Comment by nunez

About 3800 pounds. (from Hargety interview)

Honestly, I think what is shown is sleight of hand, it was probably a step up from this DIY project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MybApXQIO5Q

No it's not sad, the man was basically an unelected official, laid off thousands of government workers and the second order effects of that will affect millions. All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?

If I had paid for a reservation for this car in checks notes 2017(!!!), I'd have some issues with them as well. Very cool tech demo, but come find me when it's getting produced and sold to the people who reserved them a decade ago.

Why is it sad? Over 700,000 avoidable deaths from Elon's dismantling of US AID alone, two thirds of them children. Estimated to be 14 million avoidable deaths by 2030.

I think the qualification is unbelievably tame considering what Elon deserves.

Well unfortunately he's made it necessary to do so. I can like this demo in the same way I can like the V2 rocket as a pioneering achievement in rocketry. There's a very big elephant in the room.

He killed thousands (possibly hundreds of thousands) of people with his DOGE stunts interrupting USAID, for purely selfish reasons or completely mentally deranged delusions (if you take his twitter posts at the time at face value).

This should literally be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of this guy - a mass murderer working his way up to the level of the despots of the early 20th century

its cos he's a prick. The way he pretended to "fairly" sack devs at twitter when he was clearly just trying to cut costs. That he bought twitter to "defend free speech" and then started donating to the Republication party and promoting a very specific political position online. As a euro the Nazi salute alone is enough for me.

The qualifier matters, that guy has serious issues.

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Distinguishing “demo” from “marketing stunt” here feels like a distinction without a difference and smells like motivated reasoning.

> wonder what the point of this was?

Car manufacturers have been doing pointless things for over a century [1], with no plan to even try to make them available to the public. Why is this getting so much heat?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_car

Automotive tariffs in the US are explicitly to keep the ability to make military vehicles in the United States. GM, Ford, and Chrysler retooled their factories to make planes, trucks, and tanks during WW II.

https://michiganology.org/stories/arsenal-of-democracy/

When all of your industry will have gone to China and you'll have no knowledge and specialised workers left, you'll have only your eyes to cry.

You could make the same argument for hypercars like the McLaren W1, why do you need 1,258 bhp and sub 3s 0-60 times? Seems gimmicky and not practical for the road. But to that I'd argue, why not?

The people who are waiting for this car are waiting for a gimmick anyway. If you want a car that will take you from A to B reliably, you can buy one today.

most of the things a Tesla Roadster is advertised with is not street legal.

Not a lot of tears to shed for folks waiting a long time for a $250k (starting, at least at the time) toy.

I'd bet most of them see this as a cooler, shinier toy.

If you look at Tesla pricing and delivery, prices usually well above what was originally talked about - capability/etc a whole different thing with the cyber truck. The 3 engine "cyberbeast" was originally pushed at about 1/2 it's price 8ish years ago.

Still waiting for high speed rail

That's exactly how I see it too. Not a tesla shareholder but if I was I'd be running for the hills.

DHH: >I put $50,000 on this thing 18 months ago. Not knowing it was going to fucking fly! When it was already years "late". Because investing in whatever Elon does next is not just a great bet, but the most inspiring and fun one too.

https://x.com/dhh/status/2110983188910923926?s=20

Why the second hand outrage. If you didn't buy a car and feel bad about the wait time, just enjoy the demo! :D

There's 3 trim levels. Flying is the top tier. They already publicly announced that.

yeah if I had a preorder for a roadster, I'd be wondering about how much time they're spending on this compressed air thing.

Elon doesn't miss with his social media marketing. Compare the announcement tweets from Andy Jassy and the engagement they generate. Meta, with the Muse app (personal AI), is also leaning heavily on social media, but by paying influencers (instead of cool & viral product demos).

A lot of this sentiment is based on jealousy or competiton with Musk, or the pleasure of harassment towards Asperger people: Gimmicky demos are what people remember.

Everyone here can probably still remember the time to the minute that Steve Jobs in 2007 said "an internet communicator, a music player, a phone" and the 3-faced cube transformed into a single device. That's what gimmicky demos are for.

Gimmicky? Within our lifetime it will be a common safety feature like airbags. Can you imagine how many terrible accidents can be avoided if the car can fly out of a bad situation? Doesn't need to fly long distance. Engage your imagination and you'll think of many use cases.

And those rocket drones have a significant proportion of their mass as reaction gas for the thrusters, everything else being designed around lightness, and can still only resist gravity on the order of a few tens of seconds before a full recharge needs to be done. They're very much designed for "small" course corrections outside of atmosphere, or quickly dodging the terminal phase of an interceptor, rather than efficient velocity change.

There's no getting away from the rocket equation - reaction mass is heavy. The sheer number of design compromises that need to be made to allow a cold gas thruster system means I can't see anything but ending up with an awful car for the sake of a few seconds "air time". And the rest of the time you'll still be (at least) doubling the mass of your car from the propellant plus whatever the thrusters, tanks, linkages and everything else weights. I guess you could leave it empty, then only charge it for the "Party Trick", but it still seems a lot of compromises for the occasional "Hey, this looks cool".

And then really only usable in a nice empty, flat, controlled environment - the "real world" driving experience has things like other cars, people, buildings and street surfaces that likly wouldn't appreciate what are effectively localised hurricane-force level winds from the car next to them.

This is a car rigged for a specific stunt. And there's a reason why people don't just drive around rigged stunt cars. They suck as being "cars".

Hagerty has a very good walkthrough video with Lars and it looks pretty real. The thing they failed to mention was that the "flying" version is separate and the entire passenger seat is replaced with a pressure tank.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts

Still frames showing the underside appear to show that it is basically hollow, so fake.

Making a car with a heavy EV battery and powertrain fly like that is probably not something they're able to do.

I think it's not that difficult when you have full access to SpaceX know how and infrastructure.

My only issue with it is that beyond being impressive and very cool, it's pretty useless.

Someone else commented that this tech might make for a good Bond movie car (maybe better suited to the Roger Moore cheesy era), but I assume nowadays they'd just use AI since it'd be so much cheaper.

Was Google's 20 percent time a waste of its talent?

This looks like a genuinely fun project to have worked on. That can be the difference between a top engineer burning out and staying motivated.

Tesla's marketing budget is something close to $0. Stuff like this is why.

Even if I give you the benefit of the doubt and accept your statement as true, who cares?

Telsa board doesn’t, they need moonshots to justify their valuation. Elon doesn’t care, the engineers sure as shit don’t.

Maybe a midline quality control and reliability person? That’s not likely where many of the engineers for this project came from though.

Yeah, wouldn’t they rather be doing real impactful engineering work, like figuring out means to display even more ads on personal user devices, maximizing the number of hours kids spend doom-scrolling per day, or making robots that are deliberately designed to take jobs away from as many workers as possible?

But, imagine instead being an engineer of any kind today and you’re only getting paid to work on boring things like advanced automotive technology and building cars that can maneuver themselves in midair and might possibly fly in the future? Ridiculous.

(This message should not be taken as support for Musk or any of his views or business ventures.)

the pursuit of perfection should not always require justification :)

I don't think so. The engineering behind an F1 car is not relevant to those buying consumer cars, but it helps sell them regardless.

You must be miserable in your job. All the good engineers I know would gladly take some pay cut to be able to do projects like this.

They learned a lot, and pushed their tools further, in ways that left them with new insights and possible engineering paths for more practical work.

“Play” “fun”, curiosity” and “challenge for challenges sake” are adaptive strategies for learning unexpectedly useful things.