This is explained in the deep dive video with Lars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts

  > Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways.

Watch Ford v Ferrari for an idea of what auto companies are willing to invest for bragging rights.

Example RC toy car that drives on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA

And supercars are typically not submitted for NCAP testing, so It'll likely be less safe than a Model Y for example (to be determined, no reports out yet)

https://www.euroncap.com/assessments/tesla/model+y/0961/

Teslas evaluation is based on hype. This is as hype as it gets for a car. To me it looks like they were in need for "the coolest thing". To me, this has the smell of desperation implying the beginning of the end of their high evaluation.

Can't help but think of the not-a-flamethrower

(friend bought one for $500, now they seem to be worth $1500-$2000)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Merchandise

Guess it is for advertising mainly.

The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."

Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value. There is a huge economy revolving around people annoying other people just for a glimpse of their attention. This captures the attention and pleases people. Other car companies should start getting creative too.

It's only wild if you ignore Musk's role in this. Not even trying to bash him or anything, but he's a trillionaire. This is the kind of shit you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly waste.

I mean, if this is how he wants to spend his money, then I guess that's his prerogative. But I think it's a bit misleading to suggest this is a decision made by "Tesla" when this is clearly an irrational decision for a company to make. This is a decision made by Musk based on satisfying his own personal goals.

I don't think they'll sell these, at all in the future. No way they'll hound out actual rocket engines to en users. Too much IP in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhVLgTsoMhQ

You could say the same thing about the Cybertruck.

If that is what they have done. That may just be a large drone looking like a car.

Hopefully there will also be a warning siren while it is pressurized. "Dangerous enough to need a warning siren" seems like a plus for the target market, honestly.

If this ships, it will deliver a fraction of what's promised here. My money is on the "flying" version being delayed repeatedly until it's quietly cancelled. Anyone remember the fast battery change stations[1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oj6LaYFall4

It's staggering to consider how many resources we've diverted from people who could use them into building this novelty.

If ever there was a sign of a society of decadence in decline, it's that the most powerful person on earth is free to create toys like this exclusively for others in the ruling class.

If there was a live audience anywhere near that stage they wouldn't have been able to use thrusters to fly something that actually weighs as much as a car.

The new roadster is obviously cool, but it looks like a practically useless vehicle for 99.9999% of the population. It's purely going to be a track princess -- with lots of extra weight for frankly pointless (but very cool) thrusters.

I wonder what the point of this was? Seems likely related to anticipated purchase of Tesla by SpaceX. Maybe meant to (irrationally) justify a high offer price for Tesla?

Can't say I'm a fan of the styling of the car - I guess it'd look at home parked beside a Cybertruck, but something like the Porsche Mission S is way sexier.

This engineering in this demo was only designed o get lucrative government contracts.

Sad that people feel the need to add this qualification. I see it regularly.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/qt5p-_tE8d0?si=V5csPghK02wwd0or...

[1] https://youtu.be/JdkIOhFmbKI?si=ULvyIRWDRZRWlIWA&t=1340

Also, the stock market's id, aka WSB is not impressed in hilarious and sometimes insightful ways. [0]

From my nerd POV, this looks super cool! From any other POV, ummm, what are we supposed to do with this? This is neat as heck, but you cannot put COPVs on public roadways.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1x73hxs/tes...

I'm imagining this in two phases: phase one - you drive around, and excess energy goes to compressing air. Phase two - you use that compressed air which takes very little additional power, so you get to double up on force. I guess likely a 'running mode' where it's using some power to keep suction on.

I'm curious how much time you get at full blast vs 'just' enough to keep the car pinned to a wall, e.g. 1 vs 2 g.

napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.

Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?

Sound advice for people looking for a practical car. But if you have Lambo money who cares? I have never seen a supercar described as reliable.

The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.

This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.

Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).

Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ on an yearly basis until you get sick of fixing the suspension. Tesla claims to have fixed the issue on newer models (and apparently they did a lot of work on the suspension), but they don't really take responsibility for their old cars so I doubt they will take responsibility when their design causes problems for you.

I do enjoy driving my 2019 SR+ Model 3, but I hate when people do the whole "Well on first principles, EVs have less parts so they are more reliable..." thing. My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.

Given some of the tauted 'features' of this thing, I'd be more concerned about it blowing up in my driveway.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/NextGenT...

(just personal preference)

9 years since the announcement of Roadster v2, people who paid 50k deposits are still waiting.

Time to up the promises, and ask for more $50k deposits for v3!

https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Lamborgh...

Other cars have these tanks, but full of flammable fuel, not just air.

Off the top of my head, the honda civic CNG (3600 psi)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honda_Civic_GX#Specifications

the toyota marai (10,000 psi hydrogen)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai#High-pressure_hyd...

and probably the other cng or hydrogen cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdkIOhFmbKI&t=1239

Doesn't look too big, tbh. They also explain some of the mechanics used to make it happen.

Like any of this will materialise. Where’s the original Roadster people actually put down payments on?

Hahah, the failure modes are going to be exciting.

I can’t recall the vehicle now but there was a futuristic car around the turn of the century that had a lot of buzz, but changed dramatically for production and nobody liked it. But an engineer on the project said the concept car had less aerodynamic drag going backward than forward, which is quite an achievement.

That is one of at least a dozen experiences I have had that tell me not to get attached until the prototypes ship to car reviewers for examination.

It’s somewhat notable that Tesla was up significantly overnight and closed the day down 2%.

I wonder if this is the beginning of a very lengthy period after which people will look back and wonder “what the hell was everyone thinking?”

Just because it's not your hobby or within your budget, doesn't mean that others must feel the same way as you.

Looking at the pictures, design-wise, I’m almost tempted to ask: “what was the prompt?”.

What sad reaction to a real life flying car.

I am. These machines push the limits of prevailing technology. Strong organizations set stretch goals and pursue them regardless of market viability. Sometimes they share this with everyone, and convention has named this practice "concept" cars. I appreciate when they take the risk to do this. And when they do it well, credit is deserved.

There are real engineers and technicians behind this. A lot of them. And they will tell the story of this event for the rest of their lives. I've known a number of people with such stories. They're among the best people I've ever met.

It is possible to exist without cranking the cynical knob to 11 at all times.

Concepts cars are cars.

What was shown on stage is closer to the Apollo lander training rigs than a vehicle that you could purchase and drive on a public road.

It can never, ever be sold as a production vehicle! The COPV gas storage is under enormous pressure, and would explode with the force of a decent sized bomb if damaged in an accident.

These things would be regularly turning their owners into pink mist, emulating Stockton Rush at a larger scale.

Disregarding that, all stuff that Tesla (and SpaceX) have demoed had become commercial products, so I wouldn't call Tesla a vaporware company.

Sure, it takes them decades ... but that's different from not shipping.

Patently absurd, of course, but amazing too.

AI Elon pressure selling "act decisively, double your money" by transferring crypto to some wallet and getting 2x back - yeah, right

(PS Google shut it down)

Long-term investors would lose about 40% of their investment to subsidize the inflated valuation of X (bought by xAI), the inflated valuation of xAI (bought by SpaceX), and SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).

The valuation of both companies was inflated prior to acquisition, and Tesla shareholders will be asked to dilute their investment by absorbing that cumulative inflation.

Not even to mention that Musk would have exclusive control over the entire conglomerate, with not even the pretense of a Board to check his power.

When even Steven Mark Ryan is like "let's pump the breaks a little bit," you know it's bad.

“Other shareholder meetings are snoozefests but ours are bangers. Look at this. This is sick.”

Elon’s pay package: he gets 400 million Tesla shares if he raises the market cap of tesla(xspacextwitterxAIx) to $8.5 trillion (nominal). He spent a cool 250 mil on making friends with the republicans, so as to ensure that his incoming epic awesome merger is not blocked.

A merger, plus the amount of inflation this government has already produced over the next decade, will probably see X co hitting Elon’s salary goals.

To me it looks like a mashup of a Ferrari and a Cybertruck. That's not a good thing.

They're typically used to affix your beer to the steering wheel of your boat.

Square-cube scaling being what it is, I think it'd be much more reasonable to use propellers (like quadcopters) than try to scale down COPV's to a Vroomba! size. That's actually an interesting product idea. A small flying vacuum cleaner could clean a variety of surfaces; not only floors.

(And you could even mount the charging station on the ceiling, so it doesn't take up floor space).

https://www.amazon.com/window-cleaning-robot/s?k=window+clea...

Fan cars are pretty old. From that perspective, the driving upside down part is "less impressive" but screw it, still cool.

I want to see it on a track going all out, but something about what they decided to focus on tells me nobody gives a damn about this actually doing anything performance car related.

It won't.

And this is also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH. Some cars come with "Donut" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.

I'm more worried about the COPVs exploding in a crash, for the thruster version. Hopefully it will keep the tanks empty unless a special launch mode is enabled with a warning siren sounding as long as they're pressurized.

Corruption? Musk is already down a quarter of a billions in donations to the GOP for these incoming elections.

The suction system is interesting. It's possible for it to work on the street but incredibly dumb. The kind of gap you have to keep is millimeters off the ground and your typical streets in the real world have so much damage and inconsistency it's hard to imagine it working for anything but straight line acceleration on a newly paved road. This would be a suicide mission to drive this on Skyline with the expectation to get 2-3g in the bends.

The concerns about debris and so forth are somewhat valid but can be taken care of. Similar to dust collectors for woodworking - this will have a cyclone separator, mesh, and whatnot that will prevent the blades from getting wrecked by a rock. But wouldn't want to tail this thing. It'll be pelting your car.

It'll be another "car goes really fast in a straight line" feature which electric cars have always done well with. While it'd be cool to use the suction system to get incredible g forces in bends - it'll be too dangerous for public roads. You'd immediately fly off the road if you lost any suction and I don't know what public roads (especially in the Bay Area) you could run such a system reliably on.

People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.

That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.

For something like the performance versions of their high-volume vehicles, it's partially for the same reasons people like sports cars, or at least how some people like a sports car that is faster / quicker and gives them more excitement while driving (obviously a lot of the appeal for sports cars otherwise is the sporty look/sound of the engine, which Tesla doesn't really deliver on at all).

I hope.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Trumps

The vast majority of LLM users -- not the average person here on HN -- doesn't know which "model" they are using, can't tell the difference and don't care, including many software engineers. You could ask the same thing about those LLM benchmarks.

It's a backpack company presenting the engineering of a jetpack to promote the sales of a premium backpack with the same name.

It clearly does not look like a smaller Cybertruck though. You're just wrong there.

And, speculation by Chris Norland YouTuber is the Roadster being fitted with literal rocket boosters is a portion of an argument to help justify SpaceX financially helping Tesla.

Or, if I'm making up stuff as I go along, you can't crash, the car can just auto-takeoff to dodge whatever you were about to hit.

Sports cars are designed to be impractical, but they can also be impressive feats of engineering.

I imagine the flying variant will be an extremely limited release and mostly just for stunts and shows.

(To stop masking and start ‘musking?’)

Also Tesla events rarely (if ever) get followed by a durable stock bump.

--

Edit: Credible independent videos have been released on YouTube by reputable people. There's no doubt that the spectacle did happen as shown by Tesla. That's not to say it's anything more than a carefully staged spectacle, but claims that it's fake or AI or CGI are absolutely debunked.

And inevitably two groups will clash, one pointing out how much this deviated from the original, often decade long promises vs another pointing at the identical naming, how it's still a product they like and of course the all time winner "I don't see you do X"...

For what it's worth, I'd file this as a RCS demo for SpaceXGrokSI (or whatever they call themselves this week) above all else and if I were a betting man, might be a prelude to fusing them into SpaceXSuperXTeslaXIntelligenceX...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/11/tesla-s...

It would encourage me to sell, if I had, seeing this nonsense.

They have to sell one to say that it exists. It’s marketing.

Absolutely nobody who owns that vehicle will be “flying” it.

The fact that Waymos don't get hit head-on by drunk drivers suggests this is a situational awareness versus last-minute dodge problem.

Not that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.

You can't call this beauty of engineering a muscle car.

Are you referring to the Tesla Roadster? Because, if not, I am pretty sure that most EVs, except for maybe small compact EV cars, usually weights 2 tons or more.

It also has steer-by-wire which makes the steering yoke practical as they can tweak the steering ratio to prevent the need to go hand-over-hand. As they did for the Cybertruck.

Tesla has never really shown they can design anything compelling that doesn’t look like a lumpy shoe.

Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.

The generally available car will have cold-gas thrusters which boost acceleration but is nothing like what was demo'd.

The flying trim will never be sold to general consumers. Even the rear-thruster trim is currently listed at a $250,000 pre-order fee, which is a deposit for a fraction of the full cost of the car. Final cost will be over $1M. Any of the thruster variants will be extremely rare; like, the one guy in your city that has one will show it off at car shows twice a year, McLaren P1, level of rare.

Plenty of ways to maim/kill people in traditional cars already and I doubt this will be the most common one in roadsters.

As an engineer who dislikes polished presentations of unimpressive things, it encourages me that it’s still possible to do a bad presentation about an amazing thing and (most) people don’t grumble too much.

No way?! Elon Musk? Unnatural and cringey?!

Fan cars are old. Nothing about them is new or special or unique. Trying to build infrastructure dependent on such a feature would be the dumbest thing since monorails.

Just build subways for heaven's sake.

It’s not like this is the first time that Elon has overpromised and underdelivered.

Catching up? BYD has already surpassed Tesla and looks like the gap is going to continue to grow.

At this point it's not clear that there's anything other than a 14 year old in him. A greedy, sociopathic 14 year old.

you have to be pretty jaded to think a car that can fly through the air is not impressive.

You don't think electric vehicles and battery storage advance humanity?

On the contrary I would rather my big companies didn't try so hard to advance humanity. Elon has a lot of takes around creating a Utopian society which do not sit right with me. Really it's not the advancement that's the problem, it's the requisite power and resources necessary to achieve the elaborate visions. Humanity should be advanced by a collective, not by a few gifted individuals, even if that means more bureaucracy and less efficiency.

Also the public government funds being received are in the form of contracts. It's not like they can just use the money anywhere. Both Tesla and SpaceX are likely using private money (that is to say, funds not from the government) to fund this.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-079-introduction-to-convex-opt...

If they ever deliver a single unit that's a low enough bar to make it completely economically infeesable.

if they somehow managed to sell a couple of thousand... it might become profitable.

this has to be just a fantastic bit of marketing to jazz up their share price.

also.. I'd love to see a blooper roll of making it do these things...

You’d want something that smoothly hovers rather than a launch then catch with boosters.

Also, assuming the delivery vehicle is destroyed at the end of each "delivery", what will it cost?

I think this is pretty unique demonstration for something that theoretically may be street legal one day.

- The cold-gas only version will shotgun debris into onlookers, and possibly yeet anyone behind it.

- Active suction is very cool until a rock punches through your intakes.

- Lithium batteries and pressurised tanks in the same package, yippee!

Thank god it'll take them years to manufacture this thing.

The cybertruck is for sale and FSD is active in the US. The US lets automakers "self-certify" that they are safe. So although I don't think this thing should ever be sold, it may end of on US roads.

Flying / rocket acceleration are special versions they can sell one offs capable of doing the stunt once per canister change.

The base model has the suction fans which will make huge gains.

Next model up has rear thrusters for the acceleration, which will be more insane. It’s limited production.

Final model that can fly is invite only and will be a joke on the track, using those thrusters to go around corners way, way faster than normal.

I wish they had shown track laps and 1/4 mile times instead of the gimmick of flying.

The existing tech fab plus this car maybe makes it harder to sue once the merger happens - but he will still be sued. “Look we’re making it rocket cars with AI of course we should be one company”

Was it a an amazing demo? yes.

Also yes you can legally sell it. Whether you can legally operate it is a different question.

This would even be a sensible choice for Tesla, because it will put that car in a garage far away from public scrutiny...

(thinking just about all the debris damage-potential of those thrusters here, not even any potential quality issues)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZpQZSBTi7k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2c-B3y7yGQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU5viDOjWLw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSjXf7IUSDw

Tesla Q3 sales will be the same tomorrow.

It doesn't surprise me that any particular companies sales are down at the moment, how does Tesla compare to other car manufacturers out of interest.

This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.

1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem. 2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.

These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.

That's the bit where we diverge.

The gimmicky part is not the engineering but the fact that it is not a flying car but a proof of concept of a flying car in a very controlled environment, with no regard for cost, with no actual viability of real world use.

Its like the breakdancing humanoid robots in China, a cool feat of engineering for sure, but it makes you think that robots can do human tasks, when the reality is much further away.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Air-Hogs-Zero-Gravity-Sprint-RC-C...

Watch the video - the car jumps into the air. Not exactly flight or what we’d consider a flying car, but it’s careering through the air off the ground.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50

I mean, this isn't crazy. In fact, it's already been done. Ever heard of McMurtry? (https://mcmurtry.com/). They're notorious for exactly this - using fans to provide extreme downforce (urr... upforce if you're hanging upside down?).

> In flight?

Did you see the stunt where it literally flew over vehicles? I mean, maybe it's a bit closer to a controlled super-leap like the original Superman, but... yeah, my personal reaction to that was more "holy shit" than "well, that's not flying".

> Bullshit, no it can't.

A proof of concept already exists:

https://mcmurtry.com/upside-down-driving/