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Comment by prdonahue

4 years ago

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

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prdonahue

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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.