alt Hacker NewsTesla Roadster
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Well, there goes the share price. Dear me. It's quite amazing they have actually tried this.
The video goes against my intuition for how much performance you can get out of cold gas thrusters. I wonder if someone could do some back of the envelope maths on how much thrust and impulse you can get from a setup like this?
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
We don't do politics here on HN, but I wouldn't touch a needle made by one of the companies of this douchebag. I'm talking here as a consumer who might end up on the wrong side of this guy's political ambitions.
This is incredible engineering and deserves nothing but applause.
It doesn’t fly.. it falls gracefully. Please state your education on every post for now on.
Harvard, Yale, University of Texas 82
FINALLY! When I was in 3rd grade (1977), I checked out a book at the school library about the year 2000 and what the world would be like.
I vividly remember reading we were all supposed to have flying cars by the year 2000. I was so excited and looked forward to the future. As the early 90's approached, it was obvious, NOBODY would have flying cars. Better late than never...
This will never be allowed to be anywhere near a road I hope.
As Elon intermingles the company how are investors compensated fairly for this. What does Telsa pay SpaceX for the technology and is there a conflict of interest?
Some comment here are pretty sad. Yeah it’s not going to be perfect for sure, yeah the rocket version is certainly not going to be road legal for the foreseeable future, but who care ?
It’s an engineering demonstration, it’s main purpose is to make people dream, generate vocation.
Because if we go by this, Apollo mission was also useless, making car who go beyond road limitation is also useless and so on. But every of those projects have serve to make some children dream, children who have made to their jobs because of theses projects.
In a world where the mood appears to push people toward depression, thank you, Tesla, for letting us remain optimistic and keep dreaming.
It reminds me of Lockheed Martin's Multiple Kill Vehicle (MKV-L).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM
Timelines aside, microsecond traction control paired with zero-speed active downforce is an incredible engineering benchmark. The trickle-down software logic alone will push electric powertrain boundaries.
Did the car technically fly? To me it seemed more like a controlled graceful landing. Would we technically call that flying?
I dig the commitment to the low poly look! Really cool and fits in with the new design direction.
I must be old. I just keep thinking about what kind of whiplash I'd get with those flips
1: That's an amazing demo, just fantastic. That makes me happy
2: I still want a topless Tesla that could be a good daily driver; an SL63 competitor basically. So, I'm sad.
Historians will look at this moment and go this was the beginning of the end
It’s cool, I’d love this if I had the money to afford it. Maybe in a decade, it will be more practical and have more legitimate use cases, I’m not sure!
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
Is this page geo-locked? All I get is a page telling me that I'm unauthorised to view the page.
After “Autopilot“ there is now a new Tesla “Roadster”.
That can do kickflips.
I don't know the practicality of this car, or if the production version will have these thrusters, but the demo was epic. It tickled my childhood dream of working with mechanical stuff.
I've been recently playing a game called Approximately Up. You start from simple building blocks, thrusters and can use the in game logic system to build complex controls. One of the things I came about to learn was something to make a hover system for my ship was a simple PID controller. The side and bottom firing thrusters just remind me of my ship in the game. While the game is oversimplified and a bit arcadey, does anyone know what actually goes into this in the real life and is the huge feat the improvement on the weight of the whole car?
I wonder if they developed something to reduce the G forces
A toy for the ultra-rich. I don't see any other practical use for it, but yeah, it's cool...
Call me idiot, stupid, bastard... but in contra we call it SUBNORMALIDAD.
I really want one of these, but more importantly I absolutely don't want my neighbor to have one. This has always been the problem with flying cars as a concept.
I wonder what the potential applications of this technology could be for emergency vehicles (fire trucks, rescue vehicles, police cars, ambulance, etc.). And, of course … for the military.
1. It shocks me how many people are discussing this as if it will ever even hit private collections but whatever. Whole lot of claims and demos have never made production especially from Tesla.
2. I know fuck all when it comes to real physics but there’s a lot of discussion of this “flying” and some serious napkin math. The demo has this falling, stopping momentum, and landing. Is that demonstration of enough force to produce reliable lift from the ground?
My crap knowledge can come up with arguments either way but I’m leaning towards you can’t possibly have enough force to leave the ground and land safely?
If you have 2.5 seconds of thrust you have 1.25 seconds to use to get off the ground and 1.25 seconds to stop you from absolutely destroying the car as it pounds into the ground in my shit math world, and I feel like there’s no way you could even concept car demo that?
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
We were promised flying cars, all we got was a jumping car.
How did they get it to stick to the track just hanging there. It didn’t look real at all.
It has rockets to accelerate, but no rockets to decelerate to fix a launch mistake, or a launch in the wrong direction. It's a death trap.
All cars can fly, if you put the effort in.
What a weird fever dream of a product.
The real feat would be to actually ship the gas-equipped models. The on-stage demonstration was certainly quite impressive but handling real world terrain is a whole different story. Not to mention compensating for drivers who will skew lead-footed without any experience of handling a third dimension.
I am skeptical that this feature will prove to be much more than a publicity stunt, especially since the availability of these models will be so limited.
The suction and air recovery part might be forward thinking for how we design roads or tunnels. They might not all need to be flat. Especially when autonomous.
Looks like the Ford GT90.
https://news.dupontregistry.com/blogs/ford-news/whatever-hap...
There are a lot of accusations and predictions in this thread. I think it will be fun to come back in 2029 and see how they fared.
This car shouldn't be considered just a car. From now on, automotive technology will be used in completely different ways. For example, off-road jeeps may no longer need to cross water.
I will wait for any other company to build one
I like the spirit
sometimes u gotta just ignore economics and instead make history!
Wow, cool aesthetic. I feel like the this is what the cybertruck should have looked like but they didn't quite finish the design.
I was making my way on my rented scooter to drone bomb the Bezos BrainVat R&D center when the new model Roadster suddenly swooped over me in a mighty roar of liberated gas. Oh no, I thought! My mission is in jeopardy... but this is unparalleled quality content for the livestream viewers. I could see the Roadster's laser assembly lazily begin to track me, as if controlled by a joystick. A human pilot! Probably some one percenter out on a pleb hunt. The fool thought that I was unarmed. Heroically, I banked the scooter in a sharp turn while the machine gun on its back acquired the target, multiplying matrices furiously on its ancient low-fi GPU. As flames began to pour from the flying vehicle, I angled the scooter around a corner, timing it so that my black outfit would blur into the Apple ad projected on the side of the building. The Roadster's pilot was leaning out of the window screaming in rage and fear as his machine began a fiery descent toward the city shelter for abandoned kittens. I was torn between feeling bad for the kittens and giving in to the dopamine surge in my cortex as my viewer count climbed toward the stratosphere.
Technically impressive, but hostile to everyone else on the road, i.m.o., similarly to the Cybertruck. Shows the lack of egalitarianism in our public spaces.
Stop digging for hidden layers and just be impressed.
So this is a completely obvious scam, right? I don't see anyone else calling this out and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell, it would basically be a bomb. Also, the battery pack that would go in the car would be so large that they couldn't do the stunts they showed in their drone vehicle.
Are we not calling an obvious stock pumping charade what it is out of some sense of politeness?
If this helps accelerate the case for a Tesla-SpaceX merger just a tiny bit, it's well worth the investment (for Musk).
I can't believe people still believe Musk's demos. Can we wait with rhe excitement until this is actually real and in customer hands?