alt Hacker NewsTesla Roadster
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When I first saw the car slowly invert and stay inverted on the ramp...."what the heck am I looking at exactly?"
Amazing suction power. Waiting to see a video of its crazy turning power.
Good for a date I suppose. It has the suspension bridge effect.
It should have been a Delorean.... Still cool though
The video goes against my intuition for how much performance you can get out of cold gas thrusters. I wonder if someone could do some back of the envelope maths on how much thrust and impulse you can get from a setup like this?
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
It would have been more impressive with a human in the car during some of the stunts.
This is incredible engineering and deserves nothing but applause.
Can't wait for these things to endanger my family's life on some Colorado mountain highways. If the suction works at speed, people are gonna drive even more recklessly.
I was making my way on my rented scooter to drone bomb the Bezos BrainVat R&D center when the new model Roadster suddenly swooped over me in a mighty roar of liberated gas. Oh no, I thought! My mission is in jeopardy... but this is unparalleled quality content for the livestream viewers. I could see the Roadster's laser assembly lazily begin to track me, as if controlled by a joystick. A human pilot! Probably some one percenter out on a pleb hunt. The fool thought that I was unarmed. Heroically, I banked the scooter in a sharp turn while the machine gun on its back acquired the target, multiplying matrices furiously on its ancient low-fi GPU. As flames began to pour from the flying vehicle, I angled the scooter around a corner, timing it so that my black outfit would blur into the Apple ad projected on the side of the building. The Roadster's pilot was leaning out of the window screaming in rage and fear as his machine began a fiery descent toward the city shelter for abandoned kittens. I was torn between feeling bad for the kittens and giving in to the dopamine surge in my cortex as my viewer count climbed toward the stratosphere.
I am actually seeing what I envisioned growing up. Pretty exciting times!
> Note: Not approved for public road use.
Rocket trim is not street legal.
It’s cool, I’d love this if I had the money to afford it. Maybe in a decade, it will be more practical and have more legitimate use cases, I’m not sure!
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
I dig the commitment to the low poly look! Really cool and fits in with the new design direction.
Not beating the "Elon is 12" allegations any time soon.
I must be old. I just keep thinking about what kind of whiplash I'd get with those flips
I don't know the practicality of this car, or if the production version will have these thrusters, but the demo was epic. It tickled my childhood dream of working with mechanical stuff.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
This seems less like a consumer product than a stock market demonstration of the supposed synergies of merging SpaceX and Tesla.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
Why Musk would spend probably tens of millions of dollars on this prototype which clearly will never be drivable on roads. One explanation is he is a trillionaire and the 14 year old in him thinks it would simply be cool to do it.
I think there is a more rational explanation. Tesla sales have slowed, other companies are catching up, and if it weren't for import issues, Chinese cars would be eating Tesla's breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yet Tesla is trading at a 330 P/E and Musk has to do something to make it seem like Tesla is still light-years ahead of everyone else and just wait, that 330 P/E will be justified any quarter now. Just like shooting a roadster into deep space was just a PR stunt, this is a PR stunt to boost the brand with no actual market relevance.
Reminds me quite a bit about Compressed Gas Supercharging:
I've been recently playing a game called Approximately Up. You start from simple building blocks, thrusters and can use the in game logic system to build complex controls. One of the things I came about to learn was something to make a hover system for my ship was a simple PID controller. The side and bottom firing thrusters just remind me of my ship in the game. While the game is oversimplified and a bit arcadey, does anyone know what actually goes into this in the real life and is the huge feat the improvement on the weight of the whole car?
I worked at Tesla when they announced the Roadster 2 and said they’d start production. That never happened. Funny to see everyone eat this up, let’s see when or if they deliver.
interesting they're going back to the fixed-seat bench design of the 40's-60's kind of car design - didn't know these were allowed anymore
also wonder how comfy that is? i kind of welcome it tho!
We are a nation of dullards, entertained away from our real problems by billionaires jingling keys in our faces.
stfu about Elon and issues you have. No need to mention that crap. Just share you opinion about the damn car.
My opinion is that the car is conceptually good but requires regulations. As much as I hate regulations, I don't want no flying cars on my head.
Just don't press the button where you have wires over the road... or anything hanging over the road... like signs...Don't press the button when you are about to go into a tunnel... or inside the tunnel... Also, check your passengers have finished their shakes, coffee, and other liquids...
The real feat would be to actually ship the gas-equipped models. The on-stage demonstration was certainly quite impressive but handling real world terrain is a whole different story. Not to mention compensating for drivers who will skew lead-footed without any experience of handling a third dimension.
I am skeptical that this feature will prove to be much more than a publicity stunt, especially since the availability of these models will be so limited.
Back in the days we used to call these kind of demo cars as concept cars which rarely see the markete. But Kudos to Elon Musk who single handedly running entire Tesla's marketing compaign and keep its stocks and markete value higher than the next 10 car brands combined. Tesla Robots, Robotaxies and now Roadster, these are R&D and concept projects.
The suction and air recovery part might be forward thinking for how we design roads or tunnels. They might not all need to be flat. Especially when autonomous.
Wow, cool aesthetic. I feel like the this is what the cybertruck should have looked like but they didn't quite finish the design.
This sounds more or less like the car my 5 year old son dreamed up a few months back: "Dad, dad! What if we put a bunch of rocket thrusters on the bottom of an electric car? We could even add a really powerful fan as well. And then the car could just hover past traffic jams, and it could even drive along walls or upside down if you put the fans in reverse!".
I'll be listening even more closely to his ideas from now on, even when they defy the "common sense filter" we adults tend to have.
Loadstir, more like.
A though for the people doing the "boring" engineering at Tesla (like, you know, enhancing the range of the vehicles, improving security, making FSD closer to reality, etc...), who used to get some light (remember "battery day" ?), and are now on the backbench while the sycophants gets the budget for vanity projects like this. At least, at Tesla, the sycophants are _smart_ and pull out cool demos. Not the case in every "new clothes" kingdom.
If helipads can only handle one chopper ever few minutes, and they are surrounded by clear and open space, then that tells you that theres no way flying cars with the frequency of typical roads or even quite streets will ever happen.
well Im suitably impressed
Elon should read Anti-Grav Unlimited. It's a good book, actually a very good book. We want that tech. Time to invent the antigravity rods. AI is here, sorry, SuperIntelligence is here, AGI is on the doorstep, just ask the SOTA models to figure it out.
> It challenges the limits of design, engineering and physics to deliver an expertly crafted extra-terrestrial vehicle.
closed tab. thanks.
If you can afford something this ridiculous, then IMO you aren't being taxed enough.
I no longer like Elon and Tesla but, damn, that's a great looking Lamborghini, and a cool stunt to launch it!
At least this one doesn't look horrible. I can't see myself buying it, but I don't feel like I want to gag either.
It's great to watch these types of videos and tech ideas. It makes me really happy.
People who already have a Veyron should go for this.
It's very impressive. Not useful, but impressive.
Finally a vehicle for Bangalore!
Misdirection
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
> Tesla Sales Slump in Third Quarter
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-sales-fell-in-third...
Just curious: Was there a demo of a stable straight jump as well, or always barrel-rolls?
It must be incredibly difficult to keep the car stable while mid-air at low speeds, I suspect it wouldn't look that "elegant"...
I am amazed at how steady and in control the car was when flipping and jumping. If that kind of control on a vehicle is achieved today, it seems like flying car tech just took a giant lurch forward. Just in time for America's crumbling road infrastructure.
Probably among the least comfortable cars to be hit by as a pedestrian or cyclist.