alt Hacker NewsOk, so it actually flies. That was unexpected.
It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
It's being sold in two modes. One with cold gas (no combustion) seemingly just for extra forwards acceleration (no flying) and one with real combustion rocket engines, the latter was in the video and is "invite only".
Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
Even just the cold gas variant seems like a nightmare for production, there's a high pressure COPV in that thing and that's gonna make crashes much more.. exciting, and Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways. But very few of these are ever getting sold anyways.
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> Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways.
Reading https://www.tesla.com/roadster, it seems like both variants only use cold gas thrusters, and the difference is that the "normal" (lol) one only has them pointed rearwards while the flying one has them pointed in all different directions as well.
There are three modes: Performance ($50k reservation), Thrust ($250k reservation), and Rocket (invite only). Thrust and Rocket mention cold gas thrusters. Where do you see a combustion rocket engine advertised? https://www.tesla.com/roadster
> kinda wild they devoted this much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Watch Ford v Ferrari for an idea of what auto companies are willing to invest for bragging rights.
> It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
How confident are you that the flying object in that video is a car?
Some cursory estimates suggest that one really could get several seconds of operation with enough thrust to lift a real car with a big motor and battery and seats and such, but the margins are not great. If I were designing this thing and I cared more about showmanship than about demonstrating an actual credible car, I might use the tiniest battery I could find with adequate power output (lithium titanate? small LFP?), as little motor as I could get away with, and no interior amenities whatsoever.
More cynically, I would also contemplate whether I really really needed the fancy downforce fan for this demo. After all, that’s a very controlled track and I can imagine other ways of getting a car up it.
I'm wondering if its going to be a model like I think Ferrari calls it Cliente Ferrari. Where the car stays with Ferrari, they put on track days at great tracks all over the world. Bring Pro Driver Coaches, Mechanics , Massage Therapists, five star chefs Data Analysts to review your performance. From my understanding Ferrari makes a lot of money doing that.
The demo car they showed most likely has no batteries or even a metal frame. They basically built a car shaped drone powered by compressed air.
Example RC toy car that drives on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
I thought somewhere in the video they said that it is just regular compressed air that is held in a tank, and that the car itself has a compressor and regenerates the compressed air over time. Obviously to stabilize that amount of weight the gas has to be ejected at such a high rate it is practically frozen at the nozzle outlet, but it is still just regular air.
It's not about sales numbers, it's about putting rockets in cars, so that SpaceX can acquire Tesla and give Musk supervoting shares
Where the heck did you see combustion based rocket engines? I haven’t seen that come up once. Was it an AI response? And the video feature only cold gas rockets as far as I knew.
> so it actually flies
It glides in a carefully controlled demo. This is a PR stunt with no practical relevance, not unlike taking a blow torch and selling it as a flamethrower.
That is incorrect - there are three versions slated, one with no cold gas nozzles, one with forward-only (the 4 in the rear) and a tank in the rear "acceleration", one with 10 nozzles (4 under, 2 side, 4 rear) and a tank in the rear and passenger seat "flight". None of the variants use rocket fuel or other ignited propellent, they're all just compressed gas release systems.
This is explained in the deep dive video with Lars - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22rvpUecLts
It's cool as fuck but calling it flying is misleading. It jumps and can maneuver in space.
Falls in a controlled way would be more accurate.
This isn’t a flying car, which could conceivably have some use (like a personal aircraft). It’s a stunt to distract the gullible from Tesla financials, which do not justify the valuation. As you say, it’s not practical in production and never will be.
Musk clearly wants to merge all his companies, so that it’s too big to fail, and this probably came out of the questions that arise from that - how can we use Spacex tech at Tesla?
No, it doesn't fly. It fell a bit slower than it would have without the compressed gas.
Curiosity, on the other hand, is a car that actually hovered, and that was on Mars, in 2012. https://youtu.be/Ki_Af_o9Q9s?is=uepnp2XLG81tHacn
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Teslas evaluation is based on hype. This is as hype as it gets for a car. To me it looks like they were in need for "the coolest thing". To me, this has the smell of desperation implying the beginning of the end of their high evaluation.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
This is just going to make it even more desirable to a certain market segment.
Tesla has a very good record for crashworthiness
And supercars are typically not submitted for NCAP testing, so It'll likely be less safe than a Model Y for example (to be determined, no reports out yet)
> and one with real combustion rocket engines
The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."
> devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible mode
Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value. There is a huge economy revolving around people annoying other people just for a glimpse of their attention. This captures the attention and pleases people. Other car companies should start getting creative too.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Can't help but think of the not-a-flamethrower
(friend bought one for $500, now they seem to be worth $1500-$2000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Merchandise
Both trims have only cold gas thrusters. The differences are whether they're just for forward acceleration or also stabilization (4 in the back, or 4 in the back, 4 down, and one on each side). The "Rocket" trim also only has one seat.
Neither has combustion rockets.
A number of luxury brands (cars, watches) will build one-off editions for anyone willing to foot the cost. I guess it serves as marketing subsidized by the customer.
Would Musk actually build a hover car if someone was willing to pay for it? Maybe, but it's hard to see the market/target demographic - it'd be a geeky toy rather than something to impress others of your wealth with.
Maybe Musk should do a ghetto rocket car - a gas thruster 30-sec hover add on for the Cybertruck. If he could do it for a few hundred K there might be some takers.
Both versions have giant nitrogen tanks that expel gas. Neither has combustion. I won’t say it’s not novel, I will say that there’s 0 chance it’s street legal with the vertical thrusters, little chance it’s legal with the rear thrusters, and given that it takes 6 hours to fill the tank for a single use that is good for 1/3rd of a quarter mile, almost useless.
It made for a great marketing stunt, it is absolutely useless for a production car. And you can tell the designers realize it but were at the whims of Elon in their interview.
We were promised an awd, 620 mile range monster almost a decade ago, and then again 6 years ago. We were delivered a “maybe 310 mile” range, rwd doorstop.
I’m not sure who this car is for, but it’s definitely not car guys. It is the cybertruck of sports cars, and that’s not a good thing…
>Ok, so it actually flies
I'm going to quote Buzz Lightyear: this is falling... with style.
On a serious note, this was unexpected. You can't deny, he has style
Have they announce pricing on the rocket version? I could see it being priced like a bugatti or koenigsegg, where selling 100-500 of these is a great business.
They save on advertising to spend on mind-blowing demos.
> I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
Ferrari sells a few of each models in a production run and it does exceptionally well financially.
It's very economically feasible if it pumps up the stock price
No chance it will get a permission to drive on the streets in my country. It also is a completely useless feature but it is still awesome.
Guess it is for advertising mainly.
"Let's repeat the success we had with the flamethrower"
I guess Tesla has officially entered its The Boring Company stage? Ambition does come in unexpected form, occasionally.
You know that before EVs were a thing, it was also not economic, and was seen as crazy. So was landing a rocket. And have tons of little satellites in LEO. Don't confuse the first prototype version with it being impossible to succeed.
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
I'm not a Musk fanboy by any stretch of the imagination but this was clearly done as a marketing stunt to drum up hype about the street legal roadster. I didn't even watch the announcement but now everyone in my friend circle is talking about it because of the rocket engines. That's just called effective marketing.
Plenty of concept hypercars barely scrape 100 sales, the point is largley marketing in most cases
It doesn’t fly though. Not to reduce the engineering feat, but it’s more a jumping car than a flying car.
Question is when this would be applicable? It can't be approved for the road, right? And even if there was a use over novelty, the tanks must be depleted immediately. Also curious how well it does with extra weight from passengers
That cool. "Flying" aside, I was more curious how it didn't fall down when upside down with no thruster smoke. Turns out its got suction [1]. 2G's is rollercoaster zone.
to be fair we don’t actually know yet that this is a high performance car. We only saw it drive a few mph without rocket assistance
Yes, and it would go well on a James Bond movie or something. I'm a bit surprised they didn't go with hydrogen peroxide propellant as that can be refueled fairly quickly. The Bell Jetpack used hydrogen peroxide for example.
The rocket version is also just cold gas thrusters, not carbon fuel based.
> .... into a high performance car
If that is what they have done. That may just be a large drone looking like a car.
It's not like it's legal to operate. Such an out of touch product. Make a demo sure, but what in the k hole...
Incredible definition of "flies."
Teslas are some of the safest cars on the road. Even if you dislike musk (he’s not a good human), the record stands pretty solidly on their side.
When the NTHSA did the rollover test on the Tesla Model S, it broke the machine they use. It was estimated that it would take the weight of nine model S vehicles ontop of a model S for the roof to collapse. Tesla patented millimeter wave radars in the seats and got approval to install them. They now know if a large adult, small adult, child, animal, or groceries are in a seat. The airbags are reconfigured on the fly depending on what is in the seat. Consumer reports did a test and found Tesla wasn’t great in slam the brakes stopping distance, and did a report about it. Tesla confirmed and did some testing. They had a software update in less than a month to dramatically improve it to generally best in class. They have so many safety features many of which are now mandated in new vehicles that were not required when Tesla started producing vehicles.
Just look at some of the utterly insane Tesla crashes where in most cars all would he dead and folks walk away from them in the teslas. Some of the Teslas use a very special composite metal named Inconel in the frames. Look it up. Inconel is most commonly used in high performance aerospace applications like space rockets, and Tesla is the sole automotive manufacturer in the world with access to a large supply of it and know how. The Tesla model S plaid seats were designed to withstand 9Gs of lateral force, a thing no other street legal car in the world can do. Tesla asked the seat manufacturer that makes most all of the seats in the world to support this and they laughed at them. So Tesla made their own, and it’s safer than any of the other ones due to its design. Don’t trust me, verify this with google. It isn’t hard.
> It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
It's not a high performance car. It's a shell of a car.
Yes it was an impressive demo. But I would have appreciated putting all that engineering work into getting Model Y to 800v architecture instead.
>Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
It's only wild if you ignore Musk's role in this. Not even trying to bash him or anything, but he's a trillionaire. This is the kind of shit you do when you have more money than you can ever possibly waste.
I mean, if this is how he wants to spend his money, then I guess that's his prerogative. But I think it's a bit misleading to suggest this is a decision made by "Tesla" when this is clearly an irrational decision for a company to make. This is a decision made by Musk based on satisfying his own personal goals.
Tesla has an EXCELLENT safety record. Why's your post so tainted? Compare them to any other vehicle manufacturer's crash records.
> ”It's being sold in two modes. One with cold gas (no combustion) … and one with real combustion rocket engines”
No, both versions use cold gas thrusters. There are no combustion rocket engines involved here.
The difference between the “thrust” and “rocket” versions is the number of thrusters: “rocket” has additional thrusters that enable it to fly. The “thrust” version just has them at the back for acceleration.