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I'm not saying it was a production-ready car, but the notion of it being styrofoam is stupid. These demos are as much for the morale of the engineers as they are for the entertainment of the public. Tesla doesn't need to demonstrate a rocket car.
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> notion of it being styrofoam is stupid

Well then, I'm sure it'll be disproven very shortly, right?

They won't keep the vehicle hidden and out of sight, right?

Let's just revisit in a couple months, shall we?

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They kind of do, though, their sales have been dropping year over year during an extreme fuel crisis - and Chinese EVs are coming for their lunch.
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They need to get their sales up (lots of folks like me won’t buy one now because Elon sucks) but your reasoning I largely disagree with. We don’t have a fuel crises in the US for example. And Chinese EVs won’t be able to gain too strong of a foothold in American or European markets because neither market will permit their domestic industries to collapse due to Chinese state subsidies and industrial overcapacity.
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Even if Chinese EVs can't make it into the American market in numbers it's a pretty clear signal that Tesla models are vastly overpriced for their functionality. The subsidies have spurred innovation and do continue to artificially depress the price of vehicles, but the value you're getting for a dollar in Chinese EVs far outshines Tesla without any of the weird built-in design annoyances needing to be present like the door handles or terrible dashboard UX.

Tesla will continue to rule the US for the next two years due to the admin but the Euro and Canadian markets are likely going to continue to close to them. It might be that home-grown competitors will step up to the plate or maybe they'll open their doors to Chinese exports - it's hard to say. So while it's hard to identify a winner, the loser is clearly Tesla.

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Is it really so unbelievable that a car company with access to rocket engineers, built a car with rocket engines?
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> Is it really so unbelievable

A car company that has a long history of making false claims? Are you really asking me that?

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They have a long history of promising bad dates for future releases, or of exaggerating the capabilities of their ""FSD"", but they haven't rolled cars down hills or built them from styrofoam.
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They demoed a non-working demo of solar roof that was supposed to be a drop-in replacement for normal tiles with huge fanfare which turned out to be utterly impractical in real world usage and later quietly killed entirely.
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Ok? They’ve still largely delivered products even if the timing has been way off. I am a huge critic of Elon Musk and won’t buy another Tesla but they clearly build cars and products that work and hit consumer markets.

It’s dangerous for you to let your dislike of someone or some company to cloud your judgement like this. You know other companies have launched failed products too, right?

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> dislike of someone

I think it's the dead kids.

All those dead kids.

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No clue what you’re talking about. Elon Musk killed some kids so therefore the cars that Tesla makes don’t exist or something?
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> No clue what you’re talking about.

Here you go. AI can be so helpful when you're confused.

https://claude.ai/share/5d3b41f2-56e4-460e-84a4-4d34cef47fcf

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Ah - so people are making money from the cars doing taxi service while they sleep, are they?

And there are high-speed tunnels connecting major cities?

And that guy who saved those kids in Thailand is a pedophile?

And not a single person has died due to the USAID cuts?

Ok. Sure. I hear you. Perfectly.

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Yes, completely unbeleivable. I mainly think this because SpaceX has committed said engineers to delivering unfeasable amounts of payload to LEO/ISS, etc. Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".

That is of course very very far away from reality (though, progressing to a feasable program faster than any space observers predicted.)

THat, combined with Elon signaling to investors/market that tesla no longer produces cars.....it's hard to imagine the company splitting their very, very , very over-commited engineers to a flying car. At least, they aren't commiting the point that this will be a consumer-market car, or even a halo car.

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> Think on the order of "One succesful launch, delivery, and re-entry/recovery per day".

Given that they have largely relied on reusability rather than strongly ramping up production of boosters for Falcon 9, and given that they have performed 3 launches in a single day, one launch per day is clearly achievable without any further advances, and without even using Starship.

To be clear, the stated goal for Starship is one launch per hour throughout the year, which would still be a tiny number compared to, say, airline flights, but quite impressive for orbital flight.

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They're averaging 2-3 Falcon 9 launches per week. That's not 'very very far away' from one per day.

Nobody else comes close, whether considering individual companies or entire nations.

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SpaceX put more mass in orbit this year than the rest of the world combined, and you’re saying they’re not doing a good job?
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Both can be true.

No contradiction between "more than everyone else combined" and "it is unfeasable to launch 36,500 metric tons per year compared to the about-2,500 tons in the last 12 months".

Especially as the working launch vehicle is getting retired and the replacement has only had one circularized orbit, and is currently behind the development pace set by the Saturn V, N1, and even the Space Shuttle.

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Well I'd say they're ahead of N1 considering that N1 never made it to orbit.
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That is just a one OOM scaling. It's not that difficult, especially considering that Starship just delivered the 3rd largest payload ever launched and it wasn't even at capacity.
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Sounds like you’re very big on the nay saying for its own sake.

I assume you’re dirty on Usain Bolt for not running faster?

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If Usain bolt claimed he would run 75mph, does him being the fastest runner change the fact that he lied?
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There are legitimate question about the physics of the thing that even the most talented engineers will still come up against.
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yes. unless elon himself personally is in the drivers seat while the "car" is doing all those things, it's cardboard and styrofoam.
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They’re one of the leading companies developing autonomous vehicles, but their original self-driving demo was still faked.
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Unbelievable? No. A company already caught lying multiple times in big fashion to whole world, never delivering FSD yet cashing in tons of money for it, plus rather mentally unstable owner to keep it polite?

Fool me once...

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Tesla FSD has 1.5 million active subscriptions and is growing at 50% annually.
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There are several model years that charged full price for FSD at sale and never received the necessary hardware upgrades.
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>never delivering FSD yet cashing in tons of money for it,

Even if they didn’t deliver FSD, the data says they delivered something people are choosing to pay $100 per month for.

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It’s both true that Elon lies and overpromises damn near everything, and that Tesla has the best self driving related features available in the US that a normal person can buy and use.
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Cute how you have to caveat your claim with "a normal person can buy and use."

I suspect the decision to put unfinished FSD into the hands of average people will be Tesla's undoing. I wouldn't cite it as a win quite yet.

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So where was it claimed Tesla achieved full self driving?
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What you just said is: "Ok, they lied, but they're still in business!"
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I read that the car used in the demo was actually a hundreds of kilograms, nothing like the real cars weight of ~ 2 ton
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Agreed. Just think about it for a second. If it was 2 tons like a real EV, could a fan or 2 keep it adhered to a vertical surface?

This is a circus stunt.

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I think “a fan or 2” is underselling the technology here. It’s not about the weight of the car but the force that the atmosphere presses on its surface area. This is well-established physics that has been demonstrated by others so I don’t know why you’re questioning this and not some of the wilder parts like the flying.
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That's not even the original part - it's been done by a car with a driver in it - the McMurtry Spéirling.
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You can do a lot with a few megawatts of power for a few seconds.
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I believe he also made his own career disappear.
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Just be aware you're moving from the territory of reasonable questions to moderately desperate conspiracy theory. Whatever it is we saw, it's clearly not lightweight. That much is obvious from the kinetics.
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Well it didn’t have a driver and you can’t see the size of the battery, impressive nonetheless and in the end it’s not like it matters since it has no practical application outside a circus (the flying)
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If you think "company might have faked public demo in some important way" is a "conspiracy theory", your conspiracy theory sensor is badly miscalibrated and desperately needs a tune up. Your default presumption should be that a demo is faked to at least some extent because most of them are. If I don't hear an explicit declaration that this is real and live and working exactly the same on stage as it will be for the consumer I assume it isn't. And even some of those declarations have been shown to be false over the years, a particularly popular one being "this is real game footage on the real hardware" except it's actually a developer box with a lot more power than the console in question.
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The cybertruck was claimed to be a steel exoskeleton. They ended up releasing a car with heavy steel plates glued on.

It's not at all conspiracy theory. It's just same old over promise and under deliver that Elon does.

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What you just relayed is another misleading claim purveyed by obsessives. Cybertruck is not a true exoskeleton design, but neither are the steel plates decorative. It is a hybrid -- the unibody shell carries some minimal structural load, but it's not sufficient on its own. The exterior skin is structurally necessary for torsional rigidity and contributes meaningfully to the overall chassis strength.

All major exterior panels are welded and/or bolted on. On the earliest revisions, the thin upper door trim strips were bonded using a bad structural adhesive which became brittle with temperature cycling. These were recalled and remedied with a different structural adhesive plus a welded stud. Such recalls are very common; the current generation Ford Explorer had multiple recalls for exterior panels falling off.

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Wow high bar there comparing the Cybertruck to a Ford Explorer.
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What's misleading? You just said it's not a steel exoskeleton, and that the panels were glued on. If your point is that a true exoskeleton isn't needed for sufficient rigidity and strength, sure, fine, but you should make that claim and point out why it's misleading, all you've said is that the claim is correct, but that other cars are made similarly.
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They said that only the "thin upper door trim" is glued on.
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> moderately desperate conspiracy theory

A car company that as a long history of making false claims?

I agree: one of us is delusional. I think we disagree about whom.

But hey, you're right. If it's not styrofoam I'm sure we'll see proof of that very soon now. Like a person riding in it. Or it out where someone can actually touch it. Try to lift it.

(And if we don't....)

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