alt Hacker NewsTesla Unveils 'Flying' Roadster with SpaceX Thrusters [video]
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The audience for this must get really scared when the magician cuts the lady in half
I know its marketing but still it's super inspiring to me. Try pulling it off in real hardware. It's incredible.
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.
Does anyone have more info on the cupholders? I need to know it won’t spill my coffee.
I genuinely didn't believe they'd ever do more than use cold gas thrusters for a lame boost effect, if at all. Happy to admit I was wrong, that was cool.
(still not buying a tesla thooughbeit)
If Doc Brown's time machine was real and posted here, HN would be complaining that it's noisy, unimpressive, not street legal, uninsurable, and attacking Brown's personal character because he's a dangerous nutcase.
The reality of EVs is that they all provide more or less identical driving experience - immense amounts of speed in straight lines and pure control around corners. But you can't really make something nimble or chuckable when it weighs 1.5 tons.
(Calling it a "roadster" is cute, but this has nothing in common with a Boxster or Miata. If anything, the ICE analogue would be muscle cars.)
Because there are no real unique driving characteristics, the only engineering you can compete with is raw speed or price. That and crazy gimmicks.
If used on public streets, these thrusters could easily maim/kill people- reckless to include them on a car.
Am I missing something? At what point did the car fly?
The thrusters were able to cushion a fall.
That seems useful in ruining the ending of Thelma and Louise, but isn’t really a flying car.
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.
This seems less like a consumer product than a stock market demonstration of the supposed synergies of merging SpaceX and Tesla.
We are a nation of dullards, entertained away from our real problems by billionaires jingling keys in our faces.
A car that can make you, your friends, and your family deaf. Amazing.
FSD doesn't even work properly TEN YEARS after it was announced
still tries to murder passengers jumping across traffic at shadows
good luck with anything Musk, you are the beta tester, if you die they'll debug it, eventually
Musk really is the master of fraud. Twitter gets bought by Space X to conceal the massive loss in valuation, Tesla gets pumped with endless "we'll have self-driving cars next year", for 10+ years... now that the Tesla bubble is finally popping he needs to dump it on the Space X/Twitter shareholders, so we get this demo of a thing that will never hit the road. Bag holders beware, Musk's masterpiece of market manipulation is about to execute with the merger of all his lies.
After Elon almost died in 2000 when he lost control of his McClaren I wonder if the real reason for these thrusters isn't actually to recover when controlling this beast proves too much for the driver and it starts to spin out or accidentally launches into the air.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono... - Worth a read if you haven't already