Sad that people feel the need to add this qualification. I see it regularly.
He's a bloviating conman and no rational person should believe that this demo will ever see the light of day, if it wasn't faked.
This is completely outside of politics.
3 or 4 data points isn’t a whole lot more than an anecdote, but it’s still more data than baseless claims line you’re throwing around here
Guess he hit a nerve, eh? My condolences you got hit by the layoffs, try to not browse Reddit and Facebook all day at your next government job. Or do, but ONLY if you work for the IRS or ATF, they deserve nothing less.
You'd have loved L Ron Hubbard back in the day.
Only the President and Congress were elected. The rest are all appointed.
> laid off thousands of government workers
He did at the direction of the President, who was elected. Government service is not a jobs program.
> the second order effects of that will affect millions
speculation
> All while he also toys with Ukraine and lives are lost so that he appeases an autocrat?
Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
So an unelected official would be correct, right?
> He did at the direction of the President, who was elected.
Where is your evidence? Reporting contradicts what you say - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/06/trump-cabinet-musk-...
> speculation
Not really. Multiple independent sources and reports have confirmed the damage done by Musk during his time at DOGE.
> Decisions about Ukraine go through Trump. Musk is in a delicate position - it is illegal for him, as a private businessman, to be a combatant, but he seems thrust into that position.
He is as "thrust" into that position as he was "thrust" into the DOGE role.
What are your thoughts on his illegal state-sanctioned intimidation of ex-FEMA CFO?
All you need to do is see how frequently he posts on Twitter to know he's broken and trying to fill the hole with money and attention.
I've worked with engineers "on the spectrum" my entire career. They can be difficult to get along with. None of them were evil, none intended to offend or hurt others. It would just come out wrong.
Once I understood, it wasn't an issue for me any more.
Preferably those tasked regulating his companies.
People should find a better hobby
The qualifier matters, that guy has serious issues.
I think the qualification is unbelievably tame considering what Elon deserves.
google: did congress restore food aid funding?
There's no getting away from the rocket equation - reaction mass is heavy. The sheer number of design compromises that need to be made to allow a cold gas thruster system means I can't see anything but ending up with an awful car for the sake of a few seconds "air time". And the rest of the time you'll still be (at least) doubling the mass of your car from the propellant plus whatever the thrusters, tanks, linkages and everything else weights. I guess you could leave it empty, then only charge it for the "Party Trick", but it still seems a lot of compromises for the occasional "Hey, this looks cool".
And then really only usable in a nice empty, flat, controlled environment - the "real world" driving experience has things like other cars, people, buildings and street surfaces that likly wouldn't appreciate what are effectively localised hurricane-force level winds from the car next to them.
This is a car rigged for a specific stunt. And there's a reason why people don't just drive around rigged stunt cars. They suck as being "cars".
The demos for the future tech are fun for sure, but the Cybertruck and Tesla Semi started this exact same way. The Cybertruck arrived incredibly late, wildly missing even conservative estimates of it's capabilities, and at damn near double the price they teased, AND the units that have shipped have been a fucking mess, to such a degree where Tesla seemingly can't even give them away. And the Tesla Semi has still failed to materialize at all.
So yeah it's a bit of a joke to me to have them hocking a flying car, when their pickup truck can't even drive up a steep unpaved hill, that even my old clapped out F-150 on it's SUV tires would manage just fine.
Edit: and to clarify, I know that it can do that, because I helped a friend move some exercise equipment he bought at auction back to his house, and he has an open-back basement. We backed my truck with trailer down the hill, unloaded it through his basement patio door, and the truck then had to climb back up to the road. And I was a little nervous to be honest, but it did do that, despite as I said having SUV tires on 22-inch rims LOL
By that logic any performance car is useless. There are, albeit few, people that do track these cars.
most of the things a Tesla Roadster is advertised with is not street legal.
I'd bet most of them see this as a cooler, shinier toy.
Still hoping.
https://x.com/dhh/status/2110983188910923926?s=20
Why the second hand outrage. If you didn't buy a car and feel bad about the wait time, just enjoy the demo! :D
He just misses with his products these days: Cyber Truck, Robotaxi, Grok...
Everyone here can probably still remember the time to the minute that Steve Jobs in 2007 said "an internet communicator, a music player, a phone" and the 3-faced cube transformed into a single device. That's what gimmicky demos are for.
I expect that motivates exactly zero percent of the criticism that Musk gets.
--
Sent from my iPhone
Maybe. Another possibility is a feeling of opposition to the idea that the world's richest person continue to accumulate wealth, while using said wealth to dishonestly manipulate elections, support openly fascist and bigoted political parties, and, most recently, tip the scales of international conflict (by limiting Starlink use by Ukraine).
You might love his products, but Elon Musk should not have more power. That's a statement not based in envy, but in a revulsion for what he spends that money on, and how it impacts innocent people.
75.7% SpaceX
15.1% Tesla
1.3% The Boring Company
7.6% Other
Could it theoretically help to avoid *some* crashes? Yes
But in most cases, it'll just trade a frontal crash for a crash against obstacles off/above the road... Which is way more dangerous for pedestrians, buildings, etc.
Driver assistance can in some cases brake before an obstacles. But we've also seen Teslas drive into obstacles. Regardless if it's going to be driver assistance or a human with too much confidence in their ability to avoid obstacles... I wouldn't want to be near a Roadster leaping off the asphalt
That sounds extremely explosive and not something any random person should be irresponsibly driving around.
This is hot wheels. It's pretty clear Musk finally had enough of the culture wars at X and decided to go interfere with Tesla some more. Instead of producing a car people might actually want, he made them do this. This is the worst waste of a company you're likely to see in your life.
TSLA is probably not a good stock to be holding right now.
But TBF if they offered the SpaceX thrusters as an option, the SF effective altruists would slurp them right up to be their daily drivers even if they have to be strapped in next to a tank of toxic boom boom to use them. And Sam Altman would cry into his protein-supplemented energy drink because his Koenigsegg doesn't have them and I'd happily hand over 50 Quatloos to watch that.
Looks like the base version would be the one for that.
1. The kind of person who buys a sports-car often doesn't want the "base version". They want luxury. They want status. They don't want to face the choice of being upsold to an impractical deathtrap or driving around in the "base version" like someone who could barely just afford it.
2. This demo does absolutely nothing to demonstrate the abilities of the base version. I reiterate, a brick could have been made to fly in this way. The base version will no doubt have good paper stats because Musk understands that numbers must be big, but that doesn't mean the base model will be pleasant to drive.
3. The styling of this car is "wankpanzer with a few extra polygons". Given how well the wankpanzer sold, demand for this thing, even if the base model is a competent auto, will be limp.
4. Musk is currently trying to buy another election. With Musk visibly taking an interest in Tesla again, that's likely to backfire on Tesla. They need to cut ties with Musk, not keep doing the sort of puerile things he's known and frequently lambasted for.
CRS-7, Amos-6, Starship 36, and Super Heavy 18.
> You can think of the COPV like the fuel tank in a compressed natural gas (CNG)- or liquid propane gas (LPG)-powered vehicle, except the nitrogen mixture in the COPV is stored at a much higher pressure, up to 10,000 psi, similar to the pressures in modern hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.
LPG cars have somewhere between 100 and 300 psi.
10,000 PSI? That is beyond absurd. I can not imagine what alloy and how wrapped that pressure vessel is... Or what type of crazy pump is recharging it!
They'll happily burst (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ-__PlU4gM) and blow up your vehicle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71AwkBt3_ts).
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
"'Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as a COPV, or composite overwrapped pressure vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nosecone area, but the full data review is ongoing,' the company wrote in an update on Thursday (June 19)."
> LPG explosions are real combustion due to tank rupture…
They're mostly designed to vent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupture_disc) to prevent a BLEVE. Big fire, big mess, but without oxidizer in the tank and much lower pressures, relatively safe by comparison. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQDyNjCNxVY
This thing is literally a fucking bomb if it fails, through accident or degradation.
The down-force negative pressure aspect they gleaned from McMurtry though? Really cool. Genuinely useful. I just hope they don't claim it as their own invention.
Which they will, because Musk is all ego.
Making a car with a heavy EV battery and powertrain fly like that is probably not something they're able to do.
My only issue with it is that beyond being impressive and very cool, it's pretty useless.
First you have to build SpaceX.
This engineering in this demo was only designed o get lucrative government contracts.
Sorry for being skeptical but Elons track record of being honest at such demos isn't stellar.
Edit: To the downvoters, this is a serious question. I'd really love to see such evidence.
This looks like a genuinely fun project to have worked on. That can be the difference between a top engineer burning out and staying motivated.
This is in the same category as the Tesla flamethrower or the Teslaquila.
After Cybertruck and the LARPing as a humanoid-robotics company, I was genuinely unsure if Tesla still had top-tier engineering talent. This shows otherwise. Maybe some of these improvements will trickle down to the Models Y and 3.
(It also looks like a lot of SpaceX engineering. I could see folks there wanting to take a break, particularly if this happened while the pad was busted.)
Also, I imagine the cold gas thrusters and control software are all from spacex, this is what starship uses to orient itself in the air.
You’re that confident none of the materials or techniques aerospace engineers used to lighten this car are relevant to the rest of the lineup?
> I imagine the cold gas thrusters and control software are all from spacex, this is what starship uses to orient itself in the air
Not really, it uses grid fins and gimbals. The closest cold gas comes to air on Starship is in the upper atmosphere.
Nice pedantry on the thrusters in air, but I imagine the software here to orient the car quickly using thrusters was borrowed from spacex, the thrusters certainly were.
Again, none of this has a practical application - it’s like the flamethrowers- Elon thought it would be cool, so they made it.
Come on. They literally sent a car into space.
The Roadster was Musks personal vehicle, so Tesla didn't pay for that either.
Telsa board doesn’t, they need moonshots to justify their valuation. Elon doesn’t care, the engineers sure as shit don’t.
Maybe a midline quality control and reliability person? That’s not likely where many of the engineers for this project came from though.
But, imagine instead being an engineer of any kind today and you’re only getting paid to work on boring things like advanced automotive technology and building cars that can maneuver themselves in midair and might possibly fly in the future? Ridiculous.
(This message should not be taken as support for Musk or any of his views or business ventures.)
“Play” “fun”, curiosity” and “challenge for challenges sake” are adaptive strategies for learning unexpectedly useful things.
RAM jets?
A car could get 10–30% better energy efficiency than a conventional car at the same speed. Initially, the air jets would reduce and then eliminate wheel drag, and then hold for safety maneuvers. At speed, off-wheel-lift would be generated aerodynamically, with the option to also spot redirect air pressure from the RAM jet, or the air jets.
Then 2.0 would be the fully redesigned one-eyed two-seated flying Tesla Bodywingster.
All for the environment!
Sorry, but in world where the vast majority of people can't afford groceries, gas, housing, or healthcare... I just can't look at these silly things the billionaires are spending their money on and get even remotely excited about it. It's just so absolutely tone deaf in the moment we're in right now.
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.
You seem triggered by the choice of wording. Do you think the upside down rocket car doing aerial flips deserves a more product-ish name like "concept car"? I don't.
Car manufacturers have been doing pointless things for over a century [1], with no plan to even try to make them available to the public. Why is this getting so much heat?