Comment by Already__Taken
1 day ago
Its sold as invite only, basically just selling your own amusement park ride. Its not a car. They're trying to up-brand into that hyper-car market.
1 day ago
Its sold as invite only, basically just selling your own amusement park ride. Its not a car. They're trying to up-brand into that hyper-car market.
There’s no way this will ever directly make back the salaries and time spent on it so far. It’s not a way to make money for Tesla.
So no, Musk is trying to prepare the ground for a merger with spacex and distract from Tesla’s worsening fundamentals and the flop of cyber truck, the decade late delivery of roadster etc etc.
All this stuff was in motion while Tesla was in its COVID boom. It's hard to believe that this is all some PR stunt due to Tesla's current market posture, when the Cybertruck, Roadster, were all specced the same in 2021. It's not like they suddenly came up with these gimmicks. The gimmicks were there from day one.
Always keep a distraction in your pocket. You never know when you might need it.
2 replies →
Depends how much they sell them for. It could probably make the investment back if they price it at $5M or something and sell 100 of them to the ultra rich.
That would involve turning a carefully controlled magic trick into a production vehicle that can do the same trick anywhere
They will never sell a car with similar functionality to that demo to anyone
8 replies →
> There’s no way this will ever directly make back the salaries and time spent on it so far.
It does if it keeps their valuation in the trillions.
I think 'directly' is doing a lot of work in OP's comment. I agree, this is never going to make sales that pay for the engineering effort involved in this machine, but keeping Tesla in the news, having this amazing POC, and the lessons learned that might apply to other parts of Musk's enterprises (SpaceX particularly) are not worth zero.
Plus, whatever you think of Musk, this is really fucking cool.
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> There’s no way this will ever directly make back the salaries and time spent on it so far. It’s not a way to make money for Tesla.
Tesla in particular and all Elon Musk's ventures aren't exactly renowned for being sound investments. Even snake oil salesmen were seen as proper entrepreneurs at one point.
Personally I can't shake off the feeling that every single announcement is a con job, starting with the autonomous driving claims. I'm baffled why people still put any trust into anyyhing coming out of that field.
autonomous driving is a con job? You can stop the trolley at any point but doing so would admit you were wrong.
It's not the actual car that will be sold but apparently another prototype.
Actually, title of the submission should be changed to "Tesla Roadster new prototype".
For the record, previous prototype was in 2017 and the real deal was supposed to ship in 2020
Yes and instead of shipping a new roadster after 10 years we get this - a flying car•.
• For certain values of flying
we get another prototype that is evidently not even safe for a human to be in during demo.
it's a good trick tho, hey, now it's a flying car, so we gotta delay it more. that way they can delay the release and just collect pre order money infintely;)
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