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Comment by mulletbum

1 day ago

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I felt the same way when they were calling the Segway skateboards "hoverboards" and referring to back to the future.

  • I'm not sure I'd agree that "Traditional wheel powered transportation vehicle" is in the same category as "Useless hovering car with giant dangerous high-pressure nitrogen tank that can cause serious bodily injury to pedestrians and occupants"

    • On the other hand "Hoverboards" became famous for bursting into flames so vigorously that people thought they were exploding, so maybe there is a deep connection. Then again "Hoverboards" were actually available on the market as advertised for quite some time, which is probably going to differentiate them from yet another Musk gimmick.

      Add it to the list, boys! "Inflatable Rescue Submersible", FSD, Bulletproof windows, Mars any day now, Hyperloop... am I missing anything?

It's basically the batmobile from Dark Knight. A small bridge jumper. Still pretty cool

I guess any LPG-installed car is also a "bomb" by your definition?

  • my quick search says LPG-installed cars run at 5-10 bar. the roadster apparently at 350 bar. by comparison one is on the scale of car tires and the other is like 35x that.

    • Using Brode's equation a rupture can release 52MJ of energy or 12kg of TNT. An high explosive tank shell only has 11MJ of explosive energy.

    • For reference, tractor trailer tires run about 7 bar and we’ve all see those videos.

[flagged]

  • The point is that a car flying for 10 seconds is nowhere near the Jetsons car.

    We actually do already have Jetsons style flying cars - those things that look kind of like big drones are basically that, and those are actually practical.

    Forget the comparison to the Jetsons if it upsets you, let's just compare to actual flying vehicles.

    • I was mostly being pedantic in response to the extreme pedantry required to differentiate between “doing a barrel roll using cold gas thrusters” and “flying”. My point is that it is of course flying, and the reason cars don’t fly at all normally is because it’s insanely dangerous, so saying it’s not a flying car because it’s dangerous is both disingenuous and wrong.