Comment by lisper
1 day ago
> Ok, so it actually flies.
For a few seconds. It's a parlor trick. And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.
1 day ago
> Ok, so it actually flies.
For a few seconds. It's a parlor trick. And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.
I’m guessing the price will be at least 8 figures. If you can afford it you can also afford the 20 acre property with the private test track where you can flip your car in front of your friends.
>And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.
It may not be US legal anyway. The FAA will almost certainly have something to say about something that can go up in the air and propel itself.
It doesn’t fly. It jumps. Like the Mark V.
Apparently Pops Racer works for Tesla.
The Mach Five uses pneumatic jumping jacks though. This thing is more like a Gundam. Pretty rad to watch it maneuver mid air with RCS thrusters.
The Mach Five was way cooler than anything Elon's minions have come up with. Haha
"that's not flying, it's falling with style"
It's not flying, it's brief hops that probably will be geofenced not to be operable on any public roads. I struggle to understand when the operator of the vehicle will ever find a way to use it for any end that isn't "gross negligence followed by totaling the car". It's not even clear it can calculate trajectories in real time to be used at the operator's discretion.
Could be seen as a technology demonstrator for interesting military technology. It could offer something akin to turn based warfare where units charge up and make synchronised moves.
i would have been more impressed if they drove it off a cliff and landed it softly
In business terms they did the first part and will fail on the second.
i mean they kind of did, just upside down (half-loop)
“Yeah my dog plays piano, but only one chord at a time.”
I'm not saying it's not cool. Parlor tricks can be very cool, and this one is. But it's still a parlor trick because it's not good for anything other than being cool. When people think of flying cars what they generally have in mind is not a car that can do a flip, it's car that can take them somewhere without needing a road so that it doesn't get stuck in traffic. This car can't do that. All it can do is backflips in a parking lot. That's not nothing, but the novelty will wear off very quickly.
> When people think of flying cars what they generally have in mind is not a car that can do a flip, it's car that can take them somewhere without needing a road so that it doesn't get stuck in traffic. This car can't do that. All it can do is backflips in a parking lot. That's not nothing, but the novelty will wear off very quickly.
Aye.
That said, on previous stories about flying cars I tend to bring up how the helicopter meets such a standard.
It does't tend to go down well.
Bo and Luke Duke would disagree.
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Smashing the piano with a paw is technically a chord.
because an insufferable man put raspberry pi controlled rapid tire inflation gas canisters on his paws
This was done at night like all large scale David Copperfield magic tricks, so it's more like someone else played a chord and said the dog did.
Exactly. How did the roadster stick to the curved ramp with no obvious jets firing before going airborne? It wasn't going fast enough for centrifugal force to keep it from falling so how did that part of the magic show work?
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What if the purpose is not flying but accident prevention when falling off a bridge or cliff?
What does it prevent? At most it makes you fall in the water in the correct orientation.
At the price of your passenger seats being occupied by gas tanks, that surely are safe in a collision that's far more likely occurrence.
It's PR stunt, nothing more.
> At most it makes you fall in the water in the correct orientation.
They showed a still of the submarine car from James Bond as inspiration for this.
That's the roadster they should have built. This compressed air jumping thing is impractical and dangerous and will never be road legal. But a submersible car would have actual practical uses, increase survivability in several accident situations and not face the same regulatory hurdles.
If they were actually trying to build something cool I think that would be the play, but everything Elon does now is to bump stock price
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I used to wonder about the possibility of using thrusters to decelerate for impending crashes. I think for a substantial fraction of accidents that would be enough to massively reduce the risk.. but hopping over is an option I hadn’t considered practical.
> I used to wonder about the possibility of using thrusters to decelerate for impending crashes
We could just put oversizes brakes on cars to achieve this. Have you seen the stopping distance of a Formula 1 car with its giant brakes?
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Not even hopping. Just tilt/lift the car through the tight spot.
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I’d rather have an eject seat if I was so worried of falling off bridges lol
the purpose is: look at me everyone look at me
As opposed to just exploding from the high pressure tanks of gas onboard due to an otherwise survivable fender bender?
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“Parlor trick” - it’s a flying car ffs. It’s an incredible engineering accomplishment, even if just for a few seconds
"Just a good ol' boys, Never meanin' no harm". Cars have been flying for a few seconds on a regular basis since the 70s.
I don't recall the General going vertically upwards. Bo and Luke's motor seemed to lack an engine when "flying" over rivers etc because if it had one, it would have gone vertical quite rapidly (down).
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Controlled flight. Not ballistic.
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If you're counting brief hops, the 1917 Curtiss Autoplane, "It was able to hop, but not fly."
The show averaged slightly over one car destroyed per episode - over 300 during the production run.
I’m curious about the condition they’re usually in when they land.
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It's barely a shell of a proper car, complete gimmick for "car people" who think car industry came to be with Tesla two decades ago
Right? People here cant enjoy the show. I don't see anyone else having soo much fun engineering a car. Too be on that team would be legit fun.
I'm not even an EV guy, and this is the coolest thing to come out of the automotive space in years. This is almost a throwback to the homologation days of rallying, when automotive companies sold unchained racing cars to the general public because the FIA and WRC deemed it so. Impractical cars in every sense of the word, but phenomenal engineering.
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> It’s an incredible engineering accomplishment
Many of the best parlor tricks are.
It’s falling with style
Its a hollow shell RC car with air canisters.
Tesla making a hollow shell full of hot air would seem appropriate somehow.
The page talks about a bunch of weight reduction tech, but I didn't see an actual final weight for the Rocket model? Given that it can support itself with "downforce" (and no thrusters, and apparently not much momentum?) at the top of the loop it's got to be pretty light...
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If this is the metric of a flying car then we had working prototypes in the 60s.
Any car can be made to fly if "just for a few seconds" is as stringent as your requirements get.
Any car can fly. Once.
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It is certainly an engineering accomplishment, but calling it a 'car' is a stretch. Do you believe that this vehicle has a 100kWh battery pack in it? When Tesla demonstrates this vehicle driving two hundred miles on city streets and recharging to repeat the test, I'll gladly change my mind.
Until then, this is simply a purpose built drone, powered by compressed air to perform specific tricks in order to grift and hype up interest in the company.
I can buy a drone from DJI that performs more impressive flying maneuvers than what Tesla showed.
This is the correct take
Here’s a 30 minute interview with Tesla VP of engineering looking up close at the battery pack, motor, cooling system. Definitely seems like a real EV to me. They also look up close at the thruster pressure vessel and exhaust system.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts
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Yeah just the same way the rides at amusement parks are that go faster and higher. The end result won't change anything for the rest of us. It's entertainment.
It is a few notches beyond sitting in a wagon and emptying a fire extinguisher to go for a little ride, and about as practical, but I do not see what makes it some incredible feat of engineering.
It's a car with rocket thrusters attached. Mythbusters did it 20 years ago.
Mythbusters - JATO 3 Rocket Car Results https://www.motortrend.com/news/jet-powered-vw-new-beetle-fo... and it has some photos that no longer load on his original site)
> It’s an incredible engineering accomplishment
Yeah just like the Tesla screen in the car. Quite a problem since it lacks physical buttons.
I dunno. We have all kinds of flying machines. What exactly makes this a car? The shape?
It drives on everyday streets.
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That’s a very generous interpretation of “flying” tbh.
my honda civic can fly too if I floor it on the hill nearby.
Rockets have been around for a hundred years.
More like 700 years.
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In what way is this an engineering achievement? Presumably two thousand years ago people understood that flight requires lift. It's not like anything novel is occurring here.
Flying car… That was Aerocar back in what, 2011?
It's not a flying car in the way that anyone ever imagined growing up. When people think flying cars they think blade runner or fifth element. Not a car that can jump, interesting as a jumping car may be.
And frankly I'm not sure the engineering is all that impressive. I'm sure someone could've done similar a long time ago, there's just no point to it beyond, well, the parlor trick. Even millionaires have no use for a single seat, road-illegal vehicle with no storage that happens to be able to jump
No, but people will definitely buy the thrust version for the track, if it's ever built. (And assuming most tracks and drag strips even allow using the thrusters, which I doubt.)
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It's a limited edition collectible. Some people will buy it.
Basically, KITT from Knight Rider turned real.
I think I've seen some undergrad capstones also make flying cars that would never actually be produced or sold...
But they lacked a lot of the showmanship here.
You can basically engineer almost anything with enough money for a demo. It's a lot different to engineer something that'll actually get commercialized.
Sometimes I think this sub, being software heavy, downplays the achievements of their own field and overplays the achievements of other fields they lack experience in.
Very impressive. You might even call it Full Self Flying
It's a joke. A clever trick. To what end? ... absolute joke.
Do you know what gets me excited? Have you seen the new Porsche Mission S?
Form, function and beauty ...
> Do you know what gets me excited? Have you seen the new Porsche Mission S?
It's a glorified Beetle.
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Agreed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrqcHKIPRWg
They needed a test harness for lunar/mars landers!
What's the accomplishment here? It's 50 years old tech.
Show me a video from 50 years ago of a car doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p5LxFdc-Qg
It's just plain impressive, even if it's not practical.
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No it’s actually not. Expect police cars to have this tech
Police cars? For what?
The car was empty because it was to dangerious to drive it. It was for sure also striped of everything it not needed.
This tech needs a LOT of space and an Air Tank which needs a lot of space.
What type of bot are you that you think there is any realistic way this 'tech' will land in any normal car ever?
Again, it’s going to be in police cars. Absolutely. Less than 5 years.
Use case imagined: Jumping off cliffs onto side roads. That makes it more than a parlor trick.
That makes it a disaster waiting to happen.
And not just for the person driving it, too.