limb and guess the air flow is actually subsonic - 200m/s would make it 0.6 Ma (still insanely fast!). Even then, that requires 50 kg of air every second. Or 40 m^3. Using everyone’s favorite metric, this empties an Olympic swimming pool in 1 minute. It also requires a MW of power. I mean… that’s a lot??? Though admittedly, only about as much as accelerating 0-60 in 1 sec (50% of that in fact). So the flying would draw as much power as accelerating at full throttle.
Power requirements would go down a lot with slower exhaust speed, but then you need to shift more fluid. 40 m^3 already seems like a lot to me.
I get it’s a neat little demo and they have to get SpaceX into the picture somehow, but still I don’t understand how it’s supposed to add up. Also, what do I know - just a humble physicist.
In the video they claim the air is supersonic at exit, and point out the mach diamonds -- and I think they said 60 kilonewtons of thrust max, which is really a lot. So I think the volume of air would decrease roughly 60% from your estimate? I'm not a physicist.
I'm imagining this in two phases: phase one - you drive around, and excess energy goes to compressing air. Phase two - you use that compressed air which takes very little additional power, so you get to double up on force. I guess likely a 'running mode' where it's using some power to keep suction on.
I'm curious how much time you get at full blast vs 'just' enough to keep the car pinned to a wall, e.g. 1 vs 2 g.
So let’s double the speed - 1.2 Ma. You need half the mass now - 25kg/sec. If you want to have 10 seconds worth of hover - that’s 250kg of gas. Plus the weight of the storage tank. Plus - this is the amounts for hover. Not for any extra force on top of that.
It still doesn’t make much sense to me. And that’s before considering what happens when you get rocket stream hitting a tarmac road. Never mind public roads, this sounds like a major hazard anywhere. Plus the quantity of compressed gas son board (if that’s how it works)… not a pretty crash. At these numbers, imagine 10MJ released all of a sudden - apparently that’s about 2.5kg of TNT.
Surely I’m missing something… as I say, I can’t make sense of it.
Your math is pretty good, Tesla actually gave the storage tank capacity as 250kg
ETA: this is a horrifying amount of energy to be sitting on top of.
I guess on the plus side SpaceX has been trucking much worse around in and out of orbit verrry reliably for years now in tough conditions.
1% failure rate for space rockets might count as very reliable, but if 1% of all cars explode then we are in for a ride.
Can't wait to see the crash test video.
what's there to miss? if these ever make it to market their only purpose will be conspicuous consumption for vice-signalling ding dongs
The "pin to a wall" part uses fans, not the cold gas thrusters. It can probably stay there until the battery runs out. The gas thrusters are only needed if you want to go 0-60 in .8s (with the Thrust version), or if you want to fly (with the Rocket version). Probably those only last a few seconds before the air tanks need to recharge.
Mach diamonds in a compressed air jet aren’t surprising. You can get them from a canned compressed air duster: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/canned-air-is-unexpectedly-s...
> phase one - you drive around, and excess energy goes to compressing air.
It's an electric car - unless you've got an incredibly long charging cable, there is no "excess energy" when you're driving around.
Back of the what ? Shame on you
You have the answer in your calculations, you just need to take to its logical conclusion. I say its was balsa not cartoon...
It _does_ go supersonic, otherwise the converging-diverging nozzle doesn't make sense.
> Back of the fag pack,
napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.
Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?
> Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?
British officers planning trench raids in the front lines during WWI. Or, at least, that's where I've been told the expression originates.
Really, though, is it impossible to imagine no one, ever, using a cigarette pack to jot something down? It's a colloquialism. It doesn't even have to be taken literally to make sense. What is gained by questioning it on that level?
cigarette packs have not been blank on the back since the commenter has been alive
> is it impossible to imagine no one, ever, using a cigarette pack to jot something down?
Wouldn't the back have printing on it? I could imagine someone ripping the pack open and writing on the insides, which are blank.
In quite a few countries they were rather blank, not like today!
I don't know what cigarette packaging looked like at the time, but can imagine they were possibly government provided in a very simple paper package.
> Really, though, is it impossible to imagine no one, ever, using a cigarette pack to jot something down? It's a colloquialism. It doesn't even have to be taken literally to make sense. What is gained by questioning it on that level?
I took the OP's question to really be a question about the origin of that phrase, and with your answer, I learned something I didn't know before. So I, for one, am happy the question was asked.
I'm glad it was asked too and enjoyed the answer.
The OP's question was clearly skeptical though:
---
napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.
Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?
---
Implication being that writing on the back of cig packs does not make sense. I'd agree with your reading if not for the "at least kind of make sense" bit.
Bike shedding.
this is funny because I know so many people who always note down phone numbers and such for the day on cigarette packs. sometimes even carrying a few with them all the time.
in india.
Smokers who didn't have napkins or envelopes handy, presumably.
So this is a really neat technical demo, using spacecraft cold-gas thrusters and guidance hardware/software to do crazy stunt stuff in a car, but what's the relevance to an actual product that can be sold, even as a small-volume exotic? These are pressurized gas thrusters, so either the tanks, valves, and piping take up most of the interior of the car, or it has a low-single-digit number of seconds of thrust before recharge, probably both. Also the tanks for these things tend to use incredibly high pressures and are apt to explode spectacularly in any sort of accident.
This is sort of like demonstrating a car that softens the asphalt in front of it with lasers to get a better grip; difficult, technically impressive, and zero chance that it will ever be allowed on a public road.
Edit: According to this Motor Trend article, it uses a big carbon-fiber pressure vessel at 5500psi, so basically an enormous fragile bomb. And the one that did all the stunts had two of the pressure vessels which would have filled most of the interior.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-roadster-thrust-system...
You an actually see what the pressure vessel looks like in the recent Top Gear episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdkIOhFmbKI&t=1239
Doesn't look too big, tbh. They also explain some of the mechanics used to make it happen.
> a big carbon-fiber pressure vessel at 5500psi
Other cars have these tanks, but full of flammable fuel, not just air.
Off the top of my head, the honda civic CNG (3600 psi)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_GX#Specifications
the toyota marai (10,000 psi hydrogen)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai#High-pressure_hyd...
and probably the other cng or hydrogen cars.
It looks like those tanks are 5-8kg? The Tesla's is apparently 250kg.
I thought carbon fiber wasn't good with pressure, hence OceanGate Titan implosion
Some off piste skiers carry a carbon fiber canister with pressurized nitrogen gas, to inflate airbags from backpack in case of an avalanche. Carbon fiber is not that good with point pressure, but strong for evenly distributed loads.
At this point I look at wikipedia what happened to the submarine bamboozled mentioned. Ooops. Heh, the pressure of water is as evenly distributed as can be. Seems my background in watersports is not enough to moonlight in material engineering.
CF can make a fine pressure vessel it's just difficult to build and they require constant inspection that OceanGate didn't perform (and ignored evidence from their own monitoring system that the PV was responding differently to pressure after a hard bang it suffered when docking in one of the last few dives). SpaceX already has experience building the COPVs that Tesla is probably using and knows their limits pretty well though I don't want to be standing near one in a major crash either.
SpaceX has been using carbon fiber pressure tanks for awhile. Rocket Labs has been using them too.
Different forces: expansive (Roadster) vs compressive (OceanGate). This makes some logical sense since fibers/strands/ropes are good for tensile strength vs. compressive forces.
I guess this is the ultimate version of "you can't push a rope".
Professor Farnsworth: "Dear Lord! That's over 150 atmospheres of pressure!"
Fry: "How many atmospheres can the ship withstand?"
Professor Farnsworth: "Well, it's a space ship, so I'd say anywhere between zero and one."
Well, yeah. The full thruster version only seats one, and is invite only for purchase, and is not street legal.
I'm wondering if it could even be sold to individuals given that the thrusters probably count as restricted military technology?
It's unclear what they'll be classified as and probably comes down to some negotiation and lawyering to decide how restricted they are. You can sell a lot of restricted hardware to US citizens that you can't sell internationally due to ITAR.
*Not street legal in 48/50 states
Looks like a sensible turning down of the Cybertruck aesthetic into something that looks good.
That said, the production issues with the Cybertruck mean you’d be a fool to reserve one of these. Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls. Tesla has torched their engineering reputation lately and this page is making a lot of promises about revolutionary things.
> Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls.
Sound advice for people looking for a practical car. But if you have Lambo money who cares? I have never seen a supercar described as reliable.
People with lambo money generally also want a car that doesn't fall apart constantly AND rapidly lose its value.
If you care about the car not rapidly losing value, you definitely don't have lambo money and you're too poor to be dabbling in supercar silliness.
Er, is that not what Lambos do?
I always heard they were a pain to get serviced with long wait times. Not sure how well they hold their value either.
> what glued panels fall off
The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.
This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.
Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).
Lotus did this on their chassis not because it was cheap, but because it allowed them to use lighter, thinner aluminum which would have been ruined by welding. It was almost certainly not cheaper than welding, they had to add little protrusions that kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart, which is what made for the best bonding. They went to a lot of trouble to make this process work, and it resulted in one of the best sports cars of all time in terms of pure driving experience.
Tesla has very different reasons for doing what they did on the cybertruck. It's very much a form over function. Lotus has always been function over form (to a fault, in terms of their financial position).
> kept all the pieces 0.2mm apart
You can add glass microspheres to adhesives to guarantee bondline thickness. It's often done nowadays whenever you have different metals meeting with a glue bond because it keeps them electrically isolated, preventing galvanic corrosion.
> Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones
That's pretty standard. An M3 has long pushed the tolerances of things in the engine more than a base-model 3 series. An S-class has more whiz-bang-hope-it-still-works-in-ten-years stuff than a C-class. A Lexus has more going on than a boring base Corolla.
That is the norm in all "sporty" stuff. Expensive car/motorbikes/bicycles use light alloys that wear out much faster than heavier, cheaper materials
Most cars have glued joints and body panels these days.
The issue isn't glue, its that parts are falling off.
This type of vehicle isn't intended to drive at speed, at least not very far. It's targeted at collectors who will park it in a garage with their other supercars. It's a status symbol with wheels, not transportation or even a toy for track days. (And I don't mean that as a criticism, there's nothing wrong with wealthy people buying collectibles.)
> (And I don't mean that as a criticism, there's nothing wrong with wealthy people buying collectibles.)
there's a whole lot of systemic issues with wealthy people buying low-poly cars to their collection.
Don't make fun of the Delorean. Or The Thing.
What systemic issues?
Issues like "should society allow an economic system that leads to such vast wealth inequality?"
It’s not premium enough for collectors. I could see plenty of tech people buying one as a daily driver that they also take to the track though.
$250k deposit for the mid tier? They’ll be in some Saudi collections for sure.
Everyone is talking about the Cybertruck, but both the 3 and the Y have plenty of engineering problems as well. I believe both cars are listed as below-average reliability by CR.
Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ on an yearly basis until you get sick of fixing the suspension. Tesla claims to have fixed the issue on newer models (and apparently they did a lot of work on the suspension), but they don't really take responsibility for their old cars so I doubt they will take responsibility when their design causes problems for you.
I do enjoy driving my 2019 SR+ Model 3, but I hate when people do the whole "Well on first principles, EVs have less parts so they are more reliable..." thing. My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
Early Model 3/Ys built in the US were unreliable. The ones built in Shanghai, though, are excellent. Berlin is somewhere in the middle.
FWIW, I'm into my fourth year of (Chinese-built) Model 3 ownership and it's been rock solid, the only services so far were to replace the air filter and wipers.
Ooh, and tires I hope! Mine eats tires.
That could be bad alignment or tire pressure. Are the tires cupping, are you getting uneven lateral wear, anything like that?
Besides that, EVs are just really heavy and weight wears out tires. Just a fact of life.
Kind of a silly question but I want to be sure I’m piecing together a fair picture: both of those are five minute tasks you do yourself outside the auto parts store / driveway, right?
Accessing the air filter on the Model 3 isn't great but yes, can do it yourself. Many people just pay someone else to do things like this though.
???
Rip away center tunnel carpet on rhs (lhd vehicle), remove 2 screws from below glove compartment, fold away panel, remove cap from filter compartment, remove 2 filters - put back together in reverse order.
That's literally a 20 minute job if you about know what you should be doing - a.k.a. read about the process in the free service manual of Tesla (only need an account, free) or watched a YT video...
The difficulty is more related to the tight spot it's in and not the process.
True, I broke the clip changing mine....
Yes. Or roll it into a $80 service charge when you get anything else done at a Tesla service center. Like the air filters.
So many things you just said are wrong. The control arms are 100k mile parts, and you can easily replace them with Unplugged Performance versions for under $1k.
And I have no idea what kind of driving he's doing to spend 2-3k$/y . I got Front Upper Control Arms replaced under warranty, exactly once, in the lifetime of my 2019 M3 (also Fremont-built). I do a yearly inspection just to catch issues before they have a chance to become really problematic, but for the past 4 years I've always been told that "the car's underside is just perfect, there's nothing wrong with it".
Would you like to see the bills I got from Tesla? I've shared them before and I'm happy to do it again.
(Also my Tesla is 74.5k miles, so nowhere near 100k)
-edit-
I was a victim of misinformation from my local EV repair shop.
https://www.dormanproducts.com/pages/products/oe-fix/article...
The prices you are talking about are incorrect but there are 3rd party parts now.
> My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
This is less about EVs vs ICEs and more about Toyota's engineering quality vs Tesla's engineering quality, which is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Homer Simpson's barbecue pit.
I should note that I didn't mean to imply it was inherent that EVs were less reliable, but rather, that engineering mattered and Tesla's engineering always had underdeveloped parts.
Hey now. Homer’s BBQ pit was a work of art, built through pure passion of emotion.
That was my first thought, Cybertruck: The Car. But then it drove up a wall and stopped on the ceiling and flew down. That was awesome. I'm sure it will be a nightmare to own.
> glued panels fall off at speed
Given some of the tauted 'features' of this thing, I'd be more concerned about it blowing up in my driveway.
Hardly a concern when you can't afford one.
I liked the rounded one lots better:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/NextGenT...
(just personal preference)
Looks good? The previous version looked incredible. This looks like the Delorean and the Cybertruck had an unwanted child.
at least the CyberTruck shipped.
9 years since the announcement of Roadster v2, people who paid 50k deposits are still waiting.
Time to up the promises, and ask for more $50k deposits for v3!
I think the front view reminds me of the old lamborghini countach.
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Lamborgh...
Reminds me of the car they'd dress up to look like a Countach, the Fiero.
I just wanted to get one for $1mln I have laying somwhere, but now I'll wait for more reviews. Thanks for the tip.
Just buy it in 15 years when it has depreciated to nothing /s
Looks like a Fiero
There are three configurations:
- Performance: road ready, seats two, active aero and a “multi-mode suction system.” 0-60 mph in under 1.6 seconds. Available by reservation.
- Thrust: race ready, seats two, adds rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters. 0-60 mph in under 0.9 seconds. Limited release.
- Rocket: seats one, adds thrusters around the perimeter of the car for upward and rotational movement. 0-60 mph in under 0.59 seconds and a top speed of over 230 mph. Invite only.
Per Electrek: https://electrek.co/2026/10/15/tesla-unveils-cyberfied-new-r...
“Configurations”
Like any of this will materialise. Where’s the original Roadster people actually put down payments on?
The original roadster was Tesla's first car.
> every usable void in the car is packed with carbon-fiber overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs) to store compressed gas
Hahah, the failure modes are going to be exciting.
When I heard "carbon-fiber" and "pressure vessel" in the same sentence I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion
This would be the opposite of that, though.
What is the suction useful for? The engineering blows my mind but why would someone use this? Does it help on turns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downforce
Yes, and at high speed, it helps make sure you don't take flight accidentally.
When you don't have enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e21ZjwZGjiQ
It's for more traction. Not a road car, but this one does 0-100kph in just under 1s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQIu5tZ0vbQ
The rocket version is the real life bat-mobile to me. Impressive.
As an engineer myself, watching the Hagerty interview [0] was an ...interesting experience.
Every time Tesla's VP of vehicle engineering [0] explains the Engineering of the product by stating that they are "breaking the laws of physics", everything he says is losing a bit of credibility...
[0] https://youtu.be/22rvpUecLts?t=791
Is this page geo-locked? All I get is a page telling me that I'm unauthorised to view the page.
The livestream has the stunts: https://x.com/Tesla/status/2110788059008819215
The flying-on-RCS-in-gravity reminds me of those old videos of exoatmospheric kill vehicle tests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnofCyaWhI0
Patently absurd, of course, but amazing too.
Not RCS (used a gimbaled turbofan instead), but the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Vehicle) is also incredibly cool.
Cool!!! Whoever thinks this is *not cool* please, leave your cool card at the door
This sounds like it was written by Elon when he was posing as one of his family members. (in case people forgot he did that)
Cool, but not realistic. This is a prototype, if you have enough money you can build a prototype car that does just about anything. When the car starts shipping the "cool" features will be missing.
This is a cool prototype, though
There are many cool prototypes for flying cars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD2__BcAxSk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9hdO8avWbo
https://journal.classiccars.com/2026/10/16/delorean-enters-f...
I would consider most of those more like "helicopters that can also drive".
and i don't see any of them actually flying in these videos
This is something straight out of Rocket League. Completely impractical, but awesome at the same time.
What is the practical use case of this? https://x.com/JehovaTrades/status/2110906028971938252
Literally dozens of scenarios have been documented. e.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=f1B21Nd9oZ4&t=1000s
Nice ;)
Americans will do anything to avoid roundabouts.
Neat, but that car has to be practically empty. It appears to have very low inertia.
By rough estimate, using hydroxide jet packs as a reference, I’d say they got it down to about 600kg.
You were never stuck in traffic I take it:D Insurance will be a bitch, but people will move out of your way.
FWIW if you’re that concerned about scaring other people out of your way you could just wave a gun around out the driver’s side window. You’d spend less money and get your desired effect.
You're forgetting that other drivers very well may be armed with an even bigger gun.
Some of us don't live in countries where this is acceptable.
Why would you suggest something so unnecessarily violent?
Cars kill just as many people as guns
WTF, that the most cartoonist thing i've seen today. Does it really have to do the flip ?
yes
Flexing on the poors
To show off? Like whatever you think of it the market for supercars is rich men who want to show off so Tesla is playing in that market.
Sexist much? https://www.instagram.com/supercarblondie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule
To play Spy Hunter irl?
Uhh to be sick af?
To brag to other, lesser billionaires.
What is the practical use case of having a bunch of high powered jets all around the car? It could be used to automatically avoid fatal accidents, or at least reduce risk and damage in an accident situation. I thought everybody who watched the presentation video would reach that conclusion.
> It could be used to automatically avoid fatal accidents
I find it genuinely hilarious that anyone could possibly think this is a good idea.
> It could be used to automatically avoid fatal accidents…
Or make a few! https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
> SpaceX thinks it knows why its newest Starship spacecraft went boom this week. "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).
I look forward to phantom braking changing to phantom launching your ass into the ceiling of an underpass
You are correct in that almost nobody commenting here watched the presentation.
you know what happens to you if a jet engine moves your car out of the way? you have the accident inside your car by yourself, you become the accident. physics states that all forces will be equal.
If the car doesn't cause fatal accidents in the first place.
I'll admit, that was pretty cool
Fast forward to 11:15 to see the tricks.
Some smart cookies put up a scam video topping Google searches for the announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5lmBq00utE
AI Elon pressure selling "act decisively, double your money" by transferring crypto to some wallet and getting 2x back - yeah, right
(PS Google shut it down)
Youtube terminated the account :)
Tesla has lost the battery tech, volume EV manufacturin, and humanoid robotics to China (when trade restrictions don't apply). It's time to hype something different.
Okay that's one of the coolest things I've seen in a while since the rockets landing.
Car looks half decent too.
> Car looks half decent too
To me it looks like a mashup of a Ferrari and a Cybertruck. That's not a good thing.
Same; there are stylish super cars... this again looks like a 5 year old kid drawing like the Cybertruck does.
This was 100% precursor to the absorption of Tesla into SpaceX and I’m here for it
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-spac...
This would be a horrible deal for Tesla investors.
Long-term investors would lose about 40% of their investment to subsidize the inflated valuation of X (bought by xAI), the inflated valuation of xAI (bought by SpaceX), and SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
The valuation of both companies was inflated prior to acquisition, and Tesla shareholders will be asked to dilute their investment by absorbing that cumulative inflation.
Not even to mention that Musk would have exclusive control over the entire conglomerate, with not even the pretense of a Board to check his power.
When even Steven Mark Ryan is like "let's pump the breaks a little bit," you know it's bad.
It’s about Elon’s control over these companies. Creating a valuable company with durable revenue that produces products that the market actually wants, with stable governance by a board representing the shareholders of the company? Bah! What am I, a sucker?
He wants control, so that he can use investor’s cash to do epic stuff like humanoid robots, cyber trucks, an AI that tells you that apartheid was actually cool, rocket cars, real life brain controlled robot bacon chungus, etc.
> SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
Well, that and being the only reusable rocket company ever with an even bigger version on the horizon and a global Internet service that's about to get a whole lot better thanks to aforementioned rocket. Both of which are hugely profitable.
Rockets and Internet service are a tiny part of the valuation. It's mostly imaginary AI related sales.
You don't know why people value the company and excluding the two very profitable parts of the business in your list is obviously misleading to the point that anyone reading that should be offended that you think they are that stupid.
> You don't know why people value the company…
We do, at least at the time of the merger, as it existed as separate parts prior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceXAI#Finance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_public_offering_of_Spa...
Their own numbers in the S1 they released before the IPO listed their potential market growth, and it was almost entirely in the AI division. These aren't my numbers, these are Musk's numbers.
Yeup. In 2025–
“Other shareholder meetings are snoozefests but ours are bangers. Look at this. This is sick.”
Elon’s pay package: he gets 400 million Tesla shares if he raises the market cap of tesla(xspacextwitterxAIx) to $8.5 trillion (nominal). He spent a cool 250 mil on making friends with the republicans, so as to ensure that his incoming epic awesome merger is not blocked.
A merger, plus the amount of inflation this government has already produced over the next decade, will probably see X co hitting Elon’s salary goals.
Yes, let's combine Twitter, an AI company, and a space company with a solar company, car company, battery company, and robotics company, so that we can have one huge valuation that can't be possibly delivered upon and losses will be absorbed for a short period. What could go wrong?
Have you heard of the concept of Conglomerates?
In the US, GE makes your microwave, aircraft engines, and also the gas turbine your power plant uses.
Siemens makes appliances, MRI machines, and even nuclear reactors I believe.
Or in Korea: Samsung, Hyundai, LG. Samsung makes chips, TVs, washing machines.
Japan: Mistubishi makes washing machines and excavators and mining equipment.
India: Reliance has cell phone service, grocery stores, and oil rigs. Tata makes cars, has tier 1 datacenters, and runs hotels too.
This is hardly a novel idea.
Samsung makes a lot more than that. Well, lots of them make a lot more than what is listed, but Samsung pretty much has division for everything.
Japanese companies manage fine doing this kind of thing.
Japanese keiretsu also usually have a bank at their center or have both horizontal and vertical integrations. Where they don't have integration, they at least have financial integration. Whatever Musk is doing is far less cohesive in every way.
Musk's hype the stuff up, raise money, can be applied to any venture.
The only charitable part of this idea is that it will insulate the stock price from the actual balance sheet. It asks investors not if they want to invest in an EV automaker but in "Elon Musk Inc" essentially. He's been doing some variation of this his whole career, this would just give him the ability to dilute the numbers of each component industry further. The problem is the brand name of Elon Musk is worth a lot less than it was in the 10s.
Did you forget X money and Musk's literally first job being in a bank?
A payments platform is not a bank. Beyond the services being different and the customers being different (consumers vs businesses), both had to partner with... well a bank, to provide the actual financial services.
Do they have a gigantic tumor like twitter and Space AI slapped on the side? If all of the products were profitable it would work.
I don’t have time to look up whatever Masayoshi Son has wasted a few billion dollars on today, but yes kinda.
Reliance in India basically ran a severe loss for Jio (their new mobile network where they essentially gave the country free mobile internet), but paid for by the profits of their fossil fuel business.
For a while, didn't Amazon do the same? They basically ran a loss with Amazon retail but profits on AWS, until they spun off?
So yes, this is fairly common with conglomerates, (Amazon sold diapers at a loss to put diapers.com out of business). And in fact, this tactic is a target for anti-trust laws where they exist.
I think Twitter is the one that actually makes money.
Until they sold all their compute to anthropic, Ai was the boat anchor.
Starlink makes the money.
No way in hell is Twitter making a lick of profit.
I'm glad someone else gets it.
What about Tesla's management style would you call Japanese?
I’m highlighting that companies can and do have all kinds of departments doing seemingly unrelated things if they want to.
I'm pointing out that Japanese companies can do that because they're organized and managed like Japanese companies. Tesla is not, and in fact lacks pretty much all the organizing characteristics and long term planning that enables keiretsu to function.
Don’t think it requires layers and layers of management attending meetings for 12 hours a day to function as a prerequisite.
Kamikaze
It would almost be as big a monstrosity as Amazon
but... All elon companies. More valuable bundled, because all the elon lovers don't have to pick where they throw their tithes. I'd love it even more if they throw in a tunnel construction and a human brain implant company in the mix while they are at it.
Add weapon and tank and they will reach the scale of Samsung.
Tesla-Yutani
I'm sure they'll release this one as soon as the release the Roadster introduced 9 years ago.
This is the the release of the Roadster introduced 9 years ago. This is what people who put down a deposit (upwards of 250k) back 9 years ago are in line to receive.
Wonder if this round of suckers is going to have to wait 9 years for the next demo too.
Incredible demo but I also have to agree, I will wait for the first Top Gear or Markus Brownlee unsupervised review before believing this project has been achieved.
> Markus Brownlee
> unsupervised
This guy might be the most biased reviewer on the planet. Dude practically cashes checks from Apple on camera.
I”m not going to get into Musk himself. Nor will I get into the artistic absurdity that a moder supercar represents. But I will speak for the hackers amongst us:
The problem with the demo is that it was vapourware. Period, full stop. It is not the car they are selling to us, and they haven't even begun making them. I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown.
Steve Jobs said that "Real artists ship," because the act of shipping is the act of making the incredibly difficult and important decisions that manage the enormous number of constraints that go into the actual product.
If people like concept cars that don't have to actually work or meet a specific price point, fine. It is entertainment, nothing wrong with that. But I am not and will not be impressed until, like Apple, the thing they show on stage is so far along that you can be expected to buy one within weeks, not years.
I am not telling anyone how to judge this. But by my very old-school standards, vapourware sucks.
Doesn't matter if the product is real. The idea is to cultivate a sense of wonder and adventure. To get people talking about you. Then you sell more of the products that are real.
Doesn't matter if the product is real. The idea is to cultivate a sense of hope that the $250,000 deposit should stay where it's at, no matter what people talking about me think of that idea. At least I haven't bought a cyber truck.
Exactly, are we forgetting the apple airpower? or apple intelligence?
To be fair, those were both post-Jobs projects at Apple, so Jobs' "real artists ship" quote doesn't exactly apply.
How much did AirPower pre-orders go for?
The first orders for this car were in 2017, still yet to be fulfilled. Tesla will keep taking money, without delivering anything, for decades to come.
At-least Tesla didn't get sued and settle for $250M.
For context: https://9to5mac.com/2026/07/24/apples-250-million-siri-settl...
Not quite a $250M settlement, but a woman died.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-judge-upholds-243-million-v...
Yup, integrity doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is how many dollars you have in your bank account to buy influence!
That's true in practical terms but that doesn't mean I like anything about this sort of approach. It's not a positive thing; it's a successful thing.
Real?! From these circus folks? Their (lack of) sense for reality (practicality, safety) you see in this circus is scary! Same folks and mentality make those other ones too that you are supposed to use!
Unless the products that are real are Cybertrucks. No way in hell you're selling more of those.
Concept cars often having been run through either CFD or a wind tunnel and also haven’t been vetted for NHTSA requirements, and both those and coefficient of friction are why cars all start to look alike.
I can’t recall the vehicle now but there was a futuristic car around the turn of the century that had a lot of buzz, but changed dramatically for production and nobody liked it. But an engineer on the project said the concept car had less aerodynamic drag going backward than forward, which is quite an achievement.
That is one of at least a dozen experiences I have had that tell me not to get attached until the prototypes ship to car reviewers for examination.
The one I remember is the Pontiac Aztek.
The Mercedes W124 had a cfd of 0.29. It doesn't look anything like modern cars with similar cfd. (VW Arteon, Volvo S60, Lexus IS)
It seems the 3 demos shown were even done with differing cars - it's likely that no single prototype car could do all 3 things!
The gas tanks take hours to refill, so even with one car that could do it all they'd need 3 of them.
They should really consider going electric
I've recently come to the conclusion that Musk isn't selling products anymore, he's selling memestocks. He's a master of grabbing attention in an attention economy and it seems to be working out well for him.
This is so spot on. These things work in a bull market and we’ve been in a bull market for arguably 15 years. In a bear market the distortions that were created over the previous years are reversed and usually to an extreme.
It’s somewhat notable that Tesla was up significantly overnight and closed the day down 2%.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a very lengthy period after which people will look back and wonder “what the hell was everyone thinking?”
There are plenty of examples in the world where the one is all that is necessary. It's not like there are more than one Burj Khalifa building in the world. Many people pay for a one off car. There are multiple TV shows based on this very concept.
Just because it's not your hobby or within your budget, doesn't mean that others must feel the same way as you.
Steve wasn't an artist. Did Steve ship a product when Atari asked him to redesign pong into a one player game? No, that was Steve Wozniak. Jobs paid him a cool $350 out of the $5k bonus he got for that. Maybe he was an artist. Con-artist.
it's like saying, don't make no concept cars. No car manufacturers will follow that.
> it was vapourware. Period, full stop.
What sad reaction to a real life flying car.
What was demonstrated was not flight.
Out of curiosity, how do you define flight? To me, I think the Roadster flew because it clearly maintained powered propulsion after leaving the ground. Sure, it only flew for a few seconds, but it's not far from the Wright Bros.' first flight.
Woody said:
> This isn't flying, it's falling with style.
Being able to take off from the ground. Not using a second system to vacuum its way up to a platform and then fall slowly.
This machine demonstrated zero ability to gain altitude in the air alone.
The Kickflip demo showed it taking off from the ground: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5vsHHPVhJg
I don't think you watched the whole show. The third stunt was taking off from a stop to jump over some vehicles. So it did gain altitude in the air alone.
Well color me corrected. I’d probably quibble that this was a hop/jump the same way humans can jump but not fly, but I don’t have a strong definition at that point to argue for.
I’d need to go deep into something like being able to maintain altitude in the medium of air without positive impulse or something, but again, I don’t have a strong enough definition at this point.
the timeline we're in is various adjectives including sad. reality never hits how you envision when you're 10.
Out of curiosity, what is your sad P(>500 people owning a flying Tesla by 2030)?
Why does it matter? Did you ask the same question in 2007-8 when the first Waymo cars were on the streets for testing?
No.
It’s a cool concept car, and very impressive engineering. I don’t get why people hate on it so much.
Must surely exceed P(AI doom)
Zero. Maybe a dozen, non road legal ofc. And I'm not particularly sad about it. Sorry to disappoint.
Concept products are not real products. Their purpose is often to make a point, to prove something is possible, to make a brand look cooler, or just to have fun. I don't think I would ever see this car flying on the road myself. But part of me likes the fact that there are people out there making crazy things like this. It is more fun.
Yeah, not judging either.
Looking at the pictures, design-wise, I’m almost tempted to ask: “what was the prompt?”.
I actually think it's impressive that they have a prototype. It's less of a leap to think it could end up getting shipped. Whereas other competitors in the industry like Ferrari (Jony Ive collaboration) are launching cars with renders.
I think the event was a very Elon Musk way to say, we're not making a Roadster. Which makes sense, Tesla is leaning into completely self-driving cars and the Roadster as originally envisioned would be the opposite of that.
> I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown
I am. These machines push the limits of prevailing technology. Strong organizations set stretch goals and pursue them regardless of market viability. Sometimes they share this with everyone, and convention has named this practice "concept" cars. I appreciate when they take the risk to do this. And when they do it well, credit is deserved.
There are real engineers and technicians behind this. A lot of them. And they will tell the story of this event for the rest of their lives. I've known a number of people with such stories. They're among the best people I've ever met.
It is possible to exist without cranking the cynical knob to 11 at all times.
It is pretty common for automobile companies to show concept cars!
Thousands of people put down deposit for this car. Well, for a car called roadster.
Yes. And we're OK to wait.
Most concepts never leave the ground. Sorry, I had to...
At least Elon's dealer is regularly shipping him ketamine on time, in quantity, and under budget.
I mean, if you were a dealer and had a customer like Musk, wouldn't you do the same?
What a weird thing to be angry about.
Disregarding that, all stuff that Tesla (and SpaceX) have demoed had become commercial products, so I wouldn't call Tesla a vaporware company.
Sure, it takes them decades ... but that's different from not shipping.
This will not ship with the demonstrated capabilities for reasons discussed elsewhere in these comments. GP isn't calling Tesla a vaporware company. GP is calling this product as demonstrated vaporware.
I don't get it. Musk has an insane track record of shipping things. Well later then he claimed but he usually gets it done. I'm not seeing anyone else leading companies that upended the domination of fossil fueled cars, paved the way for brain implants, build re-usable rockets and create global access to the internet.
I too remember when we started colonizing Mars back in 2021. And that time I called my neighbor's Tesla robotaxi to drive me around in 2020.
I don't need a robotaxi because I'm taking the hyperloop everywhere
To where? Surely not to work since that's been made obsolete since autumn 2025.
Idk I’m a fan of companies doing really cool stuff even if they don’t sell it
"As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine" -- some Reddit comment.
Concepts cars are cars.
What was shown on stage is closer to the Apollo lander training rigs than a vehicle that you could purchase and drive on a public road.
It can never, ever be sold as a production vehicle! The COPV gas storage is under enormous pressure, and would explode with the force of a decent sized bomb if damaged in an accident.
These things would be regularly turning their owners into pink mist, emulating Stockton Rush at a larger scale.
I know its marketing but still it's super inspiring to me. Try pulling it off in real hardware. It's incredible.
It’s a CO2 canister with no battery or motors on wheels. What was incredible again?
Do you have any proof of this, or are you just parroting claims that others are making?
To parrot other people’s claims I would have needed to read them first. So this is my own well informed speculation. I have worked with CO2 thrust and remote controlled cars in my hobby pursuits. This is the simplest way to achieve what was demonstrated.
It can’t be CO2 because they said it refills itself.
That wasn't what was demonstrated, so therefore it doesn't exist. With the past dishonest publicity stunts done before, Tesla has earned this extra level of cynicism.
You're posting from a 1-day-old account...
The audience for this must get really scared when the magician cuts the lady in half
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... - Worth a read if you haven't already
I like the spirit
sometimes u gotta just ignore economics and instead make history!
When I saw the headlines “Tesla shows flying car” I got excited, then watched the demo and was thoroughly disappointed. How can anyone write that headline?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Coming_Out_of_Her_Well
Tesla Roadster vaporware edition MK2: now with actual vapor!
Can this be scaled down to a Roomba? Then it would both be more useful at picking stuff up off the floor, and able to recover from falling down the stairs.
Vroomba!
Square-cube scaling being what it is, I think it'd be much more reasonable to use propellers (like quadcopters) than try to scale down COPV's to a Vroomba! size. That's actually an interesting product idea. A small flying vacuum cleaner could clean a variety of surfaces; not only floors.
(And you could even mount the charging station on the ceiling, so it doesn't take up floor space).
All the dust around it on the floor would end up airborne again.
That's OK if it's just to save itself from dying in the event of a fall down the stairs. Should be infrequent!
Much cheaper to make it better at avoiding falling down the stairs (I've had two for years and they have never fallen down stairs). This is about as practical as the idea elsewhere in this topic that the roadster could avoid high speed collisions by boosting out of the way.
Roombas are already programmed not to yeet themselves off of stairs
I guess nobody informed my roomba of this.
Imagine walking up stair and suddenly a roomba launch itself at your face.
The bright side is that it would immediately vacuum all the debris it would cause in the process
Yes, it isn't even special at all.
https://www.amazon.com/window-cleaning-robot/s?k=window+clea...
Fan cars are pretty old. From that perspective, the driving upside down part is "less impressive" but screw it, still cool.
I want to see it on a track going all out, but something about what they decided to focus on tells me nobody gives a damn about this actually doing anything performance car related.
This is not a flying car. It's a falling car. It's good at falling though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5vsHHPVhJg
Falling with style
it's a cat.
Does anyone have more info on the cupholders? I need to know it won’t spill my coffee.
When you get into an accident with another car, the explosion of that 10 kPSI tank behind your seat. will make sure you are the coffee. You know...Engineering...
On the bright side, we're going to find out if extremely high pressure explosions can put out lithium ion battery fires. I vote no, but it'll likely remove any nearby debris/combustible material/organic matter/pink mist out of the combustion area.
It could create entirely new kinds of fires!
Teslanado, coming soon™ to streets near you.
Not spilling coffee during a roll is a solved problem: https://youtu.be/V9pvG_ZSnCc
Comes with a Stanley cup and a small cork
"gimbal cupholder" is what you want to google.
They're typically used to affix your beer to the steering wheel of your boat.
Using suction to create downforce is an idea that’s been built for race track usage in the past (and been successful in F1 in the ‘70s), but the near certainty of mortal injury from the system failing (and thus destabilizing the vehicle at high speed) made it unpopular and its incorporation has been very limited (McLaren and Ariel did versions, I think). I’m confused how this has (or will pass) regulatory approval for road use. Is the idea that the driver should only utilize this on a track?
> I’m confused how this has (or will pass) regulatory approval for road use.
It won't.
And this is also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH. Some cars come with "Donut" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
I think others have used a skirt that needs to extend quite close to the ground to work, so uneven ground can cause sudden loss of suction. Maybe this is solvable somehow?
I'm more worried about the COPVs exploding in a crash, for the thruster version. Hopefully it will keep the tanks empty unless a special launch mode is enabled with a warning siren sounding as long as they're pressurized.
> Maybe this is solvable somehow?
Why would you solve that? Open roads aren't a track, we don't build highways with 90 degree turns, there is no need for such thing
Are they worse than a gasoline tank exploding?
Very much so. A gasoline tank creates a fireball but not an explosion.
And this Tesla would then have air tanks going flying at explosive speeds, if I understand things correctly?
Yes. Inside the car.
This doesn't tend to end well. https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
What movie physics are you referring to?
Yes.
gasoline tanks explode? how ... ?
The T50 has a fan for down force: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
The "base" model will pretty much be McMurtry Spéirling at promised quarter of the price.
what about like a countless random debris on the road? wouldn't that get sucked up and damage the fan?
> I’m confused how this has (or will pass) regulatory approval for road use.
Corruption? Musk is already down a quarter of a billions in donations to the GOP for these incoming elections.
Probably allowed outside of California.
The suction system is interesting. It's possible for it to work on the street but incredibly dumb. The kind of gap you have to keep is millimeters off the ground and your typical streets in the real world have so much damage and inconsistency it's hard to imagine it working for anything but straight line acceleration on a newly paved road. This would be a suicide mission to drive this on Skyline with the expectation to get 2-3g in the bends.
The concerns about debris and so forth are somewhat valid but can be taken care of. Similar to dust collectors for woodworking - this will have a cyclone separator, mesh, and whatnot that will prevent the blades from getting wrecked by a rock. But wouldn't want to tail this thing. It'll be pelting your car.
It'll be another "car goes really fast in a straight line" feature which electric cars have always done well with. While it'd be cool to use the suction system to get incredible g forces in bends - it'll be too dangerous for public roads. You'd immediately fly off the road if you lost any suction and I don't know what public roads (especially in the Bay Area) you could run such a system reliably on.
Okay, that's some of the most impressive feats I've ever seen. Congratulations to the engineers!
Is that "flying" car a "real" car? As in full battery and standard weight or is it just a shell stripped down to the minimum to save weight.
Looking at the promo video... This thing weights less than 500 pounds, guaranteed.
No to mention there was no actual driver in it.
~1700KG with 600L of nitrogen gas at 10,000 PSI
If you do the math that gets you about 13 seconds of hovering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts
Apparently the thing used in the flying video was a "different car" to the actual car that drives.
According to who?
It was a clearly different unit, look at the wheel caps.
Actually, only the demo car up front and close had different wheel caps. The car that accelerated was similar looking than the one that flew.
Please show us the math on wheels and tires and battery and electric motor that would make a car go 0 to 60 in 0.8 seconds and weighs under 500 pounds.
It only has to do it once. Ie it only needs 0.8 seconds of battery. If you think you are looking at a real production car I’ve got a 2017 Tesla roadster to sell you.
Because it makes zero economic sense to make a car do that?
Remember when you were a child and your imagination wasn't killed yet by money and politics?
Absolutely.
If only I had been given fidicuary responsibility for millions of peoples life savings. Then I could build a car that has 0 chance of ever reaching production, just to impress my friends.
Imagination is powerful.
Yes it is, and imagination is how we got to the moon, or got rockets that land, or why I can talk to my computer now.
Most supercars and hypercars make zero economic sense.
For the buyer, yes. But this one also makes zero sense to the maker.
you fail to understand the psychology of billionaires
Why do car manufacturers brag about hitting 60 mph in 1, 2 or whatever seconds? For a normal person, does this really matter - what is the big deal if a car hits 60 mph in 5 seconds instead of 1? There are more important things like safety, repairability, longevity etc right?
It’s standard measure of acceleration. If you are going to sell a car on performance (like say… a sporty roadster), it’s a great metric.
People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.
That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.
It's just one stat and it makes for a good headline. Obviously those other things are important but they don't exactly fit into a headline. Oh and some people like fast cars. Why is that so confusing?
For the Roadster, it's a supercar. None of those things matter much.
For something like the performance versions of their high-volume vehicles, it's partially for the same reasons people like sports cars, or at least how some people like a sports car that is faster / quicker and gives them more excitement while driving (obviously a lot of the appeal for sports cars otherwise is the sporty look/sound of the engine, which Tesla doesn't really deliver on at all).
People are interested in speed performance. What other measure should we use?
As someone who has had a Mercedes AMG that could do 0-60s in less than 4s for a few years, it just gets boring so fast, and it makes you question why you bought the thing in the first place. It's unusable in almost every situation on the road, except for the rare "opportunity" when you stop at traffic lights next to a Golf R and yes turns out you have a bigger.....turbo.....than them. Well done, that 5 second ego boost was really worth all the money and looking like a dick to anyone above the age of 25.
Nowadays as a "petrol head" when I look at stats I want to see weight - as little of it as possible. Horsepower needs to begin with 2, maybe with 3 in some cars, any more than that and it's silly. I want reviewers to say the car puts a smile on their face driving it to work every day, not doing 160mph on the race track. And of course, high speed is "fun" - one of my favourite memories is driving at 158mph past Berlin at 4am - incredible. But the modern obsession with horsepower and 0-60 is...just stupid. Fast 0-60 time does not make for a fun or an engaging car. It just makes it fast.
I'm sure the roads I drive must be different from yours, but when I started driving a Tesla in traffic, it felt like you can just teleport into spaces. The threshold for being able to overtake and pull into traffic without obstructing is so much lower.
Of course, it's also less safe. But the threat of a quick death in a lithium fire is the only reason some of us get up in the morning.
" It's unusable in almost every situation on the road"
Yet it's a useful, comparable, measure for acceleration and is frequently exercised on track. If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it. Image?
Maybe 30-70 would be more useful for determining overtaking capability, but that would require everyone in the motoring industry to agree to change at the same time.
>>If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it.
Oh I have, and it was awesome. But 99% of the time I drove it to work and back, sitting in traffic, thinking to myself I'd much much much rather be in something more comfortable, more quiet, something that isn't using quite so much fuel just sitting there and something that didn't require new tyres every 8000 miles.
Like yes, speed is awesome - fast acceleration is cool. But the obsession with it is destroying the industry - like, it's so clear that a lighter Lamborghini with 400bhp would be a lot more fun to drive than a 2 tonne one with 1000 horsepower, no? Even if the latter does pretty good on the race track. But because everyone only cares about 0-60 times and horsepower we are where we are.
Your just getting old, I mean I agree with u but I'm also old,
Most young boys have the Lamborghini poster on the wall even if it actually sucks to drive, especially the iconic Countach, I find pure joy in driving my old beetle now, or the past weekend a friends 1957 MGA, horrible safety, tiny engines, zero comforts, not even a radio, just a pure carthat can't even be sold anymore, but there will never be a better driving experience than an proper ancient British roadster.
As they say, it's more fun to drive a slow car fast, than a fast car slow.
You answered your own question in your very second sentence. “For a normal person”. The modern economy increasingly does not cater to the “normal person” and they prove this constantly. Granted “normal people” stopped existing a long time ago. You have poor people, soon to be poor people, and people who think they will soon be rich but will really soon be poor. Of course then you have the rest but they are not people.
> The modern economy increasingly does not cater to the “normal person”
Is that a bad thing? Aren't there always a range of products that cater to different levels of interest?
If you're a "normal person" you don't need a 8000dpi mouse with RGB, or a Louis Vuitton purse, or a large big mac meal.
This is not poverty it is prosperity.
> Is that a bad thing? Aren't there always a range of products that cater to different levels of interest?
Sure.
I think the poster you are replying to is trying to say that the “k-shaped” economy is incentivizing the market to cater only to the high end and simply ignoring the low end.
A few businesses I own are dealing with this issue now. It’s just much more profitable and logistically easier for them to charge what seems like an absurd price, justify it with some inexpensive “white-glove” service, and just ignore the rest of the market.
On the one hand, this is a tribute to modern marketing that high value-add products and services can match with customers more efficiently. On the other hand, it has the potential to create a bizarre “race to the top” such that only suckers will cater to anything other than the top 1% of their target market (in terms of wealth / willingness and capacity to pay).
Where I currently live, this is happening with frightening efficiency with health care. Almost all of the “good” PCP doctors are going concierge, and the concierge prices are increasing at a rapid clip.
Normal person as in position in economic distribution, not normal as in not quirky or strange. Lots of quirky people all across the spectrum.
But to be clear, in my example products aren’t the only thing to which the economy doesn’t cater to normal people for (lower-middle class but increasingly middle and lower class). War, corruption, and genocide are all bad for the average person. Generally things that funnel money into hurting or enriching individuals. Both of these are inefficient and the inefficient use of resources, is hurtful to normal people. E.g. enriching an oligarch to build roads could be twice as much road if he takes a 50 percent cut. And the money sitting with him does harm, oppresses people. Food for thought.
Not to mention top speed. The US should have a federal or at least NY/CA state law that modern cars be electronically limited to 112 mph, as it is in Japan. There is no valid reason for a street legal passenger car to be travelling faster than that.
I live in Germany, and routinely drive faster than that. With good roads and reasonably trained drivers this isn't an issue
That makes sense for Germany, but the US does not have universally good roads or reasonably trained drivers. Many states have no regular vehicle safety inspection. On top of all that, culturally, the US is just very different when it comes to respecting regulation. I have seen germans completely befuddled when they realize that Americans will intentionally ignore laws and regulations. To many Germans it seems like it is almost inconceivable that otherwise respectable people will just not follow rules sometimes.
I take my road car to racing events (SCCA) and get above 112 routinely.
I think Nissan had a workaround I could live with: GPS fencing around known tracks would activate/deactivate the speed governor.
Cool, just bring a gps jammer to point at the guy behind you on the straight.
Speaking for myself I love the quick acceleration of electric cars because it enables you to safely pass other cars quickly on two-lane roads without needing to linger in the oncoming lane.
This is a sports car with a deposit that costs more than an ordinary new car, and with a price that would probably buy you a decent house. Nothing about this is meant for a normal person.
The more powerful the motor, the better the brakes and safety features.
I hope.
lol.
I think of F-150s that have quickly climbed over 400hp and can pull a giant trailer... but I don't think the brakes and suspension match.
(f-250 or f-350 might be more balanced when pulling those 30'+ trailers)
It matters a lot, when playing Top Trumps [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Trumps
It's one thing they can brag about, you know. Dumbing everything down to a single number, regardless of whether it's meaningful, feels impressive.
The vast majority of LLM users -- not the average person here on HN -- doesn't know which "model" they are using, can't tell the difference and don't care, including many software engineers. You could ask the same thing about those LLM benchmarks.
Bruh. Chicks man. Chicks dig fast cars.
as with lots of muscles, it's actually the dudes who care about this the most :D get hugely muscular, buy a nice sports car and dudes will absolutely love you.
You remind me of a friend who bought a nice sportbike. He thought he would attract lots of women.
He complained to me "I keep getting guys coming over to talk about the bike"
yup! got a sports bike as well, same experience. actually the biggest fans of my bike are boys between ~3-15 years of age. smiling, pointing at me, telling me to rev or do a wheelie :D
Haha, that's exactly the reaction you could hear from the crowd in the demo video. Made for bros by tech bros.
What's so disruptive on these kind of events is, that companies always used to do development for PR-stunts, or to show off their capabilities and vision for the future, but never at this scale of pure engineering investment.
Drawing a parallel, manufacturers presented rollable mobile devices already a decade ago, modular devices with replaceable components, etc. The archives of Nokia and Ericsson (and others) are full with these kinds of products. Car manufacturers did the same. They presented a vision, not a commitment to a product because there is much more to this than just "being able" to build it.
But it was never economically feasible or sensible to do this at SUCH a scale of engineering cost, and presented with the unrelenting confidence of "this will be yours in two years", despite all the fundamental roadblocks still to overcome.
It appears that this is the most disrupting aspect of their presentations: People are not used to being presented a "vision" of such a scale with so little regards for practical execution.
They like the journey they are taken on, and willingly fill all gaps and doubts with "they wouldn't present this if they didn't think of everything already"
Lots of words to say they built something useless to impress manchildren and investors, get ready for yet another "fell for it again" medal
That's also true, but I meant to say something different. I am referring to this sheer blindness to the rationality of what's being presented.
This event was like Disney presenting a mass-production rollercoaster you can pre-order for your home, but the general public seems to glance over how utterly irrational this is.
So far companies did alot of fundamental due diligence before making such an announcement (and the prior R&D investment!), because the consequences could be fatal.
The average consumer apparently still assumes that this due diligence phase was passed, thinking it's impossible that a known company presents something that big it cannot deliver on...
It's a cool demonstration, I'll give them that. From what I've seen online, people don't even seem to consider whether or not they would actually want this, just because the novelty of it. I'd even ignore that and call it good marketing, if that's what they would actually try to sell here - but you need some kind of special invitation access to even get those, while they use this demonstration to boost the pre-orders for a car without the features everyone is talking about (or at least trying to, we'll see how many will actually go for it).
Yeah, that's what I meant. The gap between what's presented as ready-to-order and the actual practical feasibility of the product is so big, it wows people because they are still accustomed to presentations of actually consumable products.
And also your point: It is a company presenting a jet-pack to actually sell a premium back-pack under the same name.
They invested in the engineering of 1-10 jet-packs, to sell 200-2000 backpacks...
And more to the point: want what?
The demonstrations seems to be very specific, it probably can't do anything more than fall to the ground. The practicality of actual levitating the car may out of reach.
Everyone calls it a "flying car" the idea is planted in people's mind and they let people's imagination or credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
I agree this is more of a "jumping car" than anywhere near an actual "flying car". My main issue with both is that if ground based cars have an issue, for example an engine failure, in most cases you can still get the car to safely stop at the side of the road. If you're flying, that's a very different story.
Even if we would accept the premise that flying cars will be the norm at some point, I'm not sure what people imagine that would do for them. Technically you could solve traffic jams to some degree, but still not entirely because I can't imagine that at any point flying cars would mean that you just fly wherever you want. It would give us multilayered traffic, which is cool to reduce traffic jams, but does it really do anything else?
That's true.
But prior to any of that, I'm fascinated by how irrational it is to think that this jumping car is even remotely feasible to participate in any kind of traffic.
That's why I assume that the general public expects that Tesla has already solved all these problems, as they otherwise wouldn't announce such a product.
In reality, we apparently have entered times where they could present a teleporting machine and start a 200k USD pre-order with little to no public scrutiny.
Who cares, they built a car that can jump or fly or whatever you want to say.
You can clearly see what it does. If nobody buys it or it can't be driven on public roads, so what.
I'm reminded of that time that guy made the Statue of Liberty disappear.
It's pretty cool that someone finally replicated the turbo boost jump function that K.I.T.T. had. Imagine having the boosters to avoid head on collision at 100km/h.
It looks like a DeLorean to me. Someone needs to do an AI mashup taking Back to the Future and replacing the car with this.
They're probably all over X, but I wouldn't know.
So, if you crash and the air tank ruptures do you just... die?
The air tank has a feature called "only making like 10 of them... probably" which will significantly reduce the potential damage that could be caused.
Or, if I'm making up stuff as I go along, you can't crash, the car can just auto-takeoff to dodge whatever you were about to hit.
win-win for society.
Apart from the supercar aspirational enthusiasts and the usual inspiration of innovation with concept cars give, I'm thinking of other audiences for this product. What's the actual future of this?
Ask yourself who would see the benefit of a vehicle that can jump over obstacles, other dangers or other cars?
Obstacles including barricades, flooded roads, tank traps, rivers, fences and burning cars. Dangers might include IEDs, mines, destroyed bridges, barbed wire, stinger strips, active munitions being fired at it, etc.
Even without such dangers, jumping over moving cars would be useful in pursuits where getting in front of a target gives an advantage.
And the extra mobility would be useful in humanitarian and disaster applications where getting to and from those in need in a timely fashion may save lives.
I wouldn't trust promo videos.
For Eg, we have self driving trucks. Nikola admits prototype was rolling downhill in promotional video: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...
Tesla’s History of Faking Demonstration Videos: https://dawnproject.com/teslas-history-of-faking-demonstrati...
This is probably just to hype up the stock. The stock is down 5% (5 days), up 1% (1 month), down ~7% (6 months), down ~20% YTD, down ~16% (1 year). It has a PE of 336 and dwindling YOY sales. Tesla’s U.S. vehicle sales fell approximately 14% to 20% year-over-year through the first three quarters of 2026. Rest of the world, Tesla is not competitive and will probably go down rapidly soon.
This Tesla event was apparently performed in front of a live audience. Yes I'm sure there's a hype strategy here but equating this with the Nikola scam is a stretch.
Also Tesla events rarely (if ever) get followed by a durable stock bump.
--
Edit: Credible independent videos have been released on YouTube by reputable people. There's no doubt that the spectacle did happen as shown by Tesla. That's not to say it's anything more than a carefully staged spectacle, but claims that it's fake or AI or CGI are absolutely debunked.
Sure. But do we have any confidence the "car" wasn't made of styrofoam?
There are lots of ways for sleight of hand. Do you remember the time that guy made the Statue of Liberty disappear?
I'm not saying it was a production-ready car, but the notion of it being styrofoam is stupid. These demos are as much for the morale of the engineers as they are for the entertainment of the public. Tesla doesn't need to demonstrate a rocket car.
> notion of it being styrofoam is stupid
Well then, I'm sure it'll be disproven very shortly, right?
They won't keep the vehicle hidden and out of sight, right?
Let's just revisit in a couple months, shall we?
They kind of do, though, their sales have been dropping year over year during an extreme fuel crisis - and Chinese EVs are coming for their lunch.
They need to get their sales up (lots of folks like me won’t buy one now because Elon sucks) but your reasoning I largely disagree with. We don’t have a fuel crises in the US for example. And Chinese EVs won’t be able to gain too strong of a foothold in American or European markets because neither market will permit their domestic industries to collapse due to Chinese state subsidies and industrial overcapacity.
Even if Chinese EVs can't make it into the American market in numbers it's a pretty clear signal that Tesla models are vastly overpriced for their functionality. The subsidies have spurred innovation and do continue to artificially depress the price of vehicles, but the value you're getting for a dollar in Chinese EVs far outshines Tesla without any of the weird built-in design annoyances needing to be present like the door handles or terrible dashboard UX.
Tesla will continue to rule the US for the next two years due to the admin but the Euro and Canadian markets are likely going to continue to close to them. It might be that home-grown competitors will step up to the plate or maybe they'll open their doors to Chinese exports - it's hard to say. So while it's hard to identify a winner, the loser is clearly Tesla.
Is it really so unbelievable that a car company with access to rocket engineers, built a car with rocket engines?
> Is it really so unbelievable
A car company that has a long history of making false claims? Are you really asking me that?
They have a long history of promising bad dates for future releases, or of exaggerating the capabilities of their ""FSD"", but they haven't rolled cars down hills or built them from styrofoam.
They demoed a non-working demo of solar roof that was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for normal tiles with huge fanfare which turned out to be utterly impractical in real world usage and later quietly killed entirely.
Ok? They’ve still largely delivered products even if the timing has been way off. I am a huge critic of Elon Musk and won’t buy another Tesla but they clearly build cars and products that work and hit consumer markets.
It’s dangerous for you to let your dislike of someone or some company to cloud your judgement like this. You know other companies have launched failed products too, right?
> dislike of someone
I think it's the dead kids.
All those dead kids.
No clue what you’re talking about. Elon Musk killed some kids so therefore the cars that Tesla makes don’t exist or something?
> No clue what you’re talking about.
Here you go. AI can be so helpful when you're confused.
https://claude.ai/share/5d3b41f2-56e4-460e-84a4-4d34cef47fcf
Ah - so people are making money from the cars doing taxi service while they sleep, are they?
And there are high-speed tunnels connecting major cities?
And that guy who saved those kids in Thailand is a pedophile?
And not a single person has died due to the USAID cuts?
Ok. Sure. I hear you. Perfectly.
Yes, completely unbeleivable. I mainly think this because SpaceX has committed said engineers to delivering unfeasable amounts of payload to LEO/ISS, etc. Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".
That is of course very very far away from reality (though, progressing to a feasable program faster than any space observers predicted.)
THat, combined with Elon signaling to investors/market that tesla no longer produces cars.....it's hard to imagine the company splitting their very, very , very over-commited engineers to a flying car. At least, they aren't commiting the point that this will be a consumer-market car, or even a halo car.
> Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".
Given that they have largely relied on reusability rather than strongly ramping up production of boosters for Falcon 9, and given that they have performed 3 launches in a single day, one launch per day is clearly achievable without any further advances, and without even using Starship.
To be clear, the stated goal for Starship is one launch per hour throughout the year, which would still be a tiny number compared to, say, airline flights, but quite impressive for orbital flight.
They're averaging 2-3 Falcon 9 launches per week. That's not 'very very far away' from one per day.
Nobody else comes close, whether considering individual companies or entire nations.
SpaceX put more mass in orbit this year than the rest of the world combined, and you’re saying they’re not doing a good job?
Both can be true.
No contradiction between "more than everyone else combined" and "it is unfeasable to launch 36,500 metric tons per year compared to the about-2,500 tons in the last 12 months".
Especially as the working launch vehicle is getting retired and the replacement has only had one circularized orbit, and is currently behind the development pace set by the Saturn V, N1, and even the Space Shuttle.
Well I'd say they're ahead of N1 considering that N1 never made it to orbit.
That is just a one OOM scaling. It's not that difficult, especially considering that Starship just delivered the 3rd largest payload ever launched and it wasn't even at capacity.
Sounds like you’re very big on the nay saying for its own sake.
I assume you’re dirty on Usain Bolt for not running faster?
If Usain bolt claimed he would run 75mph, does him being the fastest runner change the fact that he lied?
There are legitimate question about the physics of the thing that even the most talented engineers will still come up against.
yes. unless elon himself personally is in the drivers seat while the "car" is doing all those things, it's cardboard and styrofoam.
They’re one of the leading companies developing autonomous vehicles, but their original self-driving demo was still faked.
Unbelievable? No. A company already caught lying multiple times in big fashion to whole world, never delivering FSD yet cashing in tons of money for it, plus rather mentally unstable owner to keep it polite?
Fool me once...
Tesla FSD has 1.5 million active subscriptions and is growing at 50% annually.
There are several model years that charged full price for FSD at sale and never received the necessary hardware upgrades.
>never delivering FSD yet cashing in tons of money for it,
Even if they didn’t deliver FSD, the data says they delivered something people are choosing to pay $100 per month for.
So where is that million of robotaxi? https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/22/elon-musk-says-tesla-robotax...
It’s both true that Elon lies and overpromises damn near everything, and that Tesla has the best self driving related features available in the US that a normal person can buy and use.
So where was it claimed Tesla achieved full self driving?
What you just said is: "Ok, they lied, but they're still in business!"
I read that the car used in the demo was actually a hundreds of kilograms, nothing like the real cars weight of ~ 2 ton
Agreed. Just think about it for a second. If it was 2 tons like a real EV, could a fan or 2 keep it adhered to a vertical surface?
This is a circus stunt.
I think “a fan or 2” is underselling the technology here. It’s not about the weight of the car but the force that the atmosphere presses on its surface area. This is well-established physics that has been demonstrated by others so I don’t know why you’re questioning this and not some of the wilder parts like the flying.
You can do a lot with a few megawatts of power for a few seconds.
That's not even the original part - it's been done by a car with a driver in it - the McMurtry Spéirling.
I believe he also made his own career disappear.
Just be aware you're moving from the territory of reasonable questions to moderately desperate conspiracy theory. Whatever it is we saw, it's clearly not lightweight. That much is obvious from the kinetics.
Well it didn’t have a driver and you can’t see the size of the battery, impressive nonetheless and in the end it’s not like it matters since it has no practical application outside a circus (the flying)
If you think "company might have faked public demo in some important way" is a "conspiracy theory", your conspiracy theory sensor is badly miscalibrated and desperately needs a tune up. Your default presumption should be that a demo is faked to at least some extent because most of them are. If I don't hear an explicit declaration that this is real and live and working exactly the same on stage as it will be for the consumer I assume it isn't. And even some of those declarations have been shown to be false over the years, a particularly popular one being "this is real game footage on the real hardware" except it's actually a developer box with a lot more power than the console in question.
The cybertruck was claimed to be a steel exoskeleton. They ended up releasing a car with heavy steel plates glued on.
It's not at all conspiracy theory. It's just same old over promise and under deliver that Elon does.
What you just relayed is another misleading claim purveyed by obsessives. Cybertruck is not a true exoskeleton design, but neither are the steel plates decorative. It is a hybrid -- the unibody shell carries some minimal structural load, but it's not sufficient on its own. The exterior skin is structurally necessary for torsional rigidity and contributes meaningfully to the overall chassis strength.
All major exterior panels are welded and/or bolted on. On the earliest revisions, the thin upper door trim strips were bonded using a bad structural adhesive which became brittle with temperature cycling. These were recalled and remedied with a different structural adhesive plus a welded stud. Such recalls are very common; the current generation Ford Explorer had multiple recalls for exterior panels falling off.
Wow high bar there comparing the Cybertruck to a Ford Explorer.
What's misleading? You just said it's not a steel exoskeleton, and that the panels were glued on. If your point is that a true exoskeleton isn't needed for sufficient rigidity and strength, sure, fine, but you should make that claim and point out why it's misleading, all you've said is that the claim is correct, but that other cars are made similarly.
They said that only the "thin upper door trim" is glued on.
> moderately desperate conspiracy theory
A car company that as a long history of making false claims?
I agree: one of us is delusional. I think we disagree about whom.
But hey, you're right. If it's not styrofoam I'm sure we'll see proof of that very soon now. Like a person riding in it. Or it out where someone can actually touch it. Try to lift it.
(And if we don't....)
This is the same company that showed off "bulletproof glass" on the cybertruck.
I was never quite sure if that was a deliberate ploy. The demonstration showed that it quite possibly had enough strength to stop a bullet (it would just smash).
The failure of the demonstration got vastly more coverage than if it would have if the, um rock?, just hit the window, went donk and fell down. If your goal was to communicate to the maximum number of people that you had put bulletproof glass in your cars, it would be quite a reasonable tactic.
Not to disagree that this Tesla event took place, but there was also a "Nikola World" event in 2019 where Nikola presented its product to an audience of 1000+ people.
It's surely not AI, but so far it is little more than all these Jetpack demonstrations of the past decade...
> all these Jetpack demonstrations of the past decade...
They've been promising those since the 1970s...
True (the autocorrect stole my 's' of 'decades'...)
Even longer, Thunderball (Bond film featuring the Bell Rocket Belt) was released in 1965.
They're not afraid of doing tricks in front of live audience either. Look at the battery swap event. No camera placed anywhere near where the "swap" was happening for a few minutes. Then the car drove off Wow! Amazing! And they never talked about battery swap again
Or the continued use of tele-operators for all of their humanoid robotics demos.
When it's not a human dancer in a robot suit.
They got about $300 million in extra regularory credits for that demo. The government shut the loophole in 2014 after it became obvious Tesla was faking it and no real Tesla drivers were benefiting.
zOMG!1!!! Proof of concept demonstration was carefully staged.
All car manufacturers demo "concept" cars that are real and work(for most parts) but mass production with reasonable price is just not worth it, in this case there is legal challenges too.
I suspect this is going to be a Cybertruck/Boring Company situation, where we may get something ostensibly called the same and may even do something one could consider similar when squinting (maybe a bit higher than U9 jumps in scope) but with the specs and implementation differing so greatly that it shouldn't be considered the same. Exoskeleton vs body panels, 200kph+ on electric sleds vs Teslas (driven by human operators; tells you how much they trust their FSD tech) in a tiny tunnel, FSD on HW3 vs an upgrade maybe someday, etc.
And inevitably two groups will clash, one pointing out how much this deviated from the original, often decade long promises vs another pointing at the identical naming, how it's still a product they like and of course the all time winner "I don't see you do X"...
For what it's worth, I'd file this as a RCS demo for SpaceXGrokSI (or whatever they call themselves this week) above all else and if I were a betting man, might be a prelude to fusing them into SpaceXSuperXTeslaXIntelligenceX...
I'm still baffled by the human drivers for those tunnel runs. I can't imagine a more controlled environment where self driving should be capable.
I used to feel the same way, namely that the tunnel driving would be the signal that unsupervised driving was ready to go. But now that I see their geofenced robotaxis in operation I sort of get it now. Those things do well at driving autonomously, but there are edge cases where the car's safety response is to essentially shut down and wait for human intervention rather than risk uncertainty. That's not something you want happening when you have a single lane of traffic with no passing, leading to a situation where every car in the chain is now forced to deal with the situation in unison. Humans can figure that out pretty quickly, but training the cars to do it will take time. I do expect autonomous tunnel rides any day now, but I can see why they weren't the first use case for autonomous vehicles.
FYI the dawn project was debunked as crackpot scammers who had their feet on the accelerator pedal to fake an "FSD crash", along with a slew of other underhanded and misleading tricks.
Don't forget that the leader of Dawn Project has financial conflicts of interest:
His software company, named Green Hills, supplies the RTOS for Mobileye, which formerly supplied driver-assistance hardware and software to Tesla (and continues to do so for other car companies). Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
So he has a very real financial incentive to convince the world that Tesla's system is bad.
> Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla wouldn't stop using their tech in ways they did not approve of, turning back all the safety limits to allow the public to do things Mobileye knew were unsafe. Mobileye publicly called them out, saying that Tesla was "going to hurt the interests of [Mobileye] and hurt the interests of an entire industry, if a company of our reputation will continue to be associated with this type of pushing the envelope in terms of safety".
This is one of the reasons why S/X ADAS performance famously got significantly worse in late 2016 with HW2, they had of course been working on their own tech but because they'd already built their brand around ADAS they felt compelled to put it out unfinished when they no longer had the Mobileye system to sell.
Yes clear conflict of interest, guy cant take being beaten, resorting to underhand tactics, pretty scummy.
this wasn't a promotional video, it was a live demonstration in front of hundreds of people.
dawnproject.com is a well known Tesla critic with commercial ties to Mobileye, a Tesla competitor.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/11/tesla-s...
tesla.com is known fabricator of news about Tesla
Does that invalidate their examples? "Did they fake it or not" is a falsifiable claim that can be inspected regardless of personal incentives.
Also I feel like it should be said that anyone who doesn't like fascism and Nazi salutes should be a critic of Tesla, and if you aren't, that speaks volumes.
Yeah no, something is very off on this and I cannot put my finger on it, the video looks odd to me. I want to say AIgen feel, but I only saw little tiny vids, rest were blurry as sin.
Makes sense though. First time I saw video of two falcon rockets doing a synchronized landing I felt the exact same way. Our brain is used to this type of stuff in movies and we know it's CGI. So when it happens for real and is filmed in 4K and a cinematic color scheme is added, it's hard for the brain to adapt.
Musk, while a horrible presenter, did say something like “we’re doing this here because otherwise everyone would think it’s ai.”
Any self respecting trader buys Tesla stocks based on this?! OMG!
It would encourage me to sell, if I had, seeing this nonsense.
You're not alone, TSLA is down on the news. You can only commit fraud so many times before people get tired of holding the bags.
I wonder if Musk is entering the brain rot phase, and Tesla will decline from now on. After all, this is something Tesla doesn't need, a second dud after the Cybertruck. I'm sure the decline will take some time though.
SpaceX is the largest buyer of Cybertrucks. They've spent more than $100 million on them. Link: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-buying-own-cyber...
Brother Tesla has been in decline roughly in tandem with Musk’s decision to stop masking
(To stop masking and start ‘musking?’)
This is just Tesla marketing. Usually companies just dump money into marketing campaigns. Musk dumps it into engineering instead.
Remember when they sent one into space? Same thing, everyone in the world is talking about it without spending a single cent in ads.
Doesn’t mean we’re getting flying cars.
There is a huge canyon between launching a car into space for fun (test, actually, dead weight) and having a web page where you can type in your card details to pay advance on your own purely marketing purpose circus car. You really don't see the difference? Of course, calling an impractical technical circus engineering is revealing.
Did the car technically fly? To me it seemed more like a controlled graceful landing. Would we technically call that flying?
I’d categorize it as ballistic flight. While it was able to control its pitch, yaw, and roll in midair, it did not have sufficient upward propulsive thrust to balance out or exceed the force of gravity while airborne. So it wasn’t the propulsive kind of flight, where altitude can be readily adjusted in the sense that we would expect from an “flying car”.
And let’s keep in mind this is 100% vaporware; the cars sold to actual buyers may differ significantly in their design and capabilities from what was demonstrated here. It is possible that the COPVs in the car on display took up the entire passenger compartment.
“This isn’t flying, this is falling with style.” - Buzz
It’s a remote controlled CO2 canister on wheels with a skin that looks like a car. It’s a stupid publicity “stunt”. Har har Elon.
A silent (and yet so noisy) cry for attention?
I have to admit that the only thing I give Elon the title of “Genius” for is his ways of putting on shows to launder more money or get larger loans… this economy is a circus.
Looks like more hype nonsense to keep excitement going while continuing to delay actually delivering a real product.
I agree. I remember as a kid getting so excited for Detroit concept cars that never hit the market. Now, unless something is actually for sale, I basically ignore it.
The fact that the one that can fly is invite-only makes me wonder if there would be ITAR issues with the guidance mechanisms that they have to put into it.
I'm not saying that there aren't lower hanging fruit reasons why they wouldn't make more of those, but you can see how the guidance necessary to make this move the way that it does could be dual use.
I suspect it's more because some rando could actually try to use it in public space. The invite only means they could send it to people who will give them good PR, are known not to be idiots, and can be invited to sign many responsibility disclaimers.
And they will have a remote lockout installed on which the buyer will agree to.
That makes a ton of sense, yes! To be honest, I was wondering less about their reasons for invite-only and more about whether this kind of gentle and precise guidance with cold gas thrusters might hit ITAR.
It’s way simpler than that, it’s just a collector car like a special edition Ferrari.
They have to sell one to say that it exists. It’s marketing.
Absolutely nobody who owns that vehicle will be “flying” it.
Amazing tech demo. I would have liked to see more discussion of the cold-gas thrusters in the earlier Hacker News article. Some people seemed confused and made claims that the demo was a separate "rocket" version that used a combustion technology.
Well it is a separate rocket version, it just doesn't take jet fuel. "Invite only" for the rocket version means probably less than 5 will ever be made, if that.
I strongly suspect that the invite-only version is the tech that was described in the demo, and differs from the $250K version by the size of the air tank and compression motor.
Cold gas or not, these are still rocket motors.
Without fuel or an oxidizer or combustion? Not really. It's compressed air, like an air rifle.
A rocket engine doesn't require combustion, it just requires expelling a gas to produce thrust, and that the engine not be air breathing. Most rocket engines use combustion to produce the high speed gases, but there are plenty that don't (water rockets, steam rockets, plasma rockets, and... cold gas thrusters as demonstrated by Tesla)
Motors don't need combustion, they just need to provide power. See electric motors or compressed air engines.
I doubt it is actual air. When compressing gas to 10,000+ psi and then running it through a rocket motor, clean/dry nitrogen is the way to go. Normal air has moisture, which can form ice, and oxygen which gets extremely reactive when heated.
And many a rocket scientist would be insulted by the comparison of a nozzled rocket motor to the simple pipe of an air rifle.
It takes genius to take rocket motors and cover them in cringe.
[flagged]
Most of us could never afford a roadster in any form, and just like to see cool stuff on the internet.
It clearly does not look like a smaller Cybertruck though. You're just wrong there.
Is this cool? It seems like a typical Elon Musk thing some teenager might like, similar to a monster truck rally mixed with heavy dose of financial fraud.
Man, why is this comment flagged when it's probably the most relevant in the whole thread?
It's moreover not the product that will be on sale.
It's a backpack company presenting the engineering of a jetpack to promote the sales of a premium backpack with the same name.
Comments: Expectations set, expectations unmet. Fits a notable pattern by Musk of over promising and under delivering. In this age of misinformation, it's perhaps more painful than it could be if it were simply an amusing quirk of an eccentric billionaire.
And, speculation by Chris Norland YouTuber is the Roadster being fitted with literal rocket boosters is a portion of an argument to help justify SpaceX financially helping Tesla.
How dare people get excited by one of the coolest demos we've ever seen. These sort of comment are ironically almost entirely politically driven while also claiming anyone who disagrees is a secret Russian bot account.
It’s not one of the coolest demos. The iPhone was a cool demo. I could see how I would use it every day and it would bring value to my life. This looks more like bravado
Americans, French, and Russians seem to be like powerful engines, rockets, race cars, etc. more than other western nations
I just saw a car drive upside down. "Coolest" seems like an understatement. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe it's a cultural thing because this seems extremely lame to me. Cars in general are very "boomer".
> How dare people get excited by one of the coolest demos we've ever seen.
I mean, it's fun but useless? It's like those semi trucks with a jet engine on them. It looks awesome but it's utterly useless.
If this is for entertainment, sure. But they're trying to sell you something here.
Yeah, if this was from a monster truck show, I’d think it was sick as hell. But context matters and this is essentially an ad, which inspires more scrutiny and cynicism.
The fact that this is not the top comment clearly speaks volumes of the current state of affairs in tech.
The comment was seven minutes old when you posted this reply, on a 19-hour-old post.
I could have used that when leaving Costco last Saturday.
Can't help but think of the super-large size toilet paper pack getting sucked into the fans...
Production and other realities aside, I've seen some cool shit in my life and this demo is high up there! Did you guys catch 0.5 mach target top speed? That's 600kmh. It'd better do that flying because there probably aren't any rubber tyres that could endure that before exploding within seconds.
Some cars, if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford it.
Other cars, if you have to ask where the government will allow you to drive it, you can't afford it.
BYD has made the more practical cousin of this, and you can actually buy it. They have a car which jumps over potholes automatically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIKAn8yDkpA
I personally see this like a 1UP for rich idiots that are about to drive themselves into oblivion. Beats the solution in Demolition Man.
Just don't press the button where you have wires over the road... or anything hanging over the road... like signs...Don't press the button when you are about to go into a tunnel... or inside the tunnel... Also, check your passengers have finished their shakes, coffee, and other liquids...
One interesting idea for this technology is to prevent accidents. Imagine you are about to get hit head-on by a drunk driver. If only you had a set of thrusters to lift your car at the last second. So basically use this a crash collision avoidance "before" your airbag has to go off.
I too solve my problems by getting catapulted multiple feet in the air without a clear landing plan
> Imagine you are about to get hit head-on by a drunk driver
The fact that Waymos don't get hit head-on by drunk drivers suggests this is a situational awareness versus last-minute dodge problem.
It's a numbers game. As much time as Waymo had been on the road, it has not been long enough to hit a "drunk driver running red light" situation. It'll happen eventually.
If Waymo hasn't done enough miles for this to happen then it is a statistically insignificant event. They're on pace to do 20 million trips this year alone.
Original roadster is one of the best looking car designs for my taste. This... subdivision modifier over the Cybertruck.
Makes sense, it was a Lotus Elise.
With a weird horizontal loop cut.
It's just a Lotus body, though I agree that Lotus cars are pretty
Assuming this never really ships (ahem), this is basically an upper-tier "YouTuber engineer" stunt video with a NASDAQ symbol attached. And the results there seem to suggest that Musk's marketing schtick is wearing a bit thin...
Anyone know the physics of mach diamonds purely from compressed gas? I'm not a physicist, but I thought one of the key aspects of compressed gas is that it can't expand faster than the speed of sound in that gas -- the speed of sound is literally the limit to how fast it can expand?
Gas expanding faster than the speed of sound is called a shockwave - and the Mach diamonds are essentially the expanding gas shockwave “bouncing” back and forth as it hits the atmosphere, forming a standing wave of high and low compression zones.
I genuinely didn't believe they'd ever do more than use cold gas thrusters for a lame boost effect, if at all. Happy to admit I was wrong, that was cool.
(still not buying a tesla thooughbeit)
So has he hired anyone who does not exist to champion the cause of the innocent and helpless in a world of criminals who operate above the law?
I can't wait for them to never actually produce this or, if I'm wrong and they do, I can't wait for someone to seriously injure themselves or someone else.
Not everything has to be about safety. Motorbikes are extremely dangerous. Wingsuits are absurdly dangerous.
Sports cars are designed to be impractical, but they can also be impressive feats of engineering.
I imagine the flying variant will be an extremely limited release and mostly just for stunts and shows.
If this turns out to be real, I am happy purely on the basis of innovation.
This is not and will probably never be practical, but it's something that's never really been done before, and for that alone I kinda like it.
I guess that puts the final nail in the coffin of the 2019 Roadster that was announced but never arrived. Shame, because I loved how it looked. Some of its aesthetic lives on in the Highland Model 3 at least.
How did they get it to stick to the track just hanging there. It didn’t look real at all.
Cool marketing gimmick. The suction is cool though, let’s see how it will do on the track. Basically your own Brabham BT46, very cool
I thought so at first but then Musk mentioned the thrusters can recharge themselves with pumps in the car. So it will actually be something owners can use repeatedly without needing complicated refills from Tesla service.
Not that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.
But where would you (be allowed to) use that and risk wrecking your car and life? They weren’t confident to put a person in either. I guess it’s for shows only, the reservation page says invitation only. It’s definitely impressive but it will probably stay a marketing tool.
Seems like a practical use would be rapid stopping or cushioning a collision.
Probably more a liability to have a high pressure vessel near a collision
I wonder whether they will actually be able to recharge to that pressure level in a production car. I kind of doubt it, plus it will be noisy, consume a ton of energy and take a long time.
Not to mention the mass. Perhaps the pressure vessels could be relatively lightweight, but a pump that could charge such a pressure vessel to the pressure and capacity needed for this type of stunt will not be lightweight.
And mass is one of the top engineering concerns for these types of performance vehicles, even those which do not need to fight gravity.
The Brabham was withdrawn after one race because it sprayed debris at following cars. I the thrusters used for better cornering also might push a car being overtaken just enough to get it off track. Even for track-only this won't fly. Not to mention blasting pedestrians.
What happens if there's a rock in the road and it gets sucked up?
We say McMurtry Spéirling this century :)
Ok, it's cool. Now, why Musk betrayed Ukraine?
As Elon intermingles the company how are investors compensated fairly for this. What does Telsa pay SpaceX for the technology and is there a conflict of interest?
honestly both companies are getting good exposure here for relatively low lift on behalf of space-x team (it's a compressed air tank, nozzles and actuator valves).
What happened to the last one they announced? Is it just gone? are the preorders carried over?
aka a $245,000 loan to tesla with no interest for 10 years
They first started taking deposits on the Roadster 9 years ago in 2017 with a 2020 production date. It’ll be shocking if they ever sell this car they showed today. If they do, it’ll be many years late, not fly, and cost twice what they are saying. Just like the CyberTruck.
The one that doesn’t fly is only a $45,000 loan
I think it is $50,000 to reserve.
This car shouldn't be considered just a car. From now on, automotive technology will be used in completely different ways. For example, off-road jeeps may no longer need to cross water.
Genuinely impressed, incredible demo
Been a while since I was impressed with a tech presentation. I was waiting for a clear case of AI assisted movement ( though I personally expected to see it for the first time in a military chopper ).
**
Side note, as I was looking for the right stream, youtube gave me a link to a different deep fake 'Musk' stream where he extolled virtues of sending him money ( https://roadster-tesla.com/#participate ). Everything has changed man. I am sure the scammer actually got some people.
I am actually seeing what I envisioned growing up. Pretty exciting times!
This video, like the one catching the rocket with chopsticks, is so ridiculously cool even on the 20:th rewatch.
Once was enough for me. The redbull stunts are way cooler. Check out Ken Blocks videos. Its an actual driver in an actual car. Not a plastic hull with 20 year old compressed air can technology attached to it pretending to be an actual product that will ever be made.
The reality of EVs is that they all provide more or less identical driving experience - immense amounts of speed in straight lines and pure control around corners. But you can't really make something nimble or chuckable when it weighs 1.5 tons.
(Calling it a "roadster" is cute, but this has nothing in common with a Boxster or Miata. If anything, the ICE analogue would be muscle cars.)
Because there are no real unique driving characteristics, the only engineering you can compete with is raw speed or price. That and crazy gimmicks.
You should go look up the weight of a 911, Boxter, or Miata. And then, I suspect, you will not return here to reply to this comment. You'll invent some other reason why EVs can't be "nimble" or whatever, because it can't be your worldview that's wrong, it has to be the world.
Have you actually taken any of these cars along a twisty country road? They are not at all similar.
911 is not really a roadster - it's a full on sports car. Even then the older ones top out at about a ton. Same as the Boxster and Miata.
Most serious sports EVs start at 2 tons or more. It's really impressive what they can do to hide the weight, but because it's all digitally controlled, it's really not a dynamic driving experience in the same way.
More importantly to my point - all of them have nearly identical drive characteristics. Outside of raw performance, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to describe the difference in handling between a Tesla, Mach-E, or a Polestar - I'm not sure I could give you anything.
This thing is covered in cold gas thrusters, I'm betting it can go around a corner faster than almost any other car. The limitation might be G forces on the driver. Maximum performance may only be achievable in self driving mode.
yes, you can, if you think like an engineer. they have suction mechanism, low center of gravity that helps you to beat any ICE counterparts.
You can't call this beauty of engineering a muscle car.
> when it weighs 1.5 tons.
Are you referring to the Tesla Roadster? Because, if not, I am pretty sure that most EVs, except for maybe small compact EV cars, usually weights 2 tons or more.
Yup. I'm pretty sure my Model 3 Performance is around 4,000 lbs, about 500 lbs more than my wife's Honda CR-V.
The M3/MY are 2-2.5T. The Roadster will be lighter, and 1.5-2T is the same weight class as the 911 and Boxter.
tesla roadster weights 1.6-1.7 tons, thats prob without compressed air. But common, if you buy a rocket car, that is capable to suck itself to the road, you will not care about this extra 300-400 kg of weight, that probably will be compensated by perfect low center of gravity and several motors.
'Thrust' version takes $245,000 of downpayment (not the flying version that is 'invite only'). That money is neither escrowed nor earns an interest.
With high interest rate and tight money supply, this could get them a few billion dollars of 'customer financing'.
Meanwhile, Renault makes small and useful cars being sold more in France, for a fraction of Tesla's valuation.
By all means, enjoy your Renault.
As Doug DeMuro would say, this is a “rich guy go fast” car.
Is it going to be fun and engaging to drive? Absolutely not. It doesn’t even have a steering wheel.
Finally, a vehicle that’s perfect for the CEO in your life who wants to upload his brain to a data center powered by the body heat of his employees hooked up to the pods from The Matrix.
It has a steering yoke. F1 cars also have a steering yoke. Are F1 cars not fun and engaging to drive?
It also has steer-by-wire which makes the steering yoke practical as they can tweak the steering ratio to prevent the need to go hand-over-hand. As they did for the Cybertruck.
Steer by wire is fun? How? I think the wheel being directly connected to the road is more fun.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=USSHxtHLHc8
Driving an F1 car is fun in the same way that cycling in the Tour de France is fun. Everything about that experience is purely for function and competition.
I think Louis Hamilton has a lot more fun in his Ferrari F40 than in his F1 car.
F1 cars are not fun to drive
Wondering how loud this would be if you were in the driver's seat or, worse, standing nearby.
This is a showpiece at this point. but I can see these on the roads in ~10 years; but it felt more like a frog car than a flying car? in my mind flying quadcopters felt much safer in videos than this frog. It feels overly complicated based on what i have read; rocket boosters?? why? quadcopters and other flying taxis seem much more economical and using tech that's been reliable for at least last 20 years.
Elon should read Anti-Grav Unlimited. It's a good book, actually a very good book. We want that tech. Time to invent the antigravity rods. AI is here, sorry, SuperIntelligence is here, AGI is on the doorstep, just ask the SOTA models to figure it out.
Probably among the least comfortable cars to be hit by as a pedestrian or cyclist.
Looks like the Ford GT90.
https://news.dupontregistry.com/blogs/ford-news/whatever-hap...
It should have been a Delorean.... Still cool though
Maybe the most useless feature for a car. I'd imagine you need some commercial performance license to actually own this feature.
Also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
Cars seem so full of gimmicky features these days. A friend's car yesterday stopped us when exiting because it thought we left behind belongings in the back seat - it was just an empty package. That was not something I would have ever thought a car would flag. It's not that fancy of a car (entry level SUV) but it is fairly new, it just kind of bothered me.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
The back seat thing is probably the things cars have been adding to try to combat those freak memory accidents when parents forgot to drop the baby off at daycare and left them in the car in the sun all day with disastrous consequences.
Good point, I don't have a kid and would have never thought of that as something that system was hedging against. I'm not sure it changes my mind overall (I think also this particular implementation was still rather clumsy) but it does at least make that feature far more defensible in theory.
150mph is the "gentleman's agreement" speed. If a car can do 150 chances are it can do 200.
I don't think this is true: drag increases with the square of velocity, so that's close to double the drag from 150 to 200, and I believe somewhere above 60/70 mph, aerodynamic drag starts to overtake road resistance as the main friction source, i.e. it takes significantly more horsepower to be able to do 200 than 150.
> Also true of being able to go over 90 MPH
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
Tyres also throw stones and dirt at cars behind, sometimes with remarkable force. But you're right, road debris is a serious question here. I can only imagine that this is so obvious that it cannot have been overlooked.
Surely the intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
>Also true of being able to go over 90 MPH,
Nope.
List of cars I know to go over 90MPH. Supposedly. 2000 Dodge Neon with 800 pounds of man in it and only 3 out of 4 cylinders functional. 2004 Toyota Camry with broken O2 sensors, and it loves it. Anything by VW. Pretty much anything parked in your local highschool.
Most modern cars can hit 90 MPH with ease, that's what modern aero and 145HP being "underpowered" means! Supposedly cars are electronically hard limited to 115mph and I have never been able to confirm that in practice
Of course, this implies that you might be able to own some of these features, with the actual crime being using them. Like that Beetle with a helicopter jet turbine.
And it begins. I can't wait to hear all the ways people will poo poo this incredible tech tomorrow.
It's an awesome performance, but I don't know why you'd want this in your actual day to day car and pay a premium for it, all power to you if you do but I wouldn't call not sharing that preference 'poo pooing the incredible tech'.
Imagine driving on highway and suddenly a Tesla car fall on your car and kill the entire family
is it me or does it just look ugly?, was expecting the original roadster looks...
The original roadster was a Lotus Elise, all Tesla did was swap in an electric drivetrain.
Tesla has never really shown they can design anything compelling that doesn’t look like a lumpy shoe.
I think OP means the one they revealed 8/9 years ago, which still had a less-boxy supercar look.
Both are much nicer
Right now it has 80s delorean look... That was nice then but a bit out of place now especially for a supercar
Maybe they meant the original v2 Roadster
What??!? You don't like the design of the cybertruck?
Tesla has been in the business of ugly cars for some time.
It reminds me of Lockheed Martin's Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV-L).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC97wdQOmfI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Kill_Vehicle
Good for a date I suppose. It has the suspension bridge effect.
This will never be allowed to be anywhere near a road I hope.
This is an incredible feat of engineering. I have my doubts of the 2028 mass production timeline, but I am quite amazed.
If used on public streets, these thrusters could easily maim/kill people- reckless to include them on a car.
The one with the actual rocket engine is not being sold to the public and Tesla website explicitly states it's not legal to drive it on public roads. It's mostly just a cool demo/prototype and I'm sure there will be privately run tracks that let people drive one.
The generally available car will have cold-gas thrusters which boost acceleration but is nothing like what was demo'd.
It's mostly just stock fraud and laying the way for the Space X acquisition of Tesla at a hyper inflated valuation.
And it's sure going to increase the blast radius when these get into a collision. Even if you can't fire the thrusters, that pressurized tank can't be safe.
Teslas already have very strict (annoyingly strict) gating keeping specific functionality off of public roads (Summon). The drag mode thruster-assisted boost will probably leverage that. I also imagine that cameras on the car would stop it from being engaged if it detects humans in its firing area even when not on public roads.
The flying trim will never be sold to general consumers. Even the rear-thruster trim is currently listed at a $250,000 pre-order fee, which is a deposit for a fraction of the full cost of the car. Final cost will be over $1M. Any of the thruster variants will be extremely rare; like, the one guy in your city that has one will show it off at car shows twice a year, McLaren P1, level of rare.
In a video by Hagerty’s, Tesla claimed that both variants will be sold, for whatever that’s worth.
Yeah they'll make a few dozen of them and sell them to people like Joe Rogan. There is zero chance that any individual who doesn't have the personal phone number of a Tesla leadership team member will be able to buy one of these.
So it's a car for wankers. Makes sense.
I’m no Musk fan but I found it cool and try to balance my negativity towards the person with what I’m seeing.
Plenty of ways to maim/kill people in traditional cars already and I doubt this will be the most common one in roadsters.
I watched the ~16 minute presentation on YouTube and it was as if Elon and the two other guys presenting were doing a skit at a talent show. They seemed extremely unprepared. Maybe they were intentionally trying to come across as off the cuff, but it felt unnatural and cringey. Together they have the charisma of a paper clip. These guys are so full of themselves that it’s difficult to appreciate whatever accomplishment this may or may not be. And, of course, no way it will be street legal with air thrusters. What a complete joke.
When presenting the world with a flying car, one doesn't need much extra charisma, the demo does it all. I think most people would be pretty excited (or full of themselves) knowing what they were about to show.
Tesla presentations (and Musk presentations generally) have always been weirdly awkward.
As an engineer who dislikes polished presentations of unimpressive things, it encourages me that it’s still possible to do a bad presentation about an amazing thing and (most) people don’t grumble too much.
really weirdly awkward
> it felt unnatural and cringey.
No way?! Elon Musk? Unnatural and cringey?!
one seat, designed by and for the most friendless man in the world.
1: That's an amazing demo, just fantastic. That makes me happy
2: I still want a topless Tesla that could be a good daily driver; an SL63 competitor basically. So, I'm sad.
> Note: Not approved for public road use.
Rocket trim is not street legal.
It would have been more impressive with a human in the car during some of the stunts.
I don't know why - they said there was a significant chance of failure, they have quite mature technology for it to be driverless. What's the point of putting a meat puppet in there?
Get a few cervical collars ready, first.
Why?
The inspiration from the F35 seems to be quite literal. Spent a lot of time and money making vertical takeoff happen, but forgot to give the vehicle any useful capability once it's actually in the air.
stfu about Elon and issues you have. No need to mention that crap. Just share you opinion about the damn car.
My opinion is that the car is conceptually good but requires regulations. As much as I hate regulations, I don't want no flying cars on my head.
Loadstir, more like.
Can't wait for these things to endanger my family's life on some Colorado mountain highways. If the suction works at speed, people are gonna drive even more recklessly.
The suction can only work on a cleaned track. On a standard public road, they have to deal with capturing and disposing debris.
Thankfully this will never hit the road, it's just market manipulation.
What do you mean “just market manipulation”?
There’s no engineering advancement here?
I sure hope they don’t hit the road. Seems like an obviously novel (and terrifying) consumer technology
You did say "consumer tech" - so you're probablt aware of the BT-46. But this has been done a few times before... though it's probably more dangerous than ever with up to 1MW (1000kW) output from electric motors. Some of these were actually sold afair.
I'm not sure about those thrusters though, I doubt they'd be legal?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brabham_BT46
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLaren_F1
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMurtry_Sp%C3%A9irling
>> There’s no engineering advancement here?
No advance. Its engineering gimmicks to hide the fact self driving is 15 years late, and all recently announced Tesla models are worst, and more expensive, than any Chinese alternative.
The jumping car used a 600L canister of 10 kPSI compressed air behind the seats. Musk claimed the car will be able to refill the canister itself, but he didn't demonstrate that. In reality, the size of a multistage compressor to reach those pressures and the heat dissipation for compressing that much air to 680 atmospheres makes that impractical and would use several times more energy than the batteries store. You would have to get filled up at whatever specialized system they used for the demo. The weight of the compressed air in that canister alone is over 750 pounds. It's a fun one-off trick, but I wouldn't worry about this showing up on an actual public road.
Tesla has a history of failed hype campaigns. At this point, them hyping something is a negative expectation that it will come to pass.
I mean it will never be a product. It's just story telling to try and justify the premium Space X is about to pay to acquire Twitter, I mean Tesla.
This is incredible engineering and deserves nothing but applause.
It's only incredible engineering once it performs in the hands of buyers. It's an incredible demo until then.
I thought it was less of a demo and more like perfromance art?
They still had to engineer the demo unit.
Which may have been tailored for the demo - for example, put a very small battery pack in there, so that the weight is much lower than the weight of the actual car would be - it only needs to drive a few meters, doesn't it?
Based on the record of Musk & co straight out LYING in such events (remember Solarcity?), I am very confident in saying that a large portion of what they demonstrated they have not actually solved how to fit in a real production car.
There is no amount of evidence that will ever change the minds of some of these posters.
They could be in the unit when its happening and there would still be some counterclaim.
Tesla did it to themselves. They have a long history of claiming stuff and never actually delivering. Or delivering a washed down version that never makes commercial difference.
Once WhistlingDiesel posts a stress test of the thrusters, I'll believe they're legit
How many Cybertruck claims were true at launch?
It's not like demos are bereft of engineering. It's still incredible engineering even if they never ship a single car.
Unfortunately, it's impossible for us to verify what parts of the demo are 'realistic'. Did they use assisting technologies (e.g. a wire rig)? Is anything repeatable, or are the components one-and-done?
The software industry has taught me how sneaky a demo can be ;). That's without considering Tesla's history of bonkers claims and sus demos (anyone else remember the bulletproof windows?).
Edit: Removed a rhetorical question about the demo. Apparently there was a live audience, so they couldn't have just made a very tiny Roadster haha.
I'd really like to understand how you think a wire rig could support the flipping in mid air and stuff; that would be some great engineering. How do you imagine that would work?
Pinned at the front and back on a rotating axis down the centreline of the car, with the "car" itself being mostly lightweight composite with zero internal components other than the necessary air tanks and a large RC car motor to get it to roll up to the jump point? For the support structure, just put some dark matte scaffolding in the background so it stays out of shot and hidden by the light show. It wouldn't be too far off from standard wirework for movie stunts, and the compressed air could still do enough work to fool the eye. It's not like people have an innate sense for what a gas thruster powered flying car should look like anyway.
But you know, that's just off the top of my head.
I don’t think that would work here where you have to support a 170 degree y axis rotation and then a 180 degree x axis rotation with a wall on one side. I think it would work for the jumping the semi demo though!
I wouldn't say the bulletproof window demo was "sus" - that was just a Windows-crashing-during-the-demo screwup. They didn't fake the stress test on stage :)
Yeah, they literally said they had a live audience to address the criticism that these videos would've been AI generated.
There was no wire rig either as there's nothing above the car...
Who are you to decide it's not allowed any criticism at all?
It’s a spec sheet. It will be incredible engineering when it’s in the hands of customers.
It’s incredible engineering right now.
A one off, incredibly staged demo is not proof that the engineering is real.
This is a tech demo until it actually ships. Actual engineering requires things like cost effectiveness, reliability, and reparability that are yet to be seen.
It’s not like this is the first time that Elon has overpromised and underdelivered.
It is incredible engineering and also a enormous waste of effort by a car company that seems to have stopped caring about releasing cars for the mass market.
Engineering is practical, not self serving entertainment. This may be classified as interesting technological study perhaps.
"My heart goes out to you"
Thank you.
o/
Uhhhh sure if rocket propulsion is fair game now? Seems a little overdone. Is my local DOT okay with this?
The video goes against my intuition for how much performance you can get out of cold gas thrusters. I wonder if someone could do some back of the envelope maths on how much thrust and impulse you can get from a setup like this?
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
Based on the statement that the suction fan generates 2g of downforce, and the telemetry showing the fan operating at 4,700 kg @ ~95% load, the Tesla Roadster weighs approximately 2,300 to 2,500 kg.
Back in the days we used to call these kind of demo cars as concept cars which rarely see the markete. But Kudos to Elon Musk who single handedly running entire Tesla's marketing compaign and keep its stocks and markete value higher than the next 10 car brands combined. Tesla Robots, Robotaxies and now Roadster, these are R&D and concept projects.
I never thought I'd live to see K.I.T.T
I'm thinking the car from the Sega Genesis game "Outrun 2019" (and only a few years late!)
No windshield wiper?
Doesn’t matter, it can’t get wet
Not beating the "Elon is 12" allegations any time soon.
It’s cool, I’d love this if I had the money to afford it. Maybe in a decade, it will be more practical and have more legitimate use cases, I’m not sure!
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
This seems less like a consumer product than a stock market demonstration of the supposed synergies of merging SpaceX and Tesla.
interesting they're going back to the fixed-seat bench design of the 40's-60's kind of car design - didn't know these were allowed anymore
also wonder how comfy that is? i kind of welcome it tho!
I dig the commitment to the low poly look! Really cool and fits in with the new design direction.
Why Musk would spend probably tens of millions of dollars on this prototype which clearly will never be drivable on roads. One explanation is he is a trillionaire and the 14 year old in him thinks it would simply be cool to do it.
I think there is a more rational explanation. Tesla sales have slowed, other companies are catching up, and if it weren't for import issues, Chinese cars would be eating Tesla's breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yet Tesla is trading at a 330 P/E and Musk has to do something to make it seem like Tesla is still light-years ahead of everyone else and just wait, that 330 P/E will be justified any quarter now. Just like shooting a roadster into deep space was just a PR stunt, this is a PR stunt to boost the brand with no actual market relevance.
> other companies are catching up
Catching up? BYD has already surpassed Tesla and looks like the gap is going to continue to grow.
It is because he is very desperate for nerds to think he is cool so he lies and does PR stunts to that end and it works
Absolutely, but an even more likely explanation is that he's going to "acquire" Tesla with Space X and pay a premium (on top of the 330 P/E!). The SEC in this country is completely useless. Sure you can't invest in private companies if you're not an "accredited investor" but Musk is free to scam trillions of dollars.
Is this your first time seeing a concept car?
with a preorder button, yes.
> One explanation is he is a trillionaire and the 14 year old in him
At this point it's not clear that there's anything other than a 14 year old in him. A greedy, sociopathic 14 year old.
A though for the people doing the "boring" engineering at Tesla (like, you know, enhancing the range of the vehicles, improving security, making FSD closer to reality, etc...), who used to get some light (remember "battery day" ?), and are now on the backbench while the sycophants gets the budget for vanity projects like this. At least, at Tesla, the sycophants are _smart_ and pull out cool demos. Not the case in every "new clothes" kingdom.
I must be old. I just keep thinking about what kind of whiplash I'd get with those flips
I don't know the practicality of this car, or if the production version will have these thrusters, but the demo was epic. It tickled my childhood dream of working with mechanical stuff.
well Im suitably impressed
We are truly in the dumbest timeline
Reminds me quite a bit about Compressed Gas Supercharging:
https://casupercharging.com/
of all the things you could do for the world.
We are a nation of dullards, entertained away from our real problems by billionaires jingling keys in our faces.
More like they've strapped us to the chair, and now are dangling the keys trying to convince us it's our moral failing that the keys are in our face.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
Now put six of them in a field and throw in a huge soccer ball.
I've been recently playing a game called Approximately Up. You start from simple building blocks, thrusters and can use the in game logic system to build complex controls. One of the things I came about to learn was something to make a hover system for my ship was a simple PID controller. The side and bottom firing thrusters just remind me of my ship in the game. While the game is oversimplified and a bit arcadey, does anyone know what actually goes into this in the real life and is the huge feat the improvement on the weight of the whole car?
SpaceX uses convex optimizers, like CVX.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-079-introduction-to-convex-opt...
I was making my way on my rented scooter to drone bomb the Bezos BrainVat R&D center when the new model Roadster suddenly swooped over me in a mighty roar of liberated gas. Oh no, I thought! My mission is in jeopardy... but this is unparalleled quality content for the livestream viewers. I could see the Roadster's laser assembly lazily begin to track me, as if controlled by a joystick. A human pilot! Probably some one percenter out on a pleb hunt. The fool thought that I was unarmed. Heroically, I banked the scooter in a sharp turn while the machine gun on its back acquired the target, multiplying matrices furiously on its ancient low-fi GPU. As flames began to pour from the flying vehicle, I angled the scooter around a corner, timing it so that my black outfit would blur into the Apple ad projected on the side of the building. The Roadster's pilot was leaning out of the window screaming in rage and fear as his machine began a fiery descent toward the city shelter for abandoned kittens. I was torn between feeling bad for the kittens and giving in to the dopamine surge in my cortex as my viewer count climbed toward the stratosphere.
This sounds more or less like the car my 5 year old son dreamed up a few months back: "Dad, dad! What if we put a bunch of rocket thrusters on the bottom of an electric car? We could even add a really powerful fan as well. And then the car could just hover past traffic jams, and it could even drive along walls or upside down if you put the fans in reverse!".
I'll be listening even more closely to his ideas from now on, even when they defy the "common sense filter" we adults tend to have.
The real feat would be to actually ship the gas-equipped models. The on-stage demonstration was certainly quite impressive but handling real world terrain is a whole different story. Not to mention compensating for drivers who will skew lead-footed without any experience of handling a third dimension.
I am skeptical that this feature will prove to be much more than a publicity stunt, especially since the availability of these models will be so limited.
The suction and air recovery part might be forward thinking for how we design roads or tunnels. They might not all need to be flat. Especially when autonomous.
So the CyberCab will drive on the ceiling of the Boring Company’s tunnel?
Definitely not upside down, I was thinking of short inclines, possible as a sort of tunnel bypass. Assuming all the cars are networked for mechanical failures and the batteries can handle it. But that's only after the 5 minutes I spent considering the idea and mostly stolen from I Robot movie like most of Tesla's ideas.
You've got to be kidding. That's mighty uncomfortable when the angle is only a bit steep, the inclined lanes would be exclusive to expensive cars with this kind of capability (which no tax payer will want to subsidise), and when there's a traffic jam that takes a minute longer than your battery capacity, your car will just fall on top of another?
The biggest hurdle might be if the public would be tolerant of such extreme angles. It would feel like a slow roller coaster.
Yeah I was thinking it would suck for a passenger which is why it would only be useful for temporary bypass situations, since tunnels can clog up if cars fail. But that's a lot of engineering just for that one usecase. But I do except tunnels to become much more popular as cities become more dense and cars become automated.
If we’re going to have a network of underground tunnels in a city, wouldn’t it make more to fill them with subway trains, rather than thousands of autonomous cars?
I don't spend much time thinking about transit but I believe the dynamics of it will change dramatically when ever car is self-driving and whether western city governments finally allow the sort of building density and pace that is in demand.
I don't see much difference between a more affordable autonomous bus or van option vs a subway. The benefit will eventually be access to the tunnels more than the fact it's large and on a track. But in cities it's also incredibly expensive to build anything without a hundred stakeholders interfering so a large amount of new tunnels is probably DOA just like most high speed rail projects have been.
This is bending over backwards so hard I think you had to invent new geometry and discover new dimensions.
Fan cars are old. Nothing about them is new or special or unique. Trying to build infrastructure dependent on such a feature would be the dumbest thing since monorails.
Just build subways for heaven's sake.
also parking.
Wow, cool aesthetic. I feel like the this is what the cybertruck should have looked like but they didn't quite finish the design.
It's a cool demo and all but I can't help but feel like it's not that impressive considering these companies control such an absurd amount of capital and this is all they can do with it. A stunt for a launch showing off features that obviously won't be in any real product.
A lot of public funds go into these companies and it just feels like they are playing around with toys instead advancing humanity. I sometimes wonder if we are not allocating resources very efficiently.
> it's not that impressive co
you have to be pretty jaded to think a car that can fly through the air is not impressive.
I mean if I saw this at a monster truck derby I would think it was cool. When it's companies that represent trillions of dollars it feels a little underwhelming I was expecting more. It's also clearly a gimmick it's not like this is a real product. Even from their own marketing it's obvious.
If it was like "we figured out this technology and it will be available to the public and we will be working with regulators to usher in a new age of flying cars!" I would be pretty stoked. But it's pretty obviously just a stunt for the launch.
I don't know I just...I feel crazy but I feel like these resources could be doing something amazing and we getting like stunt tricks.
They do happen to build the number one selling electric vehicle in the world.
I mean Chinese EVs have already surpassed Tesla in global volume sales and their CEO helped elect the man who gut the EV industry in America. But I guess it's cool we are doing cool tricks while that happens?
Would you the same thing if it wasn't Elon Musk at the helm of this company? I'm not a big fan of him either, but I get the feeling some don't want to like this demo.
Also the public government funds being received are in the form of contracts. It's not like they can just use the money anywhere. Both Tesla and SpaceX are likely using private money (that is to say, funds not from the government) to fund this.
If it was a smaller scrappier company I would think it was neat, but this company and associated companies represents so much of the market and so many resources. And I don't know it just seems like they are doing like...monster truck derby stunts?? It's just kind of underwhelming to see this is what they are spending their time on for me. I was expecting a lot more.
> It's not like they can just use the money anywhere
I mean SpaceX was literally caught buying Cybertrucks it's clear there's some corruption. But aside from that, they also just represent such a large chunk of the market that it's hard to argue that they aren't just siphoning funds from other ventures somewhat even outside of public misappropriation. I wouldn't even mind that if I felt like they earned it, but it just feels like the stock was pumped as a meme or something. The engineering is impressive but not impressive IMO for what they are worth.
> it just feels like they are playing around with toys instead advancing humanity
You don't think electric vehicles and battery storage advance humanity?
On the contrary I would rather my big companies didn't try so hard to advance humanity. Elon has a lot of takes around creating a Utopian society which do not sit right with me. Really it's not the advancement that's the problem, it's the requisite power and resources necessary to achieve the elaborate visions. Humanity should be advanced by a collective, not by a few gifted individuals, even if that means more bureaucracy and less efficiency.
> Humanity should be advanced by a collective, not by a few gifted individuals, even if that means more bureaucracy and less efficiency.
In other words, you are advocating for communism.
I no longer like Elon and Tesla but, damn, that's a great looking Lamborghini, and a cool stunt to launch it!
Nice way to insult Lamborghini ?
Finally a vehicle for Bangalore!
If helipads can only handle one chopper ever few minutes, and they are surrounded by clear and open space, then that tells you that theres no way flying cars with the frequency of typical roads or even quite streets will ever happen.
I think that's to do with the wake/vortices a helicopter creates. Apparently, the effect is so strong that it can affect lift in a fairly large area over a few minutes. There's a recent case where a light plane took off in the neighborhood of a heli that just landed, and it veers off course, and hits the heli.
What a beautiful car!
The lack of imagination in this thread is appalling. Especially given this crowd.
cool asf
If you can afford something this ridiculous, then IMO you aren't being taxed enough.
> It challenges the limits of design, engineering and physics to deliver an expertly crafted extra-terrestrial vehicle.
closed tab. thanks.
This is pure marketing fluff. No way in hell this would ever make it into a street legal car.
It's great to watch these types of videos and tech ideas. It makes me really happy.
At least this one doesn't look horrible. I can't see myself buying it, but I don't feel like I want to gag either.
People who already have a Veyron should go for this.
It's very impressive. Not useful, but impressive.
there are approximately 450 in existence.. (ever made) Lets assume this car costs 1M each. (i bet its less) so if they sold 450 of these they'd make less than 500 million.
If they ever deliver a single unit that's a low enough bar to make it completely economically infeesable.
if they somehow managed to sell a couple of thousand... it might become profitable.
this has to be just a fantastic bit of marketing to jazz up their share price.
also.. I'd love to see a blooper roll of making it do these things...
I suspect the blooper reel is less interesting than we’d expect. SpaceX has demonstrated competency at putting cold gas thrusters on arbitrary masses and making them move as desired.
Just curious: Was there a demo of a stable straight jump as well, or always barrel-rolls?
It must be incredibly difficult to keep the car stable while mid-air at low speeds, I suspect it wouldn't look that "elegant"...
Wasn’t stable. The straight jump they did was more like a mini rocket launch over some parked cars.
You’d want something that smoothly hovers rather than a launch then catch with boosters.
the jump over the cars I saw also had a barrel-roll as soon as the thrust of lifting off was over.
Was there a second jump without a roll?
99% times when you go to write 'barrel roll', just write 'roll'.
A barrell roll is a specific manoeuvre involving pitching up vertically before commencing the roll.
Good input.
Learnt something today, thank you!
In the kickflip video it launches straight up and then proceeds to do a flip mid jump. The straight takeoff looks pretty solid to me.
On takeoff you can stabilize against opposing forces, so especially without the weight or inertia of a driver it is quite straight (rockets also don't need to stabilize on take-off).
But once that phase is overcome, how stable is the car actually mid-air?
It looks to me that they added the barrel-roll because everything else would have looked worse...
With such a powerful suction system, I can see this replacing street-sweeping trucks in a few years.
I you sweep up an hedgehog, will it be thrown out through the exhaust?
Sure, you'll get a finely chopped hedgehog [1] (the video doesn't depict any animals, it shows roadster suction fans). Things happen. With a conventional car you can get a tendered deer.
[1] https://youtu.be/_lq-DpCE9rU?t=1011
Or a banana. Mario Kart suddenly starts making sense.
I am amazed at how steady and in control the car was when flipping and jumping. If that kind of control on a vehicle is achieved today, it seems like flying car tech just took a giant lurch forward. Just in time for America's crumbling road infrastructure.
It seems it's not a convertible anymore? Which means it shouldn't be called a Roadster.
I hate Tesla for their politics, broken promises, and all the drama that we are all aware and tired of hearing about. That being said, that was the coolest damn thing I've ever seen a car do.
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that it'll never make production like this, but what I see as being demonstrated is a suborbital lander/off-world ground transport concept that can work in low gravity environments etc. This will aid autonomous delivery vehicles etc to be dropped from low orbit and find their own landing sites, and then drive to location.
I wonder how many maimed kerbals are stranded around the space X facility while testing this.
Very cool stuff but all the "extra-terrestrial" stuff is complete bunk. This thing wouldn't survive Max-Q, let alone any kind of landing that isn't on a clean slab of concrete. It's a cool rich person toy, no other notes.
You miss my point. They're demonstrating a landing system, it's just wrapped up in a car to fool the idiots that are going to pre-purchase it again so they can use that money to build more space X technology.
The car is just a façade.
Edit: And to expand on this. Owners of GM T.50' say they can't use the ground effect fan anywhere in public due to the debris it picks up and throws, and are ineffective on anything but near perfect roads. So that's not impressive to me. And the jet boosters are also ridiculous, there is not real-world application where you could use them outside of completely closed environments with no one nearby. It's a huge investment into reaction thrusters for a car that would never, ever be used - unless it was to demonstrate thruster technology for another reason.
i.e. Space X.
Ah I see. Yeah looks like it's pretty much just RCS for cars. Space landing systems are pretty well understood from the rocketry side afaik. The hard parts seem to really be around autonomous landing site selection [1][2] in novel environments. We'll have to see if the Roadster can do significant in-flight landing manoeuvrers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IM-1#Lunar_landing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_1#Landing_att...
The novel thing is atmospheric compressed air RCS, but even so I’m not talking moon landings.
This feels like a delivery mechanism to drop hardware from terrestrial orbit. At least the last leg after parachutes
What is this wonderful "autonomous delivery vehicle" capable of delivering?
Also, assuming the delivery vehicle is destroyed at the end of each "delivery", what will it cost?
...why would you assume it would be destroyed? What even is your point?
I think you are on an entirely different page.
SpaceX have great inertial measurement units and cold gas thrusters. We get it. Musk remains a fascist and can keep his cars.
If I'm understanding this correctly, it uses the electric motor to compress air into large tanks? How much thrust could that generate (and for how long)? It'd be amazing to jump over East River or the Hudson.
Very impressive prototype. Certainly an attempt to disrupt a specific segment of the car industry - "race cars", or "sports cars", or whatever you want to call it.
A few considerations, just my own thoughts.
1) I would bet that the actual car shown in the demo weights less than what will eventually be sold to the public. I am not an expert, but the way in which the car reacted to the air boosts suggests a relatively "lightweight" vehicle. Plus, I would imagine perhaps a smaller battery (again, for demo purposes).
2) It is a nice "exercise" as a game, or an expensive hobby for billionaires. I doubt, as Elon hinted, that using these thrusters will be allowed on public roads. Perhaps just on circuits?
3) Overall, Elon said that Tesla's strategy will no longer be about cars, but about robots and AI, and then proceeds to show a car that will cost billions to develop, and might not be the commercial success that justifies the investment.
4) Twitter (now X), Tesla, SpaceX... things are moving, tricks are being shown, and who knows, perhaps next year everything will be merged under ElonX, and he will finally be happy.
Am I missing something? At what point did the car fly?
The thrusters were able to cushion a fall.
That seems useful in ruining the ending of Thelma and Louise, but isn’t really a flying car.
There is a video where it is flying over some other Teslas. Actually taking off, barrel roll and landing
It flies the same as a chicken. Cushion and long jumps but not flying as in flying car or plane.
More like a turkey.
There were multiple demos; its possible you only saw one, and then raced to comment about something you had incomplete knowledge about.
"It's not flying, it's falling with style!"
I think this is pretty unique demonstration for something that theoretically may be street legal one day.
yes it cushioned the fall, but not sure if it was overly modified beyond realistic car weight for production / public.
Yes, you missed the middle of the video.
Amazing demo.
Also amazing stupidity of people believing anything close to this will hit the streets. Lies and lies for a decade, and now after a flashy demo it is again "2028".
Is the copy grok's writing style? It feels inhuman but still more readable than Opus
> an expertly crafted extra-terrestrial vehicle.
hmmmm. spacex-tesla merger signalling?
So where is FSD that has been promised since 2017?
Cool stunt car though
Nice Testarossa!
I worked at Tesla when they announced the Roadster 2 and said they’d start production. That never happened. Funny to see everyone eat this up, let’s see when or if they deliver.
So this is a completely obvious scam, right? I don't see anyone else calling this out and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell, it would basically be a bomb. Also, the battery pack that would go in the car would be so large that they couldn't do the stunts they showed in their drone vehicle.
Are we not calling an obvious stock pumping charade what it is out of some sense of politeness?
I feel like it's also crazy irresponsible to sell this deathtrap to the public, since it's pretty much guaranteed buyers will joyride this on public roads.
- The cold-gas only version will shotgun debris into onlookers, and possibly yeet anyone behind it.
- Active suction is very cool until a rock punches through your intakes.
- Lithium batteries and pressurised tanks in the same package, yippee!
Thank god it'll take them years to manufacture this thing.
It isn't being sold to the public. Of the three versions, the one that is "road ready" doesn't have the gimmicky thrusters. The one that is displayed is available by invite only, and even if you have a quarter of a million to reserve the racing model, you aren't likely to get a license plate for use on public roads.
They're not selling this to the public.
They'll make a handful that a select few billionaires will get to keep in a hanger somewhere for bragging rights.
There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I agree with the first two points, but why do you think the thrusters have to be manually controlled? My expectation would be it'd just perform one of the pre-programmed tricks taking in the sensor data to adapt mid-way, the same way they do auto-landings in SpaceX (no one is controlling the landing booster manually, right?).
Sorry, but "just use sensor data and do it like the spacex landings" is such a ridiculous hand-waving of the scope of the actual problem.
Explain what you mean please. First, this is not going on a public road anytime ever, so in an unlikely event this product will actually see the light of day, it’s very likely that anyone who attempts this will do it on mostly static controlled circuit/pad. I don’t know how they did the demo, but I don’t see it as something outside of the realm of reality to calculate ‘kickflip’ on the fly using whatever sensors they put in this thing.
I wouldn’t want to sit in it tho (and I’m guessing no one in the demographic this will be sold to would want this level of risk either).
> There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I'm not even sure if a fighter pilot could. The passenger compartment of the "Rocket" model is probably packed full of tanks and other equipment, to deliver total of a few seconds of flight time. Doing anything in the air would probably require such precise timing no person could do manually, and it probably can't even be done automatically outside very controlled conditions.
The demo literally has it flying without a pilot controlling it. There's not going to be like 8 joysticks that a driver has to use at once to make it fly
No kidding. Musk is SIX YEARS late on delivering the previous version of the roadster, which has been superseded by today's announcement, promising its delivery in a few years, and everyone is just lappin' it up.
Who cares about six years, thats the past.
When you were a kid, if you saw a car fly and flip you would be amazed. You are old and jaded like me so nothing gives you wonder anymore.
The people lapping it up aren't prospective customers, they're just people enjoying the spectacle.
Well we could examine the history here, for instance when he bought Twitter that it would immediately collapse (now its more popular than ever and Bluesky is the one that's falling apart) and when the Cybertruck was announced there were lots of people saying it could never be made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437
You forgot about how everyone was insisting the Hyperloop would never work and then it became the principal mode of transportation. Or how we couldn't possibly have a Mars colony in 2024. Or how twitter would never become the West's everything app. Etc.
I'll just leave this here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
Elon Musk causes incredible amounts of historical non-examination. There are now so many examples that it's actually difficult to list them all. My guess is that people just get very confused by the difference between late delivery and non-delivery.
It’s crazy how many Cybertrucks I see in my hometown, and I don’t live in that big of a city. They are incredibly popular. This car will be incredibly popular to. Peoples are getting bent out of shape about the “thrust” and “rocket” variants, but who cares? Those will be few and far between. For rich collectors mostly. How about just the base model? It looks wild, I’m sure it will be fun as hell to drive. They are going to sell a ton of these things.
Cybertrucks objectively missed sales expectations by a lot. The numbers are well-documented.
The Mitsubishi Outlander outsells it.
I can’t imagine a car without a steering wheel benign fun to drive. Tesla has never been known for handling and driving dynamics.
The 3 handles quite nicely, I'd compare the performance model favorably to any BMW M3.
I have never heard any serious automotive journalist come up with that sort of comparison.
Numb steering, crashy handling, that’s what the gearheads seem to say about Tesla vehicles.
They go fast but they are absolutely not at the top of the class for driving dynamics.
I’ve test driven a Model Y Performance and the steering was lighter and more numb than my basic economy car. The car goes fast but that’s all it does.
If the roadster has drive by wire like the cybertruck that’s going to be even worse.
Maybe if you don't like driving? It's really a solid car. Much better than the WRX, which is quite good. Make sure you set steering to low assist. The performance models in general are serious machines. Top of class in their price range by a long shot.
Dude this is crazy, kind of embarrassing if I’ll be honest.
There is no universe in which I would compare any Tesla model to an M3 or WRX.
First of all we should consider that their direct competitor the Ioniq 5 N is a better performance car.
The M3 finishes Willow Springs faster than the Model 3, so we can’t even go by raw performance. In track conditions the battery thermals and stock tires on the Model 3 can’t keep up.
Comparing the emotions you’re going to get from a V8 gurgling and thrashing through gears compared to a silent EV motor is just not even in the same league. The Ioniq 5 N actually does something about that and reviewers are impressed. They directly state that it is more fun than Tesla performance models.
Then your other problem is that the Model 3 performance looks identical to your uber driver’s car. Someone dropping $60k on a performance car wants to feel special. The trim and upholstery options on the M3 alone are more exciting than the Model 3.
> They are incredibly popular.
They sell 20k of them per year. It's the opposite of popular
Did you read the post or just skim.
They ARE popular, I see 10-20 a day when I drive around. Now if you want to compare to a corolla, I don't care.
> They ARE popular, I see 10-20 a day when I drive around.
They're distinctive.
Count Corollas for a day. You can probably see 10-20 at once in some spots.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
(When I got a Toyota Echo back in the early 2000s, I suddenly saw them everywhere, too. And yet… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Platz#Sales)
Also let’s talk about the production of the video. It had all the signs of those magic videos you can find on YouTube where the trick is only a camera trick. Dark background, you never see the entirety of the audience, it’s all camera cuts. I’m sure it’s not fake per say but it’s super weird still.
Well I see no numbers saying how long it will fly. Perhaps it "hops", could easily see that happening with a burst of air below the car. (While standing still, accelerating the car upwards for 1 second with a burst of air)
This is not flying, it's a semi-controlled crash landing.
https://x.com/tesla/status/2110913438293647789/video/1
Looks like 4 seconds or so.
That doesn't seem like flying to me
Would 12 seconds do?
That's not flying, it's falling with style.
> The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell
The cybertruck is for sale and FSD is active in the US. The US lets automakers "self-certify" that they are safe. So although I don't think this thing should ever be sold, it may end of on US roads.
My big question is, would anyone want one? It's an interesting life size hotwheels car but who would want one other than to show at a monster truck rally. The original Tesla Roadster was a masterpiece compared to this new one. Talk about missing the mark by a mile...
> who would want one
The Tumbler? Oh, you wouldn't be interested in that.
I suppose at least we can say there is a working car that seems to be able to actually do the things as advertised, which is more than one could ever say for e.g. the Moller Skycar.
McMurtry Spéirling is 900 kg with 1000hp and 100KW battery and 2000 kg suction fan.
Flying / rocket acceleration are special versions they can sell one offs capable of doing the stunt once per canister change.
That’s why it’s invite only.
I was #12 Tesla Roadster owner. I spoke across the country with my father. We drove from coast to coast in 2014 at a time when there was a lot of doubt. — I supported elons “mission” and now we know it’s a neo Nazi front of a company. This company and Elon has been a scam since he stole JB Straubel. How do I know? JB Straubel is my father.
I can't make soup of this. Your dad is a billionaire and you're left to fend for yourself? That's got to be some story.
You didn’t read what I wrote.
Elon is my dad and he could beat up your dad
JB Straubel married in 2013. Unless you're 13 years old, JB Straubel isn't your father.
That kind of liar is what I would expect of someone who goes around claiming Elon's a Nazi though.
Car isn’t flying
They may well be lying but that ( "JB Straubel married in 2013" ) isn't remotely a sound argument against the "JB Straubel is my father" claim.
Straubel, in the year 2000 at the age of 25, may very well have had unprotected sex out of wedlock !!
Neo Nazi? Seems a bit much.
how about pedophile instead? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA006616...
Everyone that went to the island is attracted to pre prepubescent children?
Is that your claim?
He didn't even go to the island (or want to go to the island other than to have a party).
> (or want to go to the island other than to have a party).
with the most notorious pedophile on earth?
> Virginia Giuffre alleged in a lawsuit that in the early 2000s, when she was 18, she participated in an orgy on the island with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and eight girls who "appeared to be under the age of 18" and did not speak English.
What exactly are you defending here?
I'm defending facts, there was no pedophilia, prove it.
> with the most notorious pedophile on earth?
Go look at the emails. It kinda shows Elon was clueless about what the island was about.
Also he wasn't notorious at the time.
> What exactly are you defending here?
Ah you're going to accuse me of defending pedophilia now? Figures with your type.
He spent 18 months in jail in 2008 for "soliciting prostitution from a minor". If you associated with him after that date, you were ok with hanging out with a pedophile.
> Everyone that went to the island is attracted to pre prepubescent children?
There's absolutely an argument to be made there but in this case it's a bit more specific.
Anyone that repeatedly emails the most notorious pedophile on earth, begging to be invited to the wildest party on their private island is absolutely a pedophile.
If it talks about politics like a Nazi and salutes like a Nazi…
Elon donates to white Christian fundamentalist. The largest donor in history to the Republican Party and does Nazi salutes.
Flying is obviously a gimmick, but when Elon said this will crush all track records he wasn’t kidding.
The base model has the suction fans which will make huge gains.
Next model up has rear thrusters for the acceleration, which will be more insane. It’s limited production.
Final model that can fly is invite only and will be a joke on the track, using those thrusters to go around corners way, way faster than normal.
I wish they had shown track laps and 1/4 mile times instead of the gimmick of flying.
If they could have they would have shown it.
I honestly think it’s not finished yet (that’s why no production till 28 and Elon obviously being not confident the demo would work)
They also wouldn’t have wanted it on test tracks before today.
You can tell a lot about what you don't see... For instance, a driver getting in - or out.
If that thing would have looked like a huge drone (which I strongly suspect it is) no one would be up in arms about it.
Two people did get out of the one that drove up on stage. They made it very clear there was no human in the one that flew.
The one on stage was likely very different from the one that "flew".
I don't think so, most non car people don't understand 1/4 mile times.
And they already did that with a cybertruck pulling a 911, already done.
If you wanted another pretext to merge Tesla and SpaceX this would be a good way.
The existing tech fab plus this car maybe makes it harder to sue once the merger happens - but he will still be sued. “Look we’re making it rocket cars with AI of course we should be one company”
A pretext that convinces the most credulous people on the planet. Clever guy this Musk.
I mean is it ever actually being released? probably not.
Was it a an amazing demo? yes.
What are you talking about re: the battery pack?
I think calling it a scam is a crazy thing to say. Tesla has never not (eventually) shipped a product they said they would .
Also yes you can legally sell it. Whether you can legally operate it is a different question.
May I remind you of the promised 90 second battery swap…13 years ago? https://youtu.be/Oj6LaYFall4?si=RGE8mbZQFdElq0sq
That wasn't a product they were going to sell to customers.
The car certainly was (it had to ship with the capability, which it never did). And besides, your point is irrelevant.
A bunch of the Model S production vehicles did ship with the capability. It was removed from later models. So that part absolutely shipped. Tons of cars on the road to this day still have the hardware in the car to support it.
And they did build one pilot station that did the battery swaps and did some swaps with real owners cars, but drivers didn't like the idea so they abandoned it.
And yes to my point, I said Tesla product, namely something that is sold to customers as is. So yeah it's relevant.
The roadster hasn't shipped after 9 years. Including a referral program for preorders. I find it incredibly more insane to be trusting of this
There are a long list of cars that have not-really-legal abilities.
The corvette ZR-1 had a special key that would unlock all the performance. I don't think it met emissions when unlocked.
Lots of newer muscle cars have performance modes and dragstrip modes that you shouldn't use.
Even other teslas, like model 3 performance and model s plaid have have track mode and dragstrip mode that shouldn't be used on public streets.
The second generation Roadster (reservations for which opened in 2017) literally is the product they didn't ship.
Also Cybercab.
How many Optimus robots are out in the wild?
It is a scam, 100%.
This was a product reveal for the new second generation Roadster though?
Cybercab is operating already on the roads? They're building the factory for mass producing them right now.
Optimus robot is still in development.
*Third generation. They demo'd and took millions in deposits on the second generation roadster that never materialized.
There are now 300 cyber cabs driving people around Austin, and they’re working on rolling it out.
Optimus is coming, the huge factory in Austin is being built now.
Late? Always. But coming.
Telling how you skipped his first paragraph.
For sure, that one is a miss (or very long delay)
Two outta three ain’t bad.
He actually says in the video that it might not be legal to operate but they could still sell you one. Anything is legal off-road on your own private property.
Yeah, once you leave the ground you aren't on your property anymore.
Not true, though the exact boundary is not well defined. See US v. Causby
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Causby
Depends where you are, but generally you are good to around 400ft above your own property in most cases.
FAA jurisdiction over the airspace is not the same as a rule prohibiting every form of powered lift-off within it. There's a lot of grey area in FAA regs - for instance you can land a plane on your lawn in class E (if you could manage it).
He took preorders for the roadster nine years ago. It never shipped.
What do you think this product reveal was for? The roadster.
A product reveal implies it's a production ready vehicle.
This was an air tank with a styrofoam shell held together with glue. It's a rough prototype of a concept car.
So... Still hasn't shipped?
Still hasn't failed to ship either.
this is a new roadster, the previous roadster hasnt sold a unit
WAIT THIS ISN'T THE ONE THAT PEOPLE PREORDERED NINE YEARS AGO?
The preorders converted over. It's the same product in effect.
In the sense that they're both vapor, yes.
"product"
I think it’s real, the “invite only” version could probably do the kickflip over the semis, but would probably completely exhaust the tanks and require special equipment to refill or take hours with an onboard pump. And the flip is certainly a scripted stunt, not something you’d actually be able to do live. The math doesn’t seem to be completely unreasonable as a one off demo
They said there is a compressor to re-pressurize the tanks while driving. It made it sound like a power-up in a video game. You can't use it all the time, but if you wait for it to charge up, use it as many times as you want.
I think the bigger issue with be making it street legal. Kickflipping over traffic, and refusing visibility for everyone to 0 in the process, can't be good.
For closed courses, movies, etc it's really cool.
I don’t think it would be street legal, hence the invite only thing. More of a status symbol / car collector curiosity than an actual car
I wouldn't be surprised if the presented "invite-only" variant will mostly be aimed at Saudi investors, and they will get an invite if they invest a billion into the company.
This would even be a sensible choice for Tesla, because it will put that car in a garage far away from public scrutiny...
(thinking just about all the debris damage-potential of those thrusters here, not even any potential quality issues)
When I searched for Tesla on YouTube at the start of the event, the first live event returned was this, an AI generated Tesla presentation with Elon telling users to send bitcoin and he'll send you back double as a promotional event like an X Money thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5EDp2rEbFA. The QR code went to this site: https://roadster.tv. I reported it to YouTube.
Why are you reposting links to scams?
So someone can look into it.
China has had flying cars since 2023 so I don't see how this is a scam. The flying mechanism is unique for the Roadster so that's still to be seen how it would perform out in public.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZpQZSBTi7k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2c-B3y7yGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU5viDOjWLw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSjXf7IUSDw
wow i did not realise this. are there videos of these flying cars? can you buy them?
XPeng has been spruiking flying cars (really just giant quadcopters) for a while now, but while they exist and can fly, they're more of a publicity stunt. For example, while you can buy the X2 in Australia, you can't legally fly it.
https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/australias-first-flyin...
There's also a real life speeder bike from Star Wars, if you've got an extra million dollars sitting around.
https://volonaut.com/
The only one I can think that they might mean is the BYD Yangwang U9. It can jump a tiny bit.
Yep, just google: china flying cars. They're basically human sized drones/quadcopters.
I mean, Tesla demoed, promised, and took reservation money for a roadster reboot that _also_ didn't contain any technology China didn't have in 2017, and at this point they still haven't delivered on that and it feels safe to call it a scam.
Just because the technology is technically feasible doesn't mean that a specific company is not scamming you when they promise it.
And Tesla already has enough of a history of fake promises (your tesla will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep within a few years, FSD will take you across the country while you sleep by next year, humanoid robots, the new roadster is taking reservations now and will deliver soon, regulation is the only thing holding up FSD, etc etc).
To be fair the main reason why FSD hasn't been a wide spread thing is mostly due to local regulations. The technology exists and performs fairly well. FSD is allowed in pretty much all the same cities Waymo is allowed to operate so we can see from this that its a regulatory issue not a technological one.
none of these are videos of flying cars
I mean it looks cool but considering they haven't produced any of the other Roadster models in any meaningful quantity, and have repeatedly come up short on much more reasonable product offerings... Idk I have just the slightest doubt about a flying electric car hitting the market any time soon. Hasn't it been nearly a decade since the promise of a software update that would turn your Tesla into a self-driving taxi that can earn money while you're not using it?
Flying cars before GTA6.
Rockstar better get to work adding this car to the game.
Rocket-inspired design hints at desire to merge Tesla and SpaceX?
What's up with wheels not being round anymore? How is that supposed to work? I understand it for Formula 1, but for real world driving, it doesn't make any sense
What kind of car doesn't have round wheels? This comment section must be the craziest I have seen so far on HN:
They're talking about the steering wheel, champ.
My bad, I made a typo. I meant "wheel" not "wheels"
What's with the ugly design these days... even that new electric Ferrari just look terrible coming from Ferrari not even the right color
Jumping my way out of traffic.
Is that the Draco engine?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Draco
No, they're cold gas thrusters. The car has an air compressor, a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) and 10 nozzles.
The corpses that this thing generates will be astonishing.
The homies have had flying cars for years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJDQURYkSvc
Looks like Tesla didn’t learn from the abject cybertruck failure
I have no words. Its like Elon asked Grok where can I take my business, and it suggested combine rockets and cars.
Flies, or jumps?
Dunno. Looks like it jumps. Fying seems to require some degree of control over direction but I'm just a gravity-impaired bidep.
So, almost 10 years after the reservation for this version of the Roadster.
Totally thought this was AI when I first saw this.
Other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112380
Given how Tesla's profitability nearly vanished due to Elon outing himself with the "roman salute", I don't see why he thinks his company will be around long enough to actually get this out the door.
I have no reason to believe this isn't another Deplorean.
It could have military applications; it's hard to imagine any civilian applications.
in theory it could avoid car crashes in practice the dudes that buy these cars will probably cause more crashes;)
At least the fans will allow for really short breaking distances.
I historically argued for a sort of horror-vehicle that would achieve autonomous driving "early" by exploiting downforce from powerful fans, but I mostly imagined it being used for autonomous deliveries and never imagined there being people inside it.
idk about the safety of involving jumping cars into car crashes, I'd still prefer the brakes (obviously not always enough time). The one useful situation I could see is if you're driving (accidentally I hope) off a cliff.
Misdirection
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
> Tesla Sales Slump in Third Quarter
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-sales-fell-in-third...
Misdirection only works if you cash in during the interval immediately after the misdirect before the subject can refocus.
Tesla Q3 sales will be the same tomorrow.
It doesn't surprise me that any particular companies sales are down at the moment, how does Tesla compare to other car manufacturers out of interest.
It's ok they'll merge with space x and basically be part of the US military which means sales figures won't matter anymore
This would only work until the next Democratic administration, at this point he's put almost half a billion dollars into Republican pockets. All it takes is one President AOC to pull every government contract he has. And he knows this, hence the election spending.
Tesla board meeting last week: Board: So guys, our sales are slumping. What do we do? Elon: I have this cool idea...
> Tesla Sales Slump in Third Quarter
This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.
Awesome technical demo (assuming these weren't prop cars). Painfully awkward presentation.
Crash test rating: undefined
> An invite-only "Rocket" variant is a single-seat model with a "full flight system."
Tesla should be sued into oblivion over "full self driving", but after that, if you believe this nonsense and buy one that's on you.
I hope not, I use "full self driving" every day! I'm sure your statement is based extensive experience, but mine is that for 2 1/2 years over 40k miles, it has worked very well. Not perfect (parking spot selection has frequent regressions), but astonishingly well.
Why? I’ve sat in a self driving Tesla, with the attendant’s body rotated towards me while we chatted in Florida. What specifically is wrong?
What's wrong is all of the older models they sold do not have what you experienced. They were sold FSD but their car's hardware can't run the latest software, and the older implementations required much more babysitting (aka not FSD).
Got it - thanks for answering.
This is going to be the next oceangate and I fully support it.
The engineering team did an amazing job!
Great, now how about putting some of those amazing engineering brain cells into solving the impending water crisis.
It can fly? Wow! What a time to be alive!
Paid subscriptions everyere, I bet.
EPA won't like the gas emission
It's compressed air.
Nitrogen specifically
What a wonderful illustration of the technofeudalism that many seem eager to push our world into. That doesn't diminish the engineering feat it embodies, in fact it rhymes pretty well.
Potholes no longer an issue, just hop over them.
Is this a broken link for anyone else?
All Musk cares about is Mars. The CT is going to be a Mars vehicle, that's why it looks like that by and large.
And this tech is simply part of the Tesla/SpaceX merge, and right in line with flamethrowers, tunnels, and chainsaws. It's going to funnel loads of cash his way, which was the idea.
The rocket flip part looks like CGI, in my opinion. I get the same feeling as when I see CGI on some random B movie. Would be happy to be proven wrong if there was a crowd of people filming from their angle though.
Also "Beyond The Limits of Physics"... would any actual engineers at Tesla/SpaceX agree with that marketing statement?
https://x.com/itskyleconner/status/2110901867823718434
So it can fly?
Just like we will have 1 million robotaxis on the streets by 2021?
EDIT: wow it really can fly, that is crazy
Invite-only variant can jump, not fly. Other two variants can't jump.
The thing that made the design of the original Tesla cars successful, before they went all in on this "future looks like the future" idiocy, is that they just looked good. Tasteful. All that crazy new tech was put in a package which hid it and it just became a sleek, good looking car on the road. Now Tesla design is obsessed with it cosplaying a Ridley Scott 80's wet dream and it looks stupid. The cars look like a show at universal studios theme park. When you do the "future looks like the future" it's always a sci-fi author's idea of "the future" which is cheesy and outdated as soon as its done. This is a boomer's idea of "future" aesthetics and it's not what the actual future looks like.
Tesla hitting their lambo era?
Are you kidding me? That was real? I laughed that off as AI BS and went about my day.
You can hate the man, but you must respect him. Flying cars have truly arrived.
No they haven't? It can hop at best, in a demo unit, designed specifically for that demo.
Correct. I will wait until Elon does a flip in it himself.
No. Respect is earned.
Tesla death throes, looks cool but they’re done.
What a downgrade from the renders we've seen so far.
Did you see 0 to 60 in 0.81 second, now THAT is flying!
A car that jumps - am I missing something? The speed numbers are cool.
As a father of a growing family, I am still waiting for the RoBovan.
That surpassed all expectations.
I'm so glad Elon exists. He must have spent over $100 million to build the flying variant with no hope of ever profiting off it. I can't imagine any other CEO ever doing that.
$100M to boost Tesla shares by billions of $, how generous...
Hundreds of thousands of dead Africans may not be so happy he exists.
Nobody needs that kind of acceleration on a car designed for use on public roads, and anyone who uses that capability in the vicinity of other people or vehicles deserves to be arrested. Its just criminally dangerous.
Like the Cybertruck, this is just the Musk "fuck you, get out of my way" worldview realised as metal and plastic.
I recall that about 8 (10?) years ago the “Roadster 2” was advertised. Am I correct that that was repeatedly delayed and never delivered?
My sense is that this is just more Elon Musk bullshit that will never materialize.
Even if it does, these features aren't useful and can't be used in any realistic scenario. At best they're just party tricks.
1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem. 2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.
These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.
Control theory is classical. We did it in 1960. Why would you think it requires ML?
When I first saw this I was convinced it was AI slop. Nope! This is absolutely incredible. I've also never really resonated with Tesla aesthetic in the past but they really nailed it here imo. This car looks phenomenal - I hope this style trickles down to other models.
Unavailable to visit?
Oh look, not street legal.
Fun demo, never will see the road. There's a billion ways this can kill scores of people instantly.
That the supposedly smart ppl here get their knickers in a twist over this theatre piece is telling.
Literally no proof of this working in real world conditions.
I call bull.
Who is the impressive to? 12 year old boys and Elon Musk?
Flying car? That looks more like a jumping car to me - great engineering but a bit misleading imho.
If this is real, it's going to kill people.
Absolutely incredible demo. Jesus Christ, I don't know what I was expecting. Didn't know this was planned and skipped forward to see what they were showing off and thought it was CGI for how outlandish it is. My god, man. This is amazing.
So they are going to send one of to space again?
If it allows me to fly over a traffic jam, I'll buy it
Was there any demo showing the car stabilized mid-air?
It appears like they always did a barrel-roll because the car is simply not stable after take-off...
Are they serious about the rocket version??
Very COOL, I like this Roadster retro style
I predict the next James Bond movie will be a Tesla ad.
Will this car ever ship?
I cant wait to see what type of batshit crazy motorsport series they invent for these.
"Tony Hawk would be called, we call that the kickflip."
Uh what? Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip
Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/LC97wdQOmfI
Yes, Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip (and damn near every other skate trick), but the reference here comes from a time when Tony Hawk would drive around and yell "do a kickflip" at skaters, if they did a kickflip he would sometimes give them a signed board or other things. Example video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0dI05Xz8s - it became a thing for a little where people would yell "do a kickflip" at skaters they saw on the street.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the origin of that meme.
I mean, this is the gimmicky of gimmicks for the ultra-rich.
It just means you can do jumps and stunts programmed into the vehicle at the push of a button with zero skill at being a stunt driver.
The Dukes of Hazzard had to do that without the thrusters.
Can't wait to see how people kill themselves and other people with those things by being stupid...
Hopefully that shit gets blocked by the DOT and kept off public roads--which is probably the goal to get a bunch of drooling simps outraged over "government overreach" keeping them away from their "flying cars".
> and other people
That's the bit where we diverge.
I absolutely detest the leadership and what he is actively doing to this country... but holy fucking shit. I want to reserve one, but when you're broke as a joke... ooph.
At this point this is some sort of IQ test right?
Sorry about the eggs honey, I had to use the thrusters to get past this cyclist.
Reading some of this feels like I’m having a stroke.
>This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Neat car though.
Can you imagine being behind this thing and the air blowing rocks and shit all over your car?
you already deal with this to some extent from others driving larger cars, everyone should be in a sedan
No way this is road legal in any country lmao
Very useful in England’s countryside, imagine all the puddles you can jump over! Eliminate these passing bays when cars can jump over each other in the narrow lanes!
Jaw-dropping stunts aside, I am really disappointed with where all modern car design is going. What is that ugly low poly shit? The previous Roadster concept had a style, it had sex and taste. How did we get from there to here?
I'd buy one for the police chases. Hell yes. Not that I'm in the billionaire invite-only inner circle, and not that they'll ever ship it.
This reminds me of the time Elon Musk was only known because of the supercool stuff his companies did.
He literally made good on the long time promise of FLYING CARS and this is not the top post????
this site just toast
Most roadways in the US are lined with wooden poles supporting wires with electricity running through them
It's a tech demo marketing presentation with a jumping car in it, not a flying one. It does look pretty cool though. Let's first wait and see if/when this will even be available and not just a marketing stunt.
It accelerates and maneuvers in-air, that is not a "jump". It legit flies.
This is not some suden demo, this is something they've promised and talked of along time ago and has been in development the whole time.
And Tesla is all about manufacturing so mistaking this for some "prototype-only" device is misled.
I make flying stuff all the time. Not as heavy but I don't see a reason why I couldn't and I won't need a couple of billion to do so. This thing 'flies' for a very narrow definition of flying. Call me when it stays in the air for a couple of minutes. Prediction: that will never happen.
We've had variations of flying cars for 60+ years. We know how to build them.
What people mean by "flying cars" is mass production. Ford Model T.
Will it even be maintainable? Never mind the rocket fuel...
Will the frame itself hold up?
It's apparently not fuel but pressurized air being refueled by the car itself.
> "Will it even be maintainable?"
Probably doesn't matter. I don't think it will be permitted on public roads anyway.
The presented variant is invite-only, so I guess it will be made to put in the garage of some (Saudi) investor who commits a billion dollar investment...
Correcting myself (and Elon) here.
It turns out the car has a 200L/600L nitrogen tank with 10,000PSI that needs to be filled from external source.
Consumed nitrogen reduces the pressure, so the tank is re-pressurized with ambient air by a in-car compressor.
I wonder if the jets will be able to assist breaking or control of the car in emergency situations.
oh they'll assist breaking all right
I'm sure having a bunch of rocket engines, fuel, plumbing, etc, on my car will make it great in the twisties. This is such a stupid compromise.
How come this totally cool thing with 397 points is on the third fucking page being #65.
I just want to know how they faked it. Because I actually have zero trust that this is a realistic demonstration.
To be fair, I think this is very doable with modern technology. If you've seen their rocket landing videos the technology is quite similar in nature.
The gimmicky part is not the engineering but the fact that it is not a flying car but a proof of concept of a flying car in a very controlled environment, with no regard for cost, with no actual viability of real world use.
Its like the breakdancing humanoid robots in China, a cool feat of engineering for sure, but it makes you think that robots can do human tasks, when the reality is much further away.
> If you've seen their rocket landing videos the technology is quite similar in nature.
Sure but Tesla is not SpaceX.
Well, the first thought is that they borrowed the thrust technology and software from spacex. This makes sense, because in starship, they used to have a lot of pneumatic powered actuators for things like thrust vectoring control, then they switched to electric motors, because they are instaneously responsive for one thing (and I think more reliable as they aren't fluid based). From what remember, they originally used electric motors from Tesla, so makes sense that Telsa would in turn borrow from Spacex.
I read that indeed they did use SpaceX technology.
Air Hogs!
https://www.walmart.com/ip/Air-Hogs-Zero-Gravity-Sprint-RC-C...
This is one of those products that offers a thrilling demo but I have no desire to own one. I much prefer the 2020 design that never made it to production.
Relevant.
* The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw
Is this a gas that needs to be refilled with the cold thrust one?
"grok, my flying tesla is dirty and there is a carwash 50 metres away. should i walk, drive or fly?"
"Jumping the shark" is now officially shamed by "jumping the Tesla"!
An innovative way to make some whoop-de-dooping billionaires with extra cash to spare land upside down on their rooves.
Really disappointing to see such low quality discussion here. Feasibility aside, we would not be seeing such reactions even 5 years ago. Polarization ruins everything.
> we would not be seeing such reactions even 5 years ago
5 years of broken promises and actively fighting to make the world worse will do a lot to opinions.
The main polarization with Tesla is between fantasy and reality.
Is this polarization or is this just people finally figuring out the grift after 10 years of "we'll be on Mars in 2 years"?
Name a single person on Earth who has got us closer to Mars than Musk.
Well, NASA has conducted surface operations on mars 5 times without any involvement from Musk, the CNSA has gone once....
What has Musk actually done to get us closer other than talk about how humanity ought to do it?
Musk built the first rocket capable of transporting a base, and humans, to Mars. NASA has nothing close to Starship, and if they ever did, it would come at a trillion-dollar cost to the American taxpayer.
NASA is currently the only organization to ever take humans beyond LEO.
Starship has only even achieved LEO once, in an unmanned mission a few weeks ago. Starship has so far cost about $15 Billion, the entire Saturn V launch program (excluding Apollo, to keep things apples-apples here) cost about $35 Billion in today's dollars.
Why blame this on “polarization” and not on the guy who did the polarizing? Nobody forced Elon to do all that stupid shit that got so many people hating on him. He did it if his own free will. He ruined it.
If you don’t like his politics and lean into that difference in opinions to criticise something orthogonal, like his technical innovation, then it’s YOU that is being divisive and partisan.
Why is it my responsibility to carefully compartmentalize every aspect of someone no matter how loud and outrageous they are, and not their responsibility to stop being a colossal asshole in public? He gets to publicly disown his children and support proto-fascist political parties and call people pedophiles for displeasing him, but we are the ones who have to carefully manage our feelings so we don’t accidentally let them spill over? Nuts to that.
You think he's being terrible in public. I don't, and I'm not alone. The way certain people judge his actions is quite obviously partisan and a subject of great emotional overreaction. Those exaggerated, sensationalised negative traits you described (which were fed to you by a leftwing media with vested interests) actually have zero effect on your life - so you are simply choosing to be offended by them.
If, instead, you had a grounded, balanced opinion about the man, you'd understand the great good he's delivered, and continues to deliver for the world, from Tesla (making electric cars desirable and mass-market) to Neuralink (making viable brain computer interfaces to give heavily disabled people back their lives), to SpaceX (giving humanity hope for a brighter, more exciting future in space, as governments once did, but have since failed to do).
Right, it’s all the “leftwing media’s” fault. I got those things straight from him, dude. Here’s him calling a rescuer a pedophile, for example: https://web.archive.org/web/20180715143426/https://twitter.c...
(I assume your instinct will be to defend him because said rescuer was mean first. Don’t bother, as you can see I am well aware and it doesn’t change my opinion.)
I can totally understand if you think the good outweighs the bad. I tend that way myself: I own two Teslas and I eagerly watch every Starship launch. But I also think Musk has shown himself to be a real piece of shit. A real piece of shit who has done some great stuff, but that doesn’t negate it.
It is not a roadster. A roadster is defined as an open-air, two-seat convertible.
This one is a hard-top super-coupe and I recommend calling it the "Cyberwedge"
i thought the top came off?
Now with more explosions!
I need a cheap car. Sub 25k that I can use to drop my kids and get groceries and is electric so I can get some respite from these war inflated gas prices. Nobody is offering this. I dont need all the fancy gadgets and the flying and the jumping.
Looks like it truly is a K shaped economy. Flying cars for 1% and loans for the rest
A lot of people responding to this thread saying to buy a cheap ICE vehicle.
Saving money on gas is only one reason to own an EV.
Other reasons include:
- rarely having to take it in for service
- never having to stop for gas when commuting
- a much quieter ride
- a much smoother ride (no transmission)
- instant torque
- no emissions
There are probably others I’m forgetting. But I can’t wait for the day I’ll not need to own an ICE vehicle (still better for long trips).
I've had two EVs and have been driving EV only for about 10 years. I've been driving an ICE vehicle lately due to an issue with a wiring harness on my EV that it is getting service for. It's been so long since I regularly drove an ICE that it has been an unpleasantly shocking experience.
- The cost savings are as much as a car payment. >$100/week in gas when my entire household electric bill averages only $200/month. Up until this recent issue at 85k miles, I've had $0 in maintenance costs (excluding tires). Those same miles in an ICE would have cost me about $2000 in oil changes and brakes by now.
- Getting gas sucks. Sure, it is easier to get gas than charge an EV at a public charger. But it is far more convenient to charge at home every day. In 10 years, I've used a public charger maybe 10 times, but I have to get gas at least once a week. Would you rather have a phone with 6-7 days of energy but you had to drive to a dirty gas station to fill it, or just plug it in every night?
- ICE range anxiety when I have a quarter tank left. I know I can get gas all over the place, but it is pretty rare that my EV has as little range in it at the start of the day as this ICE vehicle with a quarter tank left. Either I go to the gas station more frequently, or I have to account for going to a gas station before driving 30-40 miles away.
- EV powertrains are so much better than gas powertrains. More powerful, smoother, quieter, drive better especially due to the better weight distribution (front to back, and height of the center of gravity).
I can't wait to get my EV back.
Another thing is that an equivalent ICE version of the Roadster would most likely use premium gas. There is no such thing as premium electricity - an electron is an electron. So the cost savings are even higher.
But personally I would recommend people consider a used Model 3. They can be $25-30k which is new Prius territory. I don’t recommend other manufacturers because IMO the competition only started making good electric cards in the last year or two, so these tend to be higher-priced because they’re newer.
EVs are nice, and Im full EV on all my cars at this point. But I concede I would not own any EV if I could not charge at home. If I was still in an apartment, I'd be ICE all the way
EV driver for 10 years, and that is absolutely the big difference maker. The economics and time savings disappear if you have to use public charging infrastructure. I feel like it is almost like a tax that is put on people who can only afford to rent an apartment.
> still better for long trips
I own an ICE car and an EV. We use the EV for long trips and it is great. The only time we hesitate is when we are going out into the middle of nowhere.
EV advantages on trips:
- Smooth ride
- Always-ready A/C
- Pet mode
- Self-driving
You do have to plan a bit more. The Tesla route planner is excellent. Having a charger at your destination really seals the deal.
that's interesting. we have both ICE and EV and would never think of using the ICE over the EV for long trips, that's primarily the reason we keep the ICE vehicle.
So it sounds like you're solving for different problems here. If I'm taking a long trip, the primary problem I'm solving for is "time to location" and "difficulty planning" and ICE wins, period, if charging is required mid-trip.
Maybe people want to take leisurely strolls while charging up or will be stopping for lunch at that truck stop anyway, but that does not solve for my problems as well. I don't have a pet, my car's heating/cooling is perfectly cromulent, and I enjoy the act of driving a car.
Also, what is "smooth ride"? Are we talking suspension or accelleration/braking?
Just go test drive a Tesla. No one can properly explain the driving experience.
You don't have to buy it and it costs you nothing. The sales people aren't sleazy either.
Just try it so you can speak from experience.
> - no emissions
This is particularly nice when you're warming the car up in the garage during cold snaps. Hard to do this with ICE vehicles without risking carbon monoxide buildup.
> - no emissions
Can we just say it out loud? Because it's good for the environment and we don't want our children or their children to have an unlivable planet. This should probably be the number one reason, but yes EVs are better in many other ways too.
Driving cars is not good for the environment whether your fuel is electric or diesel. The billions acres of concrete and asphalt to support car commuting, the electricity that charges the cars, the rubber microplastic tire dust made 100x worse under hard acceleration of heavy vehicles .
Best I can say about EVs is they’re quiet and don’t wear out their brake pads, and the lack of other service is economically efficient, so in that sense they are progress towards a vehicle less likely to fail on you (software updates not withstanding!)
If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil. A thousand pound lithium battery per household is not a tenable way out of destroying ecosystems.
> If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil.
This is not realistic nor scalable. The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars, and even if we had huge transit projects there would still be a need for roads and vehicles due to the size and rural/industrial areas.
Lithium batteries can be recycled. All the studies have shown that electric cars are a huge net win for the environment, and the cries about the environmental cost of building the cars in the first place don't actually match the reality. Especially when you consider that future ev ecosystems should and hopefully will have a strong battery recycling operation.
"The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars,"
This need not be permanent, there is a Pareto improvement to be made and it has nothing to do with Rural/industrial areas.
Don’t let perfect get in the way of much better. The freedom from foreign oil is palpable.
not having much maintenance and charging at home are huge ones. i don’t understand why there is no creative advertising around that. such obviously huge wins
Because most car brands and especially the dealership network make a lot of money with maintenance. The maintenance frequency and cost of my electric Audi is not much cheaper than my previous Diesel. It is a rip off. Only Tesla is more aggressive with longer intervals and they kind of communicate the cost savings in their ownership cost calculator.
For one, renters are largely locked out of reliable home charging in most cases. No apartment complex I've lived at had any charging stations, never mind the quantity needed if most residents opted for EV.
In lots of places, including where I live (center of one of the largest European cities) charging at home is not an option, for now at least.
"Charging at home" feels elitist to a lot of folks and I imagine it would hurt your brand
Quieter maybe, but it sounds like a ghost at 3am driving through my neighborhood. Damn it neighbor stop scaring me.
> never having to stop for gas when commuting
I think this reason is understated. A friend was attacked at a gas station years ago, and since then she's had a major fear of gas stations. Her husband would fill her car for her so she could commute to/from work. She bought an EV a few years ago, and this was a major reason for it - she can fuel-up on her own without being a pain to her husband.
In my experience electric cars aren’t significantly smoother or quieter. Most noise in a modern passenger car is generated by the tires and air drag, and for some reason I found these more pronounced in the electric cars I’ve tried (maybe for the lack of engine noise).
My wife and I share a plugin hybrid and an EV. You'd think the EV is as loud, because you notice the air and tire noises in the absence of the engine noise.
But in the plugin hybrid, the change in noise is very noticeable when the car goes from pure EV into hybrid and the engine kicks in. It's specially loud when the engine revs up as you're accelerating, but even when the car is cruising, I can still hear the engine noise.
That is true above 50 km/h right? In many european cities you drive below that. In many French cities the max speed is even 30 km/h. Then EVs are much quietee.
I'd say the majority of the reason is no engine noise, but also keep in mind EVs are heavier than ICE cars. More weight means more road noise. Regenerative braking means they have significantly less brake wear than ICE cars despite the weight, but the tyres take more stress.
I'll stick with my s2000. Thank you.
The S2000 is anything but cheap, practical and reliable. It's not 2006 anymore.
I think they are fairly reliable if nothing else. Certainly not cheap or practical.
No emissions is simply not true the majority of the time. The emissions are coming out of the gas/coal powerplant somewhere else.
As Hannah Ritchie (Our World In Data) has pointed out, even with the worst coal powerplant powering the grid, an EV is getting a much better CO2 per mile driven than an ICE. As the grid powerplants improve, that only gets better. An ICE car is always an ICE.
Of course, if you look at the energy mix for our grid. But the possibility (maybe even the inevitability) exists that the grid will be powered by cleaner sources over time. No such possibility exists for an ICE vehicle...
I generate 80% of the power I drive on (PHEV + 10kW of PV on the roof), though I mostly commute by bike so I don't drive a ton.
Grid electricity generation is more efficient than ICE. Fossil fuel extraction is a major emitter even before the fuel is burned. Decarbonising the grid is underway.
True, but that's not a limitation of EVs but rather the state of energy production in most countries. An economy that moves towards solar/nuclear/wind will see blanket decreases in emissions across the entire fleet of EVs it supports.
Not to mention that even in the current state of affairs in the US, the emissions are far lower on average. Even in states where production is 60% coal: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2023/ph240/stafford1/
The word is "less", not "no" and I think that's the magical thinking OP was trying to address. Electric cars create LESS emissions, not none.
Unless they're charged by wind or solar, in which case no, during their operation, nothing is emitted into the atmosphere.
It's not really magical thinking; if the grid moves to solar/nuclear/wind then there are virtually no emissions here.
Yes, we're not there yet, and that's why I prefaced with "True", but I think this kind of splitting hairs is part of the problem. EVs are vastly better for the environment and have no emissions of their own. Yes emissions do come from somewhere in the current state, but path to a cleaner environment is not radically far away and the thesis that "emissions come from somewhere so that's not a reason to buy an EV" is ludicrous at best and disingenuous at worst.
A glorious double example of Simpson's paradox.
Naively you might think this (eg here in Australia the majority of electricity is still generated by burning coal) but:
- this is not true during certain times of day, and,
- this is not true for a growing number of buildings that have PV solar
Wait till you learn when, and how, the typical Australian EV gets charged!
> - rarely having to take it in for service
ICE cars are pretty reliable, frequent service tends to be for luxury brands.
> - never having to stop for gas when commuting
This is achievable with ICE by just watching your tank. Also, it's not really a benefit because charging takes a lot longer than a gas fill up.
> - a much smoother ride (no transmission)
Unless it puts the motors in the wheels, they have transmissions and gearboxes.
> - no emissions
They have emissions base4d on the electricity generation method, but even so it's still a lot less than ICE and this is a huge benefit.
> it's not really a benefit because charging takes a lot longer than a gas fill up.
Plug in at home takes way less of your personal time than a gas station and costs significantly less than public charging.
I agree, but it still takes longer and there's never a need to gas up on your commute if you just watch your tank.
This is what used cars are for.
This is the natural flow of things. People with disposable income buy nice new stuff, suffer the rapid, early depreciation, and then they trickle down to the next tier of consumer who can't afford or doesn't want brand new things.
Cars and houses all work like this. Very rarely have the lowest income tiers ever gotten brand new, expensive things.
And if you're high income and smart, you still get used things because you recognize this is the most fiscally responsible thing to do and a great way to build and preserve wealth.
>> Nobody is offering this
They are, they just aren't allowed to sell in the USA. And they're looking to make the ban permanent [1]. Canada is getting some though!
[1] https://apnews.com/article/senate-chinese-ev-ban-elections-m...
A BYD seagull offers this and is 10k€ in Spain
If you don't need a lot of range, a used Leaf is pretty cheap as EVs go. Though you do want to avoid the 1st generation models (before 2017?) as they had much worse battery degradation.
Of course right now EV prices are probably inflated for the exact reasons you cite. Even with $4-5/gallon gas, an economical ICE can still be overall more affordable because you can buy them for a few thousand dollars.
The problem with the Leaf is the lack of fast charging. It’s great if you can charge at home but it’s definitely not a road trip car. You get what you pay for, which is especially true for earlier-generation electric cars.
Yeah that's worth considering, but for the stated purpose (school run and getting groceries) and assuming you can charge at home, it might be good.
So... you want a car that is:
1. New
2. Electric
3. Sub $25k
Drop any one of those, and you'll have plenty of options. This isn't about a K-shaped economy -- it's about adding significant constraints and being unwilling to compromise on any of them.
Also what's wrong with "loans for the rest"? Most new cars are bought with financing and have been for a long time.
last i saw, byd will be selling a few models for ~25k CAD when they bring them to canada. that's like ~18k USD and meets all 3 criteria.
No, you do not need to compromise, you just have to look outside the US.
Well you still take a compromise on range, charging speed, comfort, size etc. with those options.
In other words: BYD.
Auto loans have gotten out of hand. 5, 6, or even 7-year car loans? That's not a good sign of the economy.
Man you Americans, here I am with me 20 year old Mini and it works great I think it’s only valued at about 2k
Agreed. You can buy a lot of gas for the price difference between an old economy ICE car and an EV. Plus cheaper insurance and in many places, cheaper registration fees.
The problem is you burn that gas and put carbon into the atmosphere which warms the planet.
But only a mini amount, how much energy do we spend making the new car vs maintaining the old one. Young people need opportunity to buy cars as well, but the price jump can be too big for many. My experience with transit around Vancouver is great unless you need to get to the next spoke over, or went for a drink downtown and then have to walk an hour to get home in the evening (not solved by having a car obviously, but a shame there isn't an affordable responsible option after 8pm)
Yeah both use significant energy in both moving the 4000 pounds around and maintaining the millions of miles of highways.
The real win for environment would be building cities and towns to support not having to drive everywhere.
Well we live in the real world. We're not going to be rebuilding cities anytime soon. And most people like being able to drive, it allows you to live your life and not be confined to a couple of square miles or the limits of a transit system.
The average car in the US is 12.8 years old. The used car market has adjusted to the fact that many of them go for 20 years/200K miles.
> 20 year old Mini
> it works great
I have a feeling that you can and do work on it, because maintenance otherwise would easily be triple the market price of that car yearly. That significantly changes the economics of old cars.
you can just ask me lol.
In 20 years: I got a garage to replace a radiator after a stone hit it, for $600 Also 2 tires once, for like $200.
I might not drive as much as you all, but when I do its at a relaxed pace and the roads are good where I live. I have a manual transmission and Im always careful how I accelerate and how I brake and change gears. It has about 100k on the mileage now
Its a Mini Convertible if anyone cares
$6k maintenance per year? That's crazy high, where are you getting that number?
What do you mean crazy high? The amount of shops that will take an old European car like that are few and far between and they'll certainly charge you a premium for it.
Say, you go for the cheapest option and get minor services done at around 500-700$. Okay, a medium or major service is going to be over 1K and you're bound to have one. Down 2-3K if nothing goes wrong, at all.
But if something breaks, you're going to be down 2K at minimum for the part itself (not counting labor) and your car is going to be in the shop for two months while the part that broke is imported, and that's if you bought a Chinese replica. Original parts might as well equal the total value of that car.
To me this sounds so crazy.
In England if I go to my local garage and ask them to replace something like A radiator or water pump it will be like $200 for labour plus maybe $250 for the part ( unless I get it myself off ebay for like $30 and install it myself ).
For example a plastic fender came off, I just bought it for $15 and all I need to do is click it in place when it arrives by post. Im not a mechanic.
EDIT > Incase you all think Im crazy I did the numbers as Im not "a poor man" and quite fancy a cool new car even if 2nd hand, if I get a 2nd hand Landrover Hybrid for 40k, the MPG will be double my old Mini, ONLY if its charged at home, I dont stop at petrol statinos etc, otherwise it would be more!
Wat? We have a 2005 Toyota and a 2005 Mitsubishi. We've had them for 12 and 8 yrs. They don't need anywhere near that much maintenance. And if something really expensive came up that exceeded their value, we'd replace them with another 10yr old car.
I assume you're in the US? Are things that much worse there?
There's multiple offering this, they're just banned from your country.
A used Model 3. There you go. They only start at $37k brand new.
37>25
The og comment was posted 27min ago. This is adjusting for inflation.
Used vs New
lol
I believe the comment should be read as "the $37k sticker price for a new vehicle is irrelevant if you buy used".
A used Ioniq electric can be under $10k
What if I don't like supporting fascism?
I bought a $5500 Chevy Volt with 105k miles in peak COVID 2020.
It now has 225k miles and I haven't done a single thing to it but change the oil.
It's still on the original factory brake pads and rotors, which look to be about 50% on the pads.
I am going to drive my Chevy Volt into the ground.
Used Chevy Bolt or a used VW ID.4. Both excellent cars that can be found for under $25k; I drive the latter myself.
New, the Chevy Bolt and the Nissan Leaf both start under $30k.
>What if I don't like supporting fascism? >> VW ID.4
Volkswagen was founded by the Nazi party. Literally.
Is VW run by a fascist still to this day? (no)
Tesla? (yes)
This is an obviously disingenuous response unless you think Germans are still Nazis 80 years later?
Try criticizing political figures or having a slight attitude to the police in Germany and tell me that old ghost is gone for good. Or that our new push to label calling out government overreach hate speech (Oh Canada!) Something cut from the same cloth. As for VW the brand that has a long and terrible history when it comes to electrical faults for ICE cars (and diesel gate) I'm not holding my breath until the other shoe drops. I like the look of the newer electric van, maybe they'll have a better reputation by the time I look for a 15 year old one!
cargo bike with a e-bike mod
Just go hide in your fucking house I guess, if everything to the right of Bernie is fascist
The good news is you can still buy a Model 3, since fascism is a dead ideology that is in no shape to rise again anytime soon. The reason it is still being used is as a prop by deluded boomers to make them feel good about themselves for being groovy anti-authoritarians, and simpletons with no understanding of politics, history or even the last 24 hours.
It's on the rise right now, just under different names. Ironically it's the supposedly freedom loving tech bro libertarians who tend to go down the neoreactionary/fascist pipeline after they "give up" on democracy. They just don't like being labeled as fascists. Since you're on HN and willfully blind to what's going on, I think it's safe to assume that if you voted in 2024, then you voted F. Yes?
Buying a used tesla (from, e.g., a Ford dealer) does not support the fascist part…f
Truly I dislike the guy and everything he did in government but I don’t think that buying a used Tesla is any endorsement or direct benefit to Elon.
Slap an “I bought this used” bumper sticker on it and your fellow anti-fascists should leave you alone.
Buying a used Tesla contributes to increased resale value, which makes new ones a more attractive purchase, driving sales, and supporting the owner.
If you can, wait for a Slate. It's not just cheap for brand new it's a company working hard to move the auto industry in an actually positive direction. I hope to make it my next car as well.
The idea of cheap, modular base and a focus on user accessibility/customization is in my view a very cool and sorely needed model in an industry that looks more about shoving in features, consolidation and ever increasing costs and complexity. Not to mention the rampant protectionism in the United States because Musk is terrified of Chinese EVs.
If you need a cheap car, then why buy new? Plenty of good used options out there, and sometimes more reliable than new cars
IIRC the difference between new and used has shrunk quite a bit recently (at least for desirable models and types) because many consumers are frustrated by the new-prices and all look towards used.
I've heard it said (literally, it was a podcast) that US car-companies are caught in a kind of prisoner's-dilemma: They all want to be the ones selling expensive (high profit margin) cars, and nobody wants to be serving the low-end. But in the long run, somebody has to, or else the market gets... Weird.
> Nobody is offering this.
They are trying. Inflation keeps moving the bar. It's not like they want their cars to be expensive; the components and fabrication prices just are.
Used you can achieve sub-25k easily.
BYD could give us this tomorrow, at the cost of completely gutting and decimating domestic American manufacturers, who are unable to actually compete on price and performance for various reasons.
The problem is not inflation, it’s that America sucks at manufacturing low cost electric vehicles. BYD has demonstrated that tenfold
America sucks at manufacturing anything that involves paying a wage because countries like China can undercut them. Even if we could the Chinese govt would fund the undercutting like they are with BYD.
What, USA never subsidizes her essential industries?
American labor is expensive but BYD owes its success to vertical integration more than cheap labor. They are moving into Europe to build there before long. Americans have an uninformed notion that China simply couldn’t have superior technology, they’re just cutting corners, dumping chemicals in the river etc (as if American companies would never)
It might just be that china is better at building cars.
Paying a wage and being socially responsible with waste and such.
It's neoliberalism all the way down, baby. People don't want to know what cheap usually means.
The U.S. could do this too with the same amount of subsidies the CCP poured into their EV industry I suspect
If they were actually trying, then a dozen or so budget-model cars - from the Hyundai Accent to the Toyota Yaris - would not have been discontinued in the U.S. in the past half-dozen years. And replaced, if at all, with much more expensive models.
To all people responding purchase a used car, I forgot to add that I don’t want to spend another 25k on repairs please
At 25k you can easily get a used car from the dealership and purchase the warranty if you're very risk averse.
A 2023 crossover with 50k miles should suit you fine. I like Subarus and Hondas.
You definitely won’t have to spend that on a used Tesla, there are very few parts to replace
Unless you have to replace the battery, then it's probably $20k just for that.
if only you could buy BYD in the US
The US has the best free markets in the world. Of course you can buy BYD.
???
If you can increase your budget to 30k, you could consider a Slate EV.
Electric cars are still an underdeveloped form factor, so it makes sense that you can't get a car big enough for many passengers that is cheap enough for your budget (the battery needs to scale for passengers/weight, so the market so far is tiny cars or big expensive cars. The middle comes as the tech develops)
Why does your neighborhood car have to be electric?
Get a Mitsubishi Mirage and pocket the extra $10k for gas.
What you want does not exist because EV buyers are mostly "look at me" types with deep pockets. That's why they're all luxury vehicles full of gadgetry. They build what the 90% customers want and you ain't it.
See: non-smart TVs etc.
10K in gas melts away quickly. I know some people who have ran through that amount in six months. Also, you have to factor in frequent, expensive and time-consuming maintenance with either awful, cheapskate shops or the wildly overpriced dealership.
Also, it shouldn't come as a surprise, but if you're spending upwards of two to four hours daily sitting in traffic, you want it to be the nicest experience possible. Punishment boxes like the Mirage are desperation plays, and people upgrade as soon as they can.
>Wow you must drive a lot.
300 miles a week in a full sized van and 10K is a three year supply of gas at current prices.
That's partly because the USA has artificially low gas prices. Over here, diesel is around 7$/gal and gas is around 6$/gal. That adds up quickly, especially vis-a-vis 0.2$/kWh.
Though, to be fair, that one specific case is a bit extreme (someone with a 100-150km round-trip daily commute and a not-especially-economical car). My commute is about 20km round-trip daily, but I also end up saving money over the long term because a lot of that time is spent sitting idle and wasting gas with nothing to show for it.
>10K in gas melts away quickly
Really?. Define "quickly" please.
Edit: nvm. 10k would be just around 95k kms.
and yet non-American cheap bare bones EV exist for other parts of the world but we wont let them in because Detroit dinosaurs only want to make gigantic SUV and pickups because they are higher margin. the US is afraid of the Chinese doing what japan and korea did 30 years ago and force the dinos to compete again.
> I need a cheap car. Sub 25k
Here’s one place with 26,000+ cars that cost less than 25k: https://www.carvana.com/cars/under-25000
Used EV's can be had for sub 25k all day long. The Slate is also technically sub 25k
It's a shame the infrastructure is so poor in most of the US that a high end electric cargo bike isn't an option most people will consider. I love mine for exactly those use cases.
Sir, you're in the invitation required vehicle discussion.
Check out the Nissan Ariya. I see them for around $20k for a 2023 low mileage model.
China is offering this. Guess why they got banned though.
Dacia Spring is around 20.000 € in Europe. LE: I realise you're not in Europe, so my comment is not very useful — on the contrary.
Get an Elantra, keep the difference to pay for gas.
Elantra owner here, just be prepared to have to pay for broken windows and replacing the ignition cylinder every few months. The kia boyz are still active apparently and will try to steal your car repeatedly. Even if you have the newer model or the upgrade that prevents them from actually being able to steal it, it doesn’t prevent them from smashing up your car while trying
Whoa, really? Where do you live?
lol, nice try kia boyz. Not getting me this time.
This was in a gated parking garage in a nice neighborhood. Every few months is admittedly a bit dramatic but it’s happened once and we’ve only been living here a year
Haha I get that you don't want to share. I was just surprised to hear that! I got one a couple of months ago and am now wondering what kind of a risk I've been exposed to
55K miles over the last 6 years. One really odd issue (a faulty headlights control handle leading to occasional switching lights on at night just to empty the battery by the morning) replaced using manufacturer's guarantee years ago.
47 MPG on the highway (but it goes down dramatically when driving around town to ~35). My Limited trim has a glass cockpit with all the popular safety features. Its exterior also looks more expensive than it is and at the time was way cooler than Civic or Corolla.
It remains to be seen what happens around 100K miles/10 years though and how it compares to my previous Corolla experience.
I've been pulling somewhere between 35 and 40 doing mostly hills and 45-55mph highways, I've been thrilled with that as well as the interior space. I'm very tall and I'm arguably more comfortable in this than in my minivan.
There are lot's of affordable Chinese cars, but US doesn't want them to be on our roads.
You could but the government won't let you buy one from China.
Adam Curtis had a great line in the 2016 doc HyperNormalisation [1] about Donald Trump turning Manhattan into a playground for the rich from the ~70s-00s.
Now we're turning everywhere into a playground for the rich. The sad part is that they're unimaginative and in such poor taste that it gives you pause about the dynamics of human hierarchies. Wealthy people used to be dignified; I'm not quite sure what you call today's crop. Insecure chic?
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04b183c
Was just in Europe and saw plenty of smaller / cheaper EVs. Unfortunately they're not offering them in the US.
The Slate is probably the closes to what you want.
A cargo e-bike is a good solution too, if urban.
Those smaller / cheaper EVs might not be street legal in the US due to safety regulations: they need to allow occupants to survive a crash vs the massive monster trucks on American roads.
Not a massive hurdle. BMW got the i3 to be street legal in the US without much trouble. And I know, the i3 was only a smaller car, it wasn't a cheap car (I think they went for around $40k new)... but that's just BWM.
Getting Renault e-Twingo / Citroen e-C3 street legal in the US wouldn't really rise the production cost much. But nobody is going through all the trouble, because (obviously) almost no American would buy such a car, even though they start at <$20k new.
Two thumbs up for the Slate vehicles. Simple, cheap, non trackable.
Just get a used Tesla 3
Hyundai Inster.
That's like commenting about needing a Chromebook on a post the newest Blackwell GPU that can serve inference workloads of thousands of people. Just irrelevant.
Tesla's efforts on the original Roadster made them be able to transform the whole EV industry to the point that EV's are nowadays actually affordable. Not everything is exactly about your specific needs, and you shouldn't shout people down when they're lifting the whole field.
If there is limited supply of memory production, and an 16GB student laptop is $800 instead of $500, then I would say the poor folk are justified with naysaying the new 128GB top shelf exotics.
Back to the K shaped economy, it’s not just annoying that some people have more money than everyone else, but given the gap in economic power, the goods that are produced are made for the people with money. With limited resources to produce material, are you going to sell to the bottom or the top? So the people not buying flying cars are left behind in more ways than one.
Of course a roadster is not the car to "drop kids and get groceries". I think op was not trying to imply that. But Musk stated his big plan was to sell an expensive roadster in order to afford building an affordable car. That was 20 years ago. The closest it ever got was a promise of a 35K Model 3 which at launch cost 50K. So, yeah, from that perspective, op's comment is relevant.
Seriously. It’s pretty clear that the new Roadster is not intended to be a practical car for the masses. And that’s Ok. There’s room for a “halo” product in any lineup.
I do not get this kind of complaint. Every thing you consider an important part of your life today (including cars and smartphones) started out as toys for rich kids. Complaining about it is asking to go back to the stone age, because all the advancements since were brought to you by someone's desire to make money and someone else being rich enough to afford it, till economies of scale made the poor old you able to afford it too.
there are more and more cars that close to that price, look at kia ev3, or ioniq 3, or BYD
amen!
The Slate car with SUV add on should do the job I imagine
Slate starts at 25k though... the SUV is at 30k. And that's without things like power windows and some basic amenities right?
Right, which is exactly what someone that only wants to spend 25k is looking for.
The whole point of the Slate is that it is a basic car without amenities.
I believe it's just under $30K with the SUV back.
Slate is still vaporware.
Several Chinese brands (like BYD or Xiaomi) have such offerings, but the US is too beholden to Musk to let them in.
And then Musk has the gall to claim India is not open to Starlink because Ambani is in charge! https://twstalker.com/elonmusk/status/2108604227643719745
Yes. Makes me sick . US consumers have lower and lower standard of living as oligarchs reach trillion dollar net worths.
Like someone said, you're asking for too much. Decent used sub-10k cars are available for your purposes https://www.carmax.com/cars?price=0-10000
Musk really is the master of fraud. Twitter gets bought by Space X to conceal the massive loss in valuation, Tesla gets pumped with endless "we'll have self-driving cars next year", for 10+ years... now that the Tesla bubble is finally popping he needs to dump it on the Space X/Twitter shareholders, so we get this demo of a thing that will never hit the road. Bag holders beware, Musk's masterpiece of market manipulation is about to execute with the merger of all his lies.
Twitter wasn’t bought to conceal the loss in valuation. It was bought so Elon can influence the populace with his narrative.
No, he bought it because he was contractually obliged to do so even after he tried to wriggle out of it.
I mean this isn't even ancient history, it only happened in 2022. He sent three termination notifications before it was determined that he had no grounds to refuse to buy.
FSD doesn't even work properly TEN YEARS after it was announced
still tries to murder passengers jumping across traffic at shadows
good luck with anything Musk, you are the beta tester, if you die they'll debug it, eventually
If you still believe FSD doesn't work, you're operating on outdated intelligence. Frankly, like a boomer saying that email doesn't work.
Oh, it doesn't require a person to continually monitor it now? I missed that change. Until that happens I don't think it qualifies as "full" self driving.
Only from a regulatory perspective. Anyone who drives a Tesla for long enough knows how to defeat the monitoring system, and doing so is extremely safe; significantly safer than a human driver. I would have no concerns summoning it autonomously over 100 miles, once the law allows for that to happen.
I've never crashed driving drunk so drunk driving is safer than driving sober
Well, you're insane for thinking that. Drunk driving is very unsafe, and population-level statistics don't lie. They're quite conclusive when it comes to grading the safety of drunk driving as being dangerous relative to sober driving, and Tesla's full self driving system as being safe relative to sober driving.
Where are the independently verified statistics for FSD being safer?
In a single 5 mile trip within the last month, an FSD Tesla I was in made four mistakes that were saved by the actions of other drivers on the road. I have concerns about you summoning it autonomously over 100 miles.
I don't understand why they don't recruit an Italian designer...
Yay the (almost) 10th anniversary of the 2nd generation Roadster reservations, and now it's got fucking rockets apparently?
How delusional are people? The emperor is not wearing clothes y'all.
Technology: spectacular, design: ugly as fuck
Nazi-funding explosive-gas car is still a Nazi-funding car.
Hard pass
Amazing to see Elon making his childhood dreams reality. It's something to behold. I hope we don't lose that spirit. The amount of negativity is very worrying. One of the coolest tech demos in 2026 and it's on the 3rd page of HN morning after because of the downvotes.
As per Telegraph Musk has offered Trump the idea to slow down the Starlink, which resulted in deaths of many civilians.
Whatever you think about these advancements (like you could marvel at Nazi inventions), make no mistake. Musk and his Tesla should get fucked.
If Doc Brown's time machine was real and posted here, HN would be complaining that it's noisy, unimpressive, not street legal, uninsurable, and attacking Brown's personal character because he's a dangerous nutcase.
Seriously, I bet these are the same people who were shitting on the Hyperloop!
The time machine actually accomplishes something. I fail to see what this accomplishes other than a very cool circus stunt. Straight out of fast and furious. Which is great and all, but not a production car.
Honestly, the fact that they are talking about this being a production car is what kills the cool. If they just said they were showcasing some cool technology that they could do, then I think it would at least be honest and people wouldn't shit on it so much. But with how many times they said the new Roadster would be on the market, can you really blame anybody for not believing it?
Remember concept cars? Companies have been doing gimmickey shit forever and nobody expected those things to make it to production.
You forgot the part where Doc Brown purchased parts for the vehicle through funding by terrorists.
He actually defrauded the terrorists and stole their plutonium giving them junk in return.
Until he shipped them the "pinball machine parts" he was working with terrorists.
Not sure there would be a distinction.
Yes, Elon Musk and Doc Brown are really, really comparable. Great metaphor. Who can forget when Doc Brown famously stole a bunch of government data? Or tried, numerous times, to overthrow democracy? Or bought a heavily used social media site to turn it into a propaganda box?
What a well-thought out comparison. You've definitely got something, here.
Well this isn't real so that's not a very good analogy. I also don't think Doc Brown (who's also not real) was famous for committing fraud and lying habitually to manipulate the market.
Maybe it makes for a closer analogy. Neither the time machine or the flying car are real, but we react to the "inventors" differently. We're not haters. We just have taste.
Elon Musk is not an inventor and definitely does not have good taste.
Doc Brown canonically did defraud Libyan terrorists.
Gotta love slipping Zionist propaganda into 80s movies.
Having been raised watching the Dukes of Hazzard, I'm not impressed.
They really should have paused the video mid-flip for a quick voiceover.
This demo took place roughly 30 hours after Starlink betrayed the Ukraine by dropping support for Ukrainian high speed intercepts and drones [1].
I don't see how we can discuss this demo without acknowledging that fact as well.
[1]: https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-zelenskyy-burn...
We can discuss the demo without acknowledging this because it has literally nothing to do with the roadster.
"Literally nothing"? The guy who cut Starlink service is the guy who's making the roadster.
I've never been so convinced by dead internet theory than I am today with this huge wave of bots advertising for Tesla today.
Just cuz you're not impressed doesn't mean only bots are. That's a hell of a demo, and a sweet looking ride to boot.
You gotta admit the car looks nice compared to the Cybertruck, and the technology is indeed impressive. I think it's an organic reaction, unless they're defending Elon personally.
This is another expensive marketing gimmick nevertheless, and I'm struggling to see the value of it, especially when Tesla is not doing that well.
Nice compared to the biggest flop of the century? Sure. I'd still instantly judge anyone driving this as an asshole.
I would guess they're less of an asshole than someone driving a cybertruck, though.
Still waiting for the underground maglev highways and buses, coming any day now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j70GvgXt-lE
Which accounts posting in this thread do you think are bots?
Wouldn't drive a Tesla if it was given to me.
European or Japanese cars all day.
Can we get the original Dropbox hater guy to comment here too?
What has HN become - just endless anti-tech hate, downstream from idiotic TikTok politics.
Is it the moderation system that amplifies this nonsense here?
If those cold-air thrusters are getting commoditized, the real discussion here should be around what could be built around them. How to HACK them.
Reddit exists for this other nonsense pile on.
I'll bite. What do you see as applications of for commodity cold gas thrusters? Excluding rockets.
Rapid adjustment of drone flighpaths with micro-thrusts? Getting interceptors out of tubes faster without explosions/temps/fumes? Anything where rocket propellant, heat is a problem?
Breaking, emergency braking in trucks? Kind of like reverse thrust in airplanes.
1. No rockets
Drones are extremely weight sensitive. Adding a heavy thruster would massively eat into the payload.
Trucks are also weight limited by the 80k rule. Brakes are far superior.
More important to signal that they think Elon is a nazi, apparently.
(i do not think he's a nazi, I think he is an edge lord who dogwhistle to Nazis to look 'cool'. Which honestly is fine for a teenager influencer, but should stop once you're 25)
> just endless anti-tech hate, downstream from idiotic TikTok politics.
The hate and politics obsession of the people you're complaining about on here pales in comparison to the guy doing this presentation. He is doing it 24/7 I'm not even sure he sleeps he is so engaged in it.
At least this is a break from all the bullshit AI agent garbage posted on this site.
Almost all the comments here are just the most generically negative I have ever seen on HN, with just general grumpiness everywhere.
This car is an incredible engineering achievement and a completely unexpected reveal.
Ai slop on a billion dollar company should tell you everything you know about how we are doomed by this ai experiment
it's be more impressive if it wasn't so pointless
IMO reinforcement learning on par with teaching quadcopters to do weird things.
But the real question: does the roadster come with SpaceX thrusters? If so, they have my attention. Otherwise, boring, even more boring than the boring company. False advertising too. People need to demand that SpaceX thrusters are now an option if only to reboot the Dukes of Hazzard except with a smart car.
Edit: Hi there Elon fanboys! Hope that all meat diet is working out for you. Have you considered taking up smoking knowing full well that AI will cure cancer?
[flagged]
Don't be fooled! This is AI generated slop.
The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.
The car is not using momentum and centrifugal force to stay on the ramp. It has fans providing tons of downforce - so much downforce that it's able to stick to the road nearly completely inverted
Wow, this might be the most phenomenal tech demo I've ever watched.
This is just amazing, congrats to everyone who worked on this.
From an engineering pov, it must be the highlight of someone's life and a massive amount of fun to be able to work on a product like this.
Was this real? I thought some wires were visible?
Re-watching it, the wires are on the ramp. Part of the support of the loop.
Pretty big nothingburger. Production starts 2028 and honestly, the taunted feature... it's not a flying car, it's a jumping car. Do people actually want this for themselves? I'd wager the valuation would go down after this presentation.
I never thought I would say this, but.. have you been like.. born 70 or something?
Late 80's
Bro the car literally jumped over a semi like its the TF2 soldier. Nothingburger???
OK sure. I don't have a lot of use cases in my day to day commute that would be better handled by this jumping over a semi like it's the TF2 soldier, hence, a big nothingburger.
yes its a nothing burger no one will be able to use this other then a few billionaires... just like that BYD car that can jump wtf are we doing? why do we need cars to jump... we need them to drive us from point a to b
teslas can do that already ... mostly without human intervention.
> Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Bullshit, no it can't.
> Advanced cold-gas thrusters use all-electric actuators to offer precise thrust, completing micro adjustments within a fraction of a second. This helps stabilize the vehicle in flight.
In flight? What? Did I miss the joke, or what? It's a fucking car... The image even shows it hovering off the ground. How is this not blatant false advertising?
ETA: okay, skimmed some of the livestream. These is absolutely no way that any of these features will ever be part of a production model. People get serious whiplash injuries just from being rear-ended at low speed. What do they think is going to happen to the occupant when they tell their car to jump over a semi and do a fucking barrel roll? Seriously, what are we doing here?
Amazing such instant expertise.
Watch the video - the car jumps into the air. Not exactly flight or what we’d consider a flying car, but it’s careering through the air off the ground.
This isn't even the first car to demo holding and driving upside down using a ground effect fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6LYcgaQ46c
It's supposed to be funny. Or it's not? Really not sure.
There is another car [1] with a fan to improve downforce.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
"There is another system."
Watch the livestream
> Bullshit, no it can't
I mean, this isn't crazy. In fact, it's already been done. Ever heard of McMurtry? (https://mcmurtry.com/). They're notorious for exactly this - using fans to provide extreme downforce (urr... upforce if you're hanging upside down?).
> In flight?
Did you see the stunt where it literally flew over vehicles? I mean, maybe it's a bit closer to a controlled super-leap like the original Superman, but... yeah, my personal reaction to that was more "holy shit" than "well, that's not flying".
If you scroll down on the page, it shows that the "rocket edition" is invite-only. Probably gonna sell it to a few friends in hopes that the 3-5 they make sell for millions down the road, so to speak.
>> Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
> Bullshit, no it can't.
A proof of concept already exists:
https://mcmurtry.com/upside-down-driving/
A car that can make you, your friends, and your family deaf. Amazing.
That’s if it doesn’t kill you
Unbelievable useless for the actual use of the car.
Well, think you're only seeing the most splashy uses. For instance, at high speeds, could use the thrusters to first, increase acceleration and speed, and second, have them also able to do a bit of thrust vectoring to help push the car's tires on to the pavement for better traction. And then on turns, have thrusters firing to help push the car into the turn.
Also, maybe the car is able to hover for short to medium distances, which for a military and offroad vehicles, could be very useful to cover all types of terrain
Literal "Neck Breaking" speeds.
No human could survive this rocket-jump without a neck-brace.
May come in handy if someone blocked your car on a parking and you don't have time for the tow truck to arrive. Or when you're stuck on I-95 during a major snowstorm.
It can only fly for a few seconds, no? Where are you going to land in a snow storm if the literal Interstate is impassable? Everywhere else would be worse.
IIRC during the 2022 snowstorm, it was only impassable one way. Jumping over to the opposite side should be doable.
Have you ever slid into a ditch? I have a couple times. It's a fair amount of work to get the car out of the ditch. With thrusters, you only need a couple seconds to get out of the ditch and back on the road.
Yeah, I mean how are you even going to get a family of seven and a dog in there
https://www.alamy.com/jim-varney-diedrich-bader-erika-elenia...
Let's get real, the entire point of a roadster is to look cool and have good sensations. Try to beat that!
If you want a sensible car, get a Toyota Corolla, or a Model Y if you want to stay with Tesla. They will get you to your destination just as well for cheaper and with more space for your stuff.
So Elon's entities are really using SI instead of AI? Interesting. Or was he the one who actually suggested the name change to POTUS?
Super
Kind of disturbing how hard he's leaning into the futurism aesthetic here, given its history.
Tesla has been doing this for a while, having all their promo shots at night etc. The terafab announcement stuff has an especially dystopian vibe
I guess robotaxi is failing? This is my only explanation of that jumping gimmick.
The Robotaxi just started rolling out beyond Austin a few months ago. You think they threw together a flying car on a whim in a matter of weeks?
I can't wait for some rich asshole going 120 mph to backflip their Tesla into my Outback on the interstate.
Don't worry, the first time they drive through a city the fans will suck up some trash and ruin the motors
After Elon almost died in 2000 when he lost control of his McClaren I wonder if the real reason for these thrusters isn't actually to recover when controlling this beast proves too much for the driver and it starts to spin out or accidentally launches into the air.
The demo presentation was horrible.
The somber music, darkness, 3 awkward people presenting it with 0 presentational skills. Just a random comparison - if Steve Jobs were to present this, he would've killed it. I was watching the demo, impressed by the car so much, but I couldn't help but feel irritated at how badly is was presented. The choice or music, lights, everything.
This is literally the richest man in the world going "We were promised flying cars!"
And because he's the richest man in the world, he just does it for fun. Nerd Cool for sure! But given the state of the world, absolutely horrible..
He may have done it to improve the optics of a potential Tesla–SpaceX merger.
Yeah no thanks. I think I will stick to BYD and other reputable chineese brands for my EV needs. Safety is a thing for cars. Teslas were not the safest cars before and now they are adding gas thrusters, oh boy, what could possibly go wrong. I would not feel safe driving behind or infront of this car.
Tesla with FSD is 8 times safer than other cars.
Tesla Model 3 and Y are some of the safest cars to have been tested in history. Obviously, a flying car is not meant for the mass market.
https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/tesla/model+y/0961 https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/byd/atto+3/0992/