Comment by thelastgallon

Is it really so unbelievable that a car company with access to rocket engineers, built a car with rocket engines?

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.

I read that the car used in the demo was actually a hundreds of kilograms, nothing like the real cars weight of ~ 2 ton

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.

> all these Jetpack demonstrations of the past decade...

They've been promising those since the 1970s...

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.

They never talked about battery swap again because DC fast charging got fast enough to eliminate that hassle.

Meanwhile Chinese EV maker Nio has built over three thousand battery swap stations. We can speculate all we want about Tesla's motives, endlessly entertaining as that is, but the fundamental idea was sound.

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.

Or the continued use of tele-operators for all of their humanoid robotics demos.

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.

> 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.

Musk, while a horrible presenter, did say something like “we’re doing this here because otherwise everyone would think it’s ai.”