Comment by qarl

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.

Correction: A car company that has a long history of making both true and false claims.

> 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 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

This is a mathematically silly assertion. Over the past decade, SpaceX has scaled their launch capacity from ~20 metric tons per year to ~2,300 metric tons per year. That's more than two orders of magnitude. It's not unreasonable to imagine that they could scale a further 0.3 orders of magnitude if there were customers willing to pay for this amount of lift.

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?

Tesla FSD has 1.5 million active subscriptions and is growing at 50% annually.

>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.

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.

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.

That's not even the original part - it's been done by a car with a driver in it - the McMurtry Spéirling.

You can do a lot with a few megawatts of power for a few seconds.

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.