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Comment by rogerrogerr

2 days ago

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.

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

    • that's not the rocket version that can hop, that's the thruster version. the jumping car has a tank instead of a passenger seat

    • 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.

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  • There's an obvious tradeoff between range and "flight" time, but if you ask your favorite AI it will do some napkin math for you that shows a 4 cold gas thruster system with a 3 foot diameter COPV (at pressures attainable by an onboard compressor) could hover a ~4000 lbs vehicle for a few seconds.

    • Ask the AI the energy cost of filling such tanks and deduce that from the max range, see what's left after compressing air like that

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  • 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.

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    • 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?

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.

Would you say a bullfrog that can hop from pad to pad can fly?

  • A frog can't hover for any amount of time.

    • Neither can this car. Unless 'any amount of time' is sub second, then fine, it can hover. But then a brick on a ballistic trajectory also hovers when it is at the top of that trajectory.

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  • Are you all so dense as to not grasp the difference between controlled flight vs ballistic?

Yes, the assertion is that it's not the car they'll sell. For example, they demo'd a "Cybertruck" with a never-before-seen durable single piece exoskeleton and then sold a Cybertruck with a unibody construction similar to the existing Honda Ridgeline.

I'd assert that it being something other than a car is an extremely reasonable assumption given all evidence available.

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.

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