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Tesla 'Cannot Guarantee' Roadster Reservation Holders Will Ever Get a Car (www.thedrive.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [A, M] to c/TooDumbToImagine
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1401610

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[–] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (15 children)

I am so dubious about the roadster demonstration. Was the car being operated by a human? If not, I wouldn't be surprised if the car was magnetized to the ramp and made super lightweight for the "booster jets" to work.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 days ago

    Or that it weighed like 75 kilos, a gocart with a plastic shell.

    Anyways, from an engineering viewpoint it's utter trash except for a one off stunt like this, and even then it was super janky IMO. I sure wasn't impressed, I didn't really get what was supposed to be cool about it.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I mean it is possible, as was shown in a demonstration McMurtry did. In fact, I would think it’s more difficult to use magnets to do that. I’d believe this is just a giant fan car.

    There’s no way that it gets more than like 3 minutes of runtime from a full charge with that downforce mode on, especially the flight model with all the extra weight of the thrusters and compressed gas tanks.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    Tanks are probably carbon fiber, and the other parts are likely super light too.

    They did likely add a special secondary tank and gut most of the rest of the cars that 'flew'.... I did read somewhere that they only had 1 seat.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    so they say that the planned model you could theoretically buy “by invite only” with all the flying features would be a one seater. The model that did the demo was probably much much lighter than you could make a salable car. I do not think that it will be possible to kickflip a car that is gonna weigh around 3500 lbs. my guess is that enough battery and copv tank to perform the demos was probably less than 1000 lbs of car.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I can’t find the article but…

    They never claimed there was a person. Musk even explicitly said it was remote controlled because they didn’t want to kill anyone.

    The ramp was supposedly suction. That seems feasible for a carbon fiber body.

    It’s all just a show, anyway. Probably an ego project ordered by Musk. He desperately wants to be seen as genius but has the most juvenile ideas about what that entails. Also, the demonstration to distract from the movie about Musk and his political machinations.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    Even though i have no evidence Im pretty certain there was no human in it also what was used in the show was likely a machine specifically designed for the purpose of the show nothing close to a practical car outside of looks.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Remember, this is the man that sold his first company Zip2 by doing this

    "Ever marketing savvy, the Musk brothers tried to make their Web service seem more important by giving it an imposing physical body. Musk built a huge case around a standard PC and lugged the unit onto a base with wheels. When prospective investors would come by, Musk would put on a show and roll this massive machine out so that it appeared like Zip2 ran inside of a mini-supercomputer. "The investors thought that was impressive," Kimbal said."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip2

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