• Tempus Fugit@lemmy.world
    30·
    2 hours ago

    I genuinely don’t even know who that demonstration was for other than 12-year-olds. None of these cars have any practical or road applications. Where are you going to need to flip your cap off of a ramp or over some cars? It’s so fucking stupid.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
      5·
      31 minutes ago

      Very stupid investors?

      EV sales are flat or shrinking in the US (but growing extremely quickly outside the US, partially thanks to the Hormuz situation). Tesla’s sales are flat. He’s doing anything possible to show that Tesla has a future.

      So, he basically told his talented engineers to take the stabilizing parts of a SpaceX rocket, put them in the body of a car, and pretended that what was demoed is actually vaguely related to something people might be able to buy at some point.

      There isn’t a chance that a vehicle with those kinds of thrusters would ever be road legal. You’re basically driving a pretty large bomb around. You crash that vehicle and you don’t just kill yourself, you kill everybody within a pretty large blast radius.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
        3·
        23 minutes ago

        There isn’t a chance that a vehicle with those kinds of thrusters would ever be road legal

        Tesla sold a car for years with no way to open the back seat doors in the event of an emergency.

        US regulators allow Tesla to do anything.

        • merc@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          8 minutes ago

          A car that maybe you (or your passengers) can’t get out of and might die is different from a car that’s basically a bomb on wheels.

      • jballs@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        25·
        1 hour ago

        They demoed a car that was loaded with a shit load of compressed gas, then they had it do a kick flip over a line of cars and a semi truck. They also drove it up a massive inverted ramp and then had it flip over and land smoothly.

        Looked cool as hell, but has absolutely no practical purpose other than allowing Nazi Musk to get headlines saying they have a flying car.

      • ThePyroPython@lemmy.world
        15·
        1 hour ago

        They did a demo of the new roadster model; they’ve strapped a suction fan and HPA thrusters to it so it can do 0 to 60mph in under a second, drive up walls, perform a running jump over a semi-truck without a ramp, spin and do a standing flip.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
      5·
      47 minutes ago

      It is actually a pretty cool stunt. Completely pointless from a commercial point of view, of course. But Tesla has been disconnected from market realities for a long time, so that’s just in character.

      • Tempus Fugit@lemmy.world
        2·
        20 minutes ago

        Right, if they could build a race track and have a bunch of these in a race, that might actually be kinda cool. I see no other reason for this.

    • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
      9·
      1 hour ago

      There might be some niche situation where it’s helpful but that’s not even relevant because there’s no way it would be legal on public roads in most places. I also strongly doubt that it would be able to do it safely and compensate for different weight distribution of the vehicle with different passengers and such.

      • voxthefox@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        2·
        21 minutes ago

        I doubt they’d be able to even sit still safely, that amount of compressed air sitting in the undercarriage is much more dangerous than even the 10 gallons of gas sitting in a car.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        3·
        1 hour ago

        Then there’s the “range issue” of being able to do that maybe a few times, at best, for a few seconds. Cool demo, but you’d think just a revamped Roadster would be enough. Do it with a Cybertruck without showering everyone with shrapnel and I might be impressed.

  • rem26_art@fedia.io
    23·
    2 hours ago

    Apparently their Q3 earnings report comes out next week, so I guess they tried wheeling out the vaporware car to make number go up before whatever’s in that earnings report hits?