I”m not going to get into Musk himself. Nor will I get into the artistic absurdity that a moder supercar represents. But I will speak for the hackers amongst us:
The problem with the demo is that it was vapourware. Period, full stop. It is not the car they are selling to us, and they haven't even begun making them. I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown.
Steve Jobs said that "Real artists ship," because the act of shipping is the act of making the incredibly difficult and important decisions that manage the enormous number of constraints that go into the actual product.
If people like concept cars that don't have to actually work or meet a specific price point, fine. It is entertainment, nothing wrong with that. But I am not and will not be impressed until, like Apple, the thing they show on stage is so far along that you can be expected to buy one within weeks, not years.
I am not telling anyone how to judge this. But by my very old-school standards, vapourware sucks.
Doesn't matter if the product is real.
The idea is to cultivate a sense of wonder and adventure.
To get people talking about you.
Then you sell more of the products that are real.
Doesn't matter if the product is real. The idea is to cultivate a sense of hope that the $250,000 deposit should stay where it's at, no matter what people talking about me think of that idea. At least I haven't bought a cyber truck.
Real?! From these circus folks? Their (lack of) sense for reality (practicality, safety) you see in this circus is scary! Same folks and mentality make those other ones too that you are supposed to use!
Concept cars often having been run through either CFD or a wind tunnel and also haven’t been vetted for NHTSA requirements, and both those and coefficient of friction are why cars all start to look alike.
I can’t recall the vehicle now but there was a futuristic car around the turn of the century that had a lot of buzz, but changed dramatically for production and nobody liked it. But an engineer on the project said the concept car had less aerodynamic drag going backward than forward, which is quite an achievement.
That is one of at least a dozen experiences I have had that tell me not to get attached until the prototypes ship to car reviewers for examination.
I don't get it. Musk has an insane track record of shipping things. Well later then he claimed but he usually gets it done. I'm not seeing anyone else leading companies that upended the domination of fossil fueled cars, paved the way for brain implants, build re-usable rockets and create global access to the internet.
Others could get this done too. With less lying and more safety.
So why do we hype Musk to get stuff build sooner than ncessary?
Do you think these people who had to die because of musk enjoyed doing so?
We ask the wrong question, you ask the wrong question: Why do we allow Musk, just because he is rich, to manipulate politics so bluntly? Why do we not put Musk behind bars for all the death he is responsbile for?
Why is it okay for musk for being such a horrible rolemodel? X Æ A-Xii Musk, 14 kids of x different woman etc.?
> I am personally not a fan of pure concept products that exist only to polish the company’s crown
I am. These machines push the limits of prevailing technology. Strong organizations set stretch goals and pursue them regardless of market viability. Sometimes they share this with everyone, and convention has named this practice "concept" cars. I appreciate when they take the risk to do this. And when they do it well, credit is deserved.
There are real engineers and technicians behind this. A lot of them. And they will tell the story of this event for the rest of their lives. I've known a number of people with such stories. They're among the best people I've ever met.
It is possible to exist without cranking the cynical knob to 11 at all times.
I've recently come to the conclusion that Musk isn't selling products anymore, he's selling memestocks. He's a master of grabbing attention in an attention economy and it seems to be working out well for him.
Steve wasn't an artist. Did Steve ship a product when Atari asked him to redesign pong into a one player game? No, that was Steve Wozniak. Jobs paid him a cool $350 out of the $5k bonus he got for that. Maybe he was an artist. Con-artist.
This will not ship with the demonstrated capabilities for reasons discussed elsewhere in these comments. GP isn't calling Tesla a vaporware company. GP is calling this product as demonstrated vaporware.
I endorse this description of my comment. This was vapourware.
Others have pointed out that Apple have shipped vapourware. Yes they have! And I'm old enough to remember how much buzz the Knowledge Navigator generated in 1987:
It was exciting. It pointed in new directions. People were nerd-sniped. But in retrospect...
Apple wouldn't ship Newton until 1993, more than five years later. Nothing of importance from the Knowledge Navigator video made it into Newton that didn't already exist. iPhone was 2007, a full twenty years later. And we are only now getting close to the core concepts of Knowledge Navigator with LLM-based agents that can animate a human avatar in real-time.
Knowledge Navigator was billed as a concept video. Apple did not promise you could buy it in two years or two decades. But apart from some temporary hype... It accomplished nothing of importance for Apple or its customers. The 90s were so hard for Apple that they were nearly acquired by Sun Microsystems.
Shipping a demo didn't move any needle other than "engagement."
This is so spot on. These things work in a bull market and we’ve been in a bull market for arguably 15 years. In a bear market the distortions that were created over the previous years are reversed and usually to an extreme.
It’s somewhat notable that Tesla was up significantly overnight and closed the day down 2%.
I wonder if this is the beginning of a very lengthy period after which people will look back and wonder “what the hell was everyone thinking?”
There are plenty of examples in the world where the one is all that is necessary. It's not like there are more than one Burj Khalifa building in the world. Many people pay for a one off car. There are multiple TV shows based on this very concept.
Just because it's not your hobby or within your budget, doesn't mean that others must feel the same way as you.
> Just because it's not your hobby or within your budget, doesn't mean that others must feel the same way as you.
I wrote, I am not telling anyone how to judge this. So where do you get the idea that I think others must feel the same way that I do?
You like it? Go ahead and like it. Knock yourself out. In fact, when Tesla ships a car that can kick flip over a Semi, you can look me up and yell, "Hah!"
For that matter, even if they never ship it, you can bump into me anywhere in the world and say, "I liked the flying car demo." I won't argue with you liking it, but don't expect me to change my mind.
Concept products are not real products. Their purpose is often to make a point, to prove something is possible, to make a brand look cooler, or just to have fun. I don't think I would ever see this car flying on the road myself. But part of me likes the fact that there are people out there making crazy things like this. It is more fun.
Building concept cars is a very important part of being a car manufacturer. The issue with Tesla is they take reservations as if it will ever go into production
Out of curiosity, how do you define flight? To me, I think the Roadster flew because it clearly maintained powered propulsion after leaving the ground. Sure, it only flew for a few seconds, but it's not far from the Wright Bros.' first flight.
I don't think you watched the whole show. The third stunt was taking off from a stop to jump over some vehicles. So it did gain altitude in the air alone.
Well color me corrected. I’d probably quibble that this was a hop/jump the same way humans can jump but not fly, but I don’t have a strong definition at that point to argue for.
I’d need to go deep into something like being able to maintain altitude in the medium of air without positive impulse or something, but again, I don’t have a strong enough definition at this point.
I didn’t, because Waymo cars were proof of concept, not proof of wallet size.
It is very impressive engineering, just not very useful or ever going to result in any viable product. It’s a dead end. A waste of somebody’s engineering effort and talent for a one-time rich guy demo item. People hate on it because they get it.
You’re confused. This isn’t a “maybe there’s more demand for flying cars than you think!” kind of situation. My dude, nobody is disputing the demand for flying cars. It is fairly obvious, however, that they’re completely infeasible technology, and even if not, then this certainly ain’t the way to do it.
> I have a general tendency to know things. I think it has something to do with my brain.
Your brain can predict future?
> But also, I read about how this tech works. Have you? If so, how are you possibly still confused about this?
I think that in 1900s there were a lot of people that were saying the same things you are saying about brothers Wright and their inventions. And yet, if there is demand and value in specific things people will find a way to make it work cost effectively and at scale.
I actually think it's impressive that they have a prototype. It's less of a leap to think it could end up getting shipped. Whereas other competitors in the industry like Ferrari (Jony Ive collaboration) are launching cars with renders.
I think the event was a very Elon Musk way to say, we're not making a Roadster. Which makes sense, Tesla is leaning into completely self-driving cars and the Roadster as originally envisioned would be the opposite of that.
Well, it's not the car he's selling to me because I'm not going to support white supremacist fascists who flip heil Hitlers when they celebrate buying an election. It could be the best car in the World, I'm not sending Musk money, I'd rather walk.
The sooner y'all stop funding this shit the better.
"As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it's classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine" -- some Reddit comment.
Concepts cars are cars.
What was shown on stage is closer to the Apollo lander training rigs than a vehicle that you could purchase and drive on a public road.
It can never, ever be sold as a production vehicle! The COPV gas storage is under enormous pressure, and would explode with the force of a decent sized bomb if damaged in an accident.
These things would be regularly turning their owners into pink mist, emulating Stockton Rush at a larger scale.
In the late 90s, I interviewed for a job as a Technical Product Manager with a Toronto startup. The CTO/Co-founder, was an obfuscated C contest winner: https://www.ioccc.org/1985/lycklama/index.html
Great guy to work with. I think he runs a craft brewery now.
Can confirm: In the 1970s our high school had a minicomputer for teaching programming, and it was turned off when not in use. After turning it on, we would enter the magic three binary instructions into memory using sixteen toggles on the front panel.
Give it six months and there'll be have Optimus robots toggling switches to load terrabytes of binary programs directly into memory. Nobody wrote it, nobody will read it, but it will run everything.
The point is that if we can put binary directly into RAM, then what is assembly if not a programming language? Assembly is source code in a programming language that is turned into binary by a compiler called an assembler.
If you don’t feel that toggling the binary 16-bit words into RAM demonstrates that binary is what actually runs on the hardware, and that assembly is source code for a binary, well ok. I find it persuasive.
It can be worse: Someone recently posted about going for an interview and discovering that an AI was interviewing them, complete with uncanny valley imitation human over the video call. This was disclosed to candidate, along with the strict injunction that if the candidate used AI in any way for the interview, the process would be terminated immediately.
"Impersonal lack of human touch for we, but not for thee."
I get tons of these. I suspect they must run on crappy local models to save money, because the ones I get are also terrible at drawing a simple line connecting my experience with the job.
I look at them with a mixture of pity and contempt. They are examples of "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King" work: i conjecture that this type of "shallow customization" is going to be most persuasive with recipients who have very little exposure to slop and/or the kinds of things human recruiters used to say when visually scanning some stale copy of a résumé while on the phone with the prospect.
I get ones for projects specific languages that are not on my resume. Never mind crappy models, they could rule me out with traditional keyword matching.
> from a sales perspective, that’s probably not wrong.
Possibly not wrong. One scenario that happens over and over again is that we lose a deal because we didn't have feature A. So we build feature A, and we still don't win deals with it. One way this happens is when the competitor has a focus on one part of the market, and we have a focus on another.
Example: We go after SMB, the competitor owns "The Enterprise." Just building A will never break us into the Enterprise part of the market. We have to build an entire strategy around seizing part of the Enterprise market from our competitor. That strategy may or may not include A, but it is definitely more involved than "Build A and customers will come."
if we aren't going to build an entire strategy around "The Enterprise," not only can building A fail to win the business, it may cost us some of our existing SMB business. Every feature our core market doesn't want or need is additional complexity and feature surface area for our customers to absorb. They stop thinking of our product as "tailored for their needs" as it begins to bloat with features they don't need.
And worst of all, the investment in feature A means some other feature—B—that our existing customers have asked for gets punted down-calendar because we're suddenly tearing up our road map and building A because the VP Sales threw a temper tantrum about being unable to close deals without A. This is another way that chasing feature A means sacrificing value for our existing customers who are asking for feature B.
That was the McGuffin for the 1963 book "Ice Station Zebra" (and the 1968 film adaptation). A satellite with pictures of every missile launch site in the US malfunctions and is knocked off its planned orbit that would overfly the Soviet Union, so the race is on to figure out where they would drop the film and prevent them from recovering it.
The story was based on a real-life incident in 1959:
Anyone need sugar? He has some in his pocket. How about cream? No thanks!
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