I thought so at first but then Musk mentioned the thrusters can recharge themselves with pumps in the car. So it will actually be something owners can use repeatedly without needing complicated refills from Tesla service.
Not that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.
I wonder whether they will actually be able to recharge to that pressure level in a production car. I kind of doubt it, plus it will be noisy, consume a ton of energy and take a long time.
Not to mention the mass. Perhaps the pressure vessels could be relatively lightweight, but a pump that could charge such a pressure vessel to the pressure and capacity needed for this type of stunt will not be lightweight.
And mass is one of the top engineering concerns for these types of performance vehicles, even those which do not need to fight gravity.
But where would you (be allowed to) use that and risk wrecking your car? I guess it’s for shows only, the reservation page says invitation only. It’s definitely impressive but it will probably stay a marketing tool.
The Brabham was withdrawn after one race because it sprayed debris at following cars. I the thrusters used for better cornering also might push a car being overtaken just enough to get it off track. Even for track-only this won't fly. Not to mention blasting pedestrians.
Very useful in England’s countryside, imagine all the puddles you can jump over! Eliminate these passing bays when cars can jump over each other in the narrow lanes!
Also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
Cars seem so full of gimmicky features these days. A friend's car yesterday stopped us when exiting because it thought we left behind belongings in the back seat - it was just an empty package. That was not something I would have ever thought a car would flag. It's not that fancy of a car (entry level SUV) but it is fairly new, it just kind of bothered me.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
The back seat thing is probably the things cars have been adding to try to combat those freak memory accidents when parents forgot to drop the baby off at daycare and left them in the car in the sun all day with disastrous consequences.
Good point, I don't have a kid and would have never thought of that as something that system was hedging against. I'm not sure it changes my mind overall (I think also this particular implementation was still rather clumsy) but it does at least make that feature far more defensible in theory.
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
I’m sure they’ve factored in road debris. Tyres also throw stones and dirt at cars behind, sometimes with remarkable force.
The intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
List of cars I know to go over 90MPH. Supposedly. 2000 Dodge Neon with 800 pounds of man in it and only 3 out of 4 cylinders functional. 2004 Toyota Camry with broken O2 sensors, and it loves it. Anything by VW. Pretty much anything parked in your local highschool.
Most modern cars can hit 90 MPH with ease, that's what modern aero and 145HP being "underpowered" means! Supposedly cars are electronically hard limited to 115mph and I have never been able to confirm that in practice
Of course, this implies that you might be able to own some of these features, with the actual crime being using them. Like that Beetle with a helicopter jet turbine.
It's an awesome performance, but I don't know why you'd want this in your actual day to day car and pay a premium for it, all power to you if you do but I wouldn't call not sharing that preference 'poo pooing the incredible tech'.
Even if it does, these features aren't useful and can't be used in any realistic scenario. At best they're just party tricks.
1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem.
2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.
These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.
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.
What's so disruptive on these kind of events is, that companies always used to do development for PR-stunts, or to show off their capabilities and vision for the future, but never at this scale of pure engineering investment.
Drawing a parallel, manufacturers presented rollable mobile devices already a decade ago, modular devices with replaceable components, etc. The archives of Nokia and Ericsson (and others) are full with these kinds of products. Car manufacturers did the same. They presented a vision, not a commitment to a product because there is much more to this than just "being able" to build it.
But it was never economically feasible or sensible to do this at SUCH a scale of engineering cost, and presented with the unrelenting confidence of "this will be yours in two years", despite all the fundamental roadblocks still to overcome.
It appears that this is the most disrupting aspect of their presentations: People are not used to being presented a "vision" of such a scale with so little regards for practical execution.
They like the journey they are taken on, and willingly fill all gaps and doubts with "they wouldn't present this if they didn't think of everything already"
It's a cool demonstration, I'll give them that. From what I've seen online, people don't even seem to consider whether or not they would actually want this, just because the novelty of it.
I'd even ignore that and call it good marketing, if that's what they would actually try to sell here - but you need some kind of special invitation access to even get those, while they use this demonstration to boost the pre-orders for a car without the features everyone is talking about (or at least trying to, we'll see how many will actually go for it).
Yeah, that's what I meant. The gap between what's presented as ready-to-order and the actual practical feasibility of the product is so big, it wows people because they are still accustomed to presentations of actually consumable products.
And also your point: It is a company presenting a jet-pack to actually sell a premium back-pack under the same name.
They invested in the engineering of 1-10 jet-packs, to sell 200-2000 backpacks...
The demonstrations seems to be very specific, it probably can't do anything more than fall to the ground. The practicality of actual levitating the car may out of reach.
Everyone calls it a "flying car" the idea is planted in people's mind and they let people's imagination of credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
I agree this is more of a "jumping car" than anywhere near an actual "flying car". My main issue with both is that if ground based cars have an issue, for example an engine failure, in most cases you can still get the car to safely stop at the side of the road. If you're flying, that's a very different story.
Even if we would accept the premise that flying cars will be the norm at some point, I'm not sure what people imagine that would do for them. Technically you could solve traffic jams to some degree, but still not entirely because I can't imagine that at any point flying cars would mean that you just fly wherever you want. It would give us multilayered traffic, which is cool to reduce traffic jams, but does it really do anything else?
But prior to any of that, I'm fascinated by how irrational it is to think that this jumping car is even remotely feasible to participate in any kind of traffic.
That's why I assume that the general public expects that Tesla has already solved all these problems, as they otherwise wouldn't announce such a product.
In reality, we apparently have entered times where they could present a teleporting machine and start a 200k USD pre-order with little to no public scrutiny.
That's also true, but I meant to say something different. I am referring to this sheer blindness to the rationality of what's being presented.
This event was like Disney presenting a mass-production rollercoaster you can pre-order for your home, but the general public seems to glance over how utterly irrational this is.
So far companies did alot of fundamental due diligence before making such an announcement (and the prior R&D investment!), because the consequences could be fatal.
The average consumer apparently still assumes that this due diligence phase was passed, thinking it's impossible that a known company presents something that big it cannot deliver on...
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.
This would only work until the next Democratic administration, at this point he's put almost half a billion dollars into Republican pockets. All it takes is one President AOC to pull every government contract he has. And he knows this, hence the election spending.
At least the fans will allow for really short breaking distances.
I historically argued for a sort of horror-vehicle that would achieve autonomous driving "early" by exploiting downforce from powerful fans, but I mostly imagined it being used for autonomous deliveries and never imagined there being people inside it.
It's a tech demo marketing presentation with a jumping car in it, not a flying one. It does look pretty cool though. Let's first wait and see if/when this will even be available and not just a marketing stunt.
This is what the Roadster is. You will see Roadsters in random parking lots, not just specialized areas, like it would be with the flying pinto (which failed) or some newer options that compromise arguably way too much to have long-term flight WITH driveability.
I make flying stuff all the time. Not as heavy but I don't see a reason why I couldn't and I won't need a couple of billion to do so. This thing 'flies' for a very narrow definition of flying. Call me when it stays in the air for a couple of minutes. Prediction: that will never happen.
Your definition for "flying" is hard irrelevant. Any toy plane that we do call "flying" flies only for seconds, but has concepts like lift / and / or thrust and / or aerial control thru different ways like aerodynamic stability or in-air thrust. So did the first aeroplane too. Hell, even hyper-maneuvering multi-mach air-to-air missiles just "jump" with your worthless definition of "flight".
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.
The car is not using momentum and centrifugal force to stay on the ramp. It has fans providing tons of downforce - so much downforce that it's able to stick to the road nearly completely inverted
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 61.2 ms ] threadNot that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.
And mass is one of the top engineering concerns for these types of performance vehicles, even those which do not need to fight gravity.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
The intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
Nope.
List of cars I know to go over 90MPH. Supposedly. 2000 Dodge Neon with 800 pounds of man in it and only 3 out of 4 cylinders functional. 2004 Toyota Camry with broken O2 sensors, and it loves it. Anything by VW. Pretty much anything parked in your local highschool.
Most modern cars can hit 90 MPH with ease, that's what modern aero and 145HP being "underpowered" means! Supposedly cars are electronically hard limited to 115mph and I have never been able to confirm that in practice
Of course, this implies that you might be able to own some of these features, with the actual crime being using them. Like that Beetle with a helicopter jet turbine.
My sense is that this is just more Elon Musk bullshit that will never materialize.
1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem. 2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.
These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.
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.
Drawing a parallel, manufacturers presented rollable mobile devices already a decade ago, modular devices with replaceable components, etc. The archives of Nokia and Ericsson (and others) are full with these kinds of products. Car manufacturers did the same. They presented a vision, not a commitment to a product because there is much more to this than just "being able" to build it.
But it was never economically feasible or sensible to do this at SUCH a scale of engineering cost, and presented with the unrelenting confidence of "this will be yours in two years", despite all the fundamental roadblocks still to overcome.
It appears that this is the most disrupting aspect of their presentations: People are not used to being presented a "vision" of such a scale with so little regards for practical execution.
They like the journey they are taken on, and willingly fill all gaps and doubts with "they wouldn't present this if they didn't think of everything already"
And also your point: It is a company presenting a jet-pack to actually sell a premium back-pack under the same name.
They invested in the engineering of 1-10 jet-packs, to sell 200-2000 backpacks...
The demonstrations seems to be very specific, it probably can't do anything more than fall to the ground. The practicality of actual levitating the car may out of reach.
Everyone calls it a "flying car" the idea is planted in people's mind and they let people's imagination of credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
Even if we would accept the premise that flying cars will be the norm at some point, I'm not sure what people imagine that would do for them. Technically you could solve traffic jams to some degree, but still not entirely because I can't imagine that at any point flying cars would mean that you just fly wherever you want. It would give us multilayered traffic, which is cool to reduce traffic jams, but does it really do anything else?
But prior to any of that, I'm fascinated by how irrational it is to think that this jumping car is even remotely feasible to participate in any kind of traffic.
That's why I assume that the general public expects that Tesla has already solved all these problems, as they otherwise wouldn't announce such a product.
In reality, we apparently have entered times where they could present a teleporting machine and start a 200k USD pre-order with little to no public scrutiny.
You can clearly see what it does. If nobody buys it or it can't be driven on public roads, so what.
This event was like Disney presenting a mass-production rollercoaster you can pre-order for your home, but the general public seems to glance over how utterly irrational this is.
So far companies did alot of fundamental due diligence before making such an announcement (and the prior R&D investment!), because the consequences could be fatal.
The average consumer apparently still assumes that this due diligence phase was passed, thinking it's impossible that a known company presents something that big it cannot deliver on...
Will the frame itself hold up?
It must be incredibly difficult to keep the car stable while mid-air at low speeds, I suspect it wouldn't look that "elegant"...
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
> Tesla Sales Slump in Third Quarter
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-sales-fell-in-third...
Tesla Q3 sales will be the same tomorrow.
It doesn't surprise me that any particular companies sales are down at the moment, how does Tesla compare to other car manufacturers out of interest.
This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.
I historically argued for a sort of horror-vehicle that would achieve autonomous driving "early" by exploiting downforce from powerful fans, but I mostly imagined it being used for autonomous deliveries and never imagined there being people inside it.
this site just toast
This is not some suden demo, this is something they've promised and talked of along time ago and has been in development the whole time.
And Tesla is all about manufacturing so mistaking this for some "prototype-only" device is misled.
What people mean by "flying cars" is mass production. Ford Model T.
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.