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Comment by ctvo

4 years ago

I find the audacity of the fraud hilarious.

They pulled a truck up a hill and let it roll down unpowered, using it in a video demonstrating their new EV technology when nothing worked. Who does that.

26 comments

ctvo

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femto113  4 years ago

I like how they carefully called this demo "in motion", not "driving" or even "road test". It's definitely in motion!

prdonahue  4 years ago

Startups do this. All the time. But they're typically software not hardware demos so much easier to fake.

  • ctvo  4 years ago

    This would be Google creating a static page of results and pretending they had crawled the data when they demo’d submitting a query.

    Uber manually arranging a driver / passenger pick up and animating a vehicle on the map along a predefined route, etc. etc.

    It’s edgy to say startups do this, but there hasn’t been a startup conducting this level of fraud so openly since Theranos. And Nikola is a publicly traded company valued at billions.

  • foolfoolz  4 years ago

    this sounds equivalent to recording your demo of your website to play during a conference because you aren’t sure it’s gonna work on stage. done that plenty of times

    • jariel  4 years ago

      Not equivalent though, by a stretch.

      That would be 'Tesla making a video of a working vehicle and showing it at Conf because they are not sure it will start!'

      There are reasonable expectations of 'show', but showing something that literally does not work, as 'working' would be fraud.

      The equivalent would be 'there is no software' so 'just make a video fabrication of software' and then show that at the conf.

    • paxys  4 years ago

      No, it's the equivalent of taking some designer's mock and presenting it as a real website, without having an actual client or backend or anything else in place (which companies also do all the time).

    • WalterSear  4 years ago

      Hardly. This is more like faking your website demo because you don't know how to use the internet.

    • outworlder  4 years ago

      > because you aren’t sure it’s gonna work on stage

      Because you aren't sure it's going to work at all, ever.

  • divbzero  4 years ago

    There’s a difference between Nikola’s repeated product announcements that haven’t led to actual products, versus rigging a demo of the half-working alpha version and then shipping the real thing shortly after.

foobiekr  4 years ago

How crap do you have to be that, if you're going to fake it, you don't just tow it and digitally remove the cable or put an electric motor in or whatever? It's just a such laughable approach.

swyx  4 years ago

i dunno - here is the video in question: https://blurbsurfer.com/index.php/video/p9reimwb that really look like a hill to you?

  • revscat  4 years ago

    Read the article. It discusses how they tested with the same road, and were able to put an SUV in neutral and achieve a cruising speed of 53mph using that same road.

  • williamscales  4 years ago

    Yeah, that actually does look like a hill. It appears to me the road rises up to the ridge seen in the background.

  • recursive  4 years ago

    No, it doesn't look like a hill. But it doesn't matter what it looks like. They found the exact road, and it has a 3% grade.

    • liability  4 years ago

      Honestly it does look like a hill for me, particularly in the shots where the road is angled down and to the left with the truck rolling left (the video starts with such a shot). I know that's partially an optical illusion and doesn't represent the true slope but I do think it looks like a hill.