alt Hacker NewsFalls 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?
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Tesla’s machine vision research wing became xAI and the compute and resource were transferred over. SpaceX then bought cursor.ai, a small but goated frontier lab. They merged cursor with xAI and it’s now SpaceXAI. So each Tesla uses models trained by SpaceX AI.
The model s has always had Inconel in the frame for strength since relatively early on. But the Inconel came from SpaceX. Inconel is primarily used in aerospace applications. It made the frame of the model s so strong it broke the NTHSA machine used to test rollover strength. Look this up it is easy to verify.
SpaceX materials science has always been a big part of Tesla’s success since the very early beginning. Likewise inversely.
Musk already talked about the cold gas thrusters for the Tesla Roadster in 2018.
It would seem that your theory that the idea arose out of a need to distract from current financials doesn't hold merit.
He probably just wanted to design a cool car.
I mean in theory if it did work you could use it to take shortcuts or go over very difficult terrain or a flood or something but I don’t think traffic or aviation laws are anywhere near to allowing that
I don’t see Musk as a nefarious actor; more of a nerd — albeit a visionary one — who is socially awkward but got unfathomably rich and powerful.
Its sold as invite only, basically just selling your own amusement park ride. Its not a car. They're trying to up-brand into that hyper-car market.