So this is a really neat technical demo, using spacecraft cold-gas thrusters and guidance hardware/software to do crazy stunt stuff in a car, but what's the relevance to an actual product that can be sold, even as a small-volume exotic? These are pressurized gas thrusters, so either the tanks, valves, and piping take up most of the interior of the car, or it has a low-single-digit number of seconds of thrust before recharge, probably both. Also the tanks for these things tend to use incredibly high pressures and are apt to explode spectacularly in any sort of accident.
This is sort of like demonstrating a car that softens the asphalt in front of it with lasers to get a better grip; difficult, technically impressive, and zero chance that it will ever be allowed on a public road.
Edit: According to this Motor Trend article, it uses a big carbon-fiber pressure vessel at 5500psi, so basically an enormous fragile bomb. And the one that did all the stunts had two of the pressure vessels which would have filled most of the interior.
Why do car manufacturers brag about hitting 60 mph in 1, 2 or whatever seconds? For a normal person, does this really matter - what is the big deal if a car hits 60 mph in 5 seconds instead of 1? There are more important things like safety, repairability, longevity etc right?
Speaking for myself I love the quick acceleration of electric cars because it enables you to safely pass other cars quickly on two-lane roads without needing to linger in the oncoming lane.
It’s standard measure of acceleration. If you are going to sell a car on performance (like say… a sporty roadster), it’s a great metric.
People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.
That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.
Not to mention top speed. The US should have a federal or at least NY/CA state law that modern cars be electronically limited to 112 mph, as it is in Japan. There is no valid reason for a street legal passenger car to be travelling faster than that.
You answered your own question in your very second sentence. “For a normal person”. The modern economy increasingly does not cater to the “normal person” and they prove this constantly. Granted “normal people” stopped existing a long time ago. You have poor people, soon to be poor people, and people who think they will soon be rich but will really soon be poor. Of course then you have the rest but they are not people.
It's just one stat and it makes for a good headline. Obviously those other things are important but they don't exactly fit into a headline. Oh and some people like fast cars. Why is that so confusing?
For the Roadster, it's a supercar. None of those things matter much.
For something like the performance versions of their high-volume vehicles, it's partially for the same reasons people like sports cars, or at least how some people like a sports car that is faster / quicker and gives them more excitement while driving (obviously a lot of the appeal for sports cars otherwise is the sporty look/sound of the engine, which Tesla doesn't really deliver on at all).
As someone who has had a Mercedes AMG that could do 0-60s in less than 4s for a few years, it just gets boring so fast, and it makes you question why you bought the thing in the first place. It's unusable in almost every situation on the road, except for the rare "opportunity" when you stop at traffic lights next to a Golf R and yes turns out you have a bigger.....turbo.....than them. Well done, that 5 second ego boost was really worth all the money and looking like a dick to anyone above the age of 25.
Nowadays as a "petrol head" when I look at stats I want to see weight - as little of it as possible. Horsepower needs to begin with 2, maybe with 3 in some cars, any more than that and it's silly. I want reviewers to say the car puts a smile on their face driving it to work every day, not doing 160mph on the race track. And of course, high speed is "fun" - one of my favourite memories is driving at 158mph past Berlin at 4am - incredible. But the modern obsession with horsepower and 0-60 is...just stupid. Fast 0-60 time does not make for a fun or an engaging car. It just makes it fast.
" It's unusable in almost every situation on the road"
Yet it's a useful, comparable, measure for acceleration and is frequently exercised on track. If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it. Image?
Maybe 30-70 would be more useful for determining overtaking capability, but that would require everyone in the motoring industry to agree to change at the same time.
>>If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it.
Oh I have, and it was awesome. But 99% of the time I drove it to work and back, sitting in traffic, thinking to myself I'd much much much rather be in something more comfortable, more quiet, something that isn't using quite so much fuel just sitting there and something that didn't require new tyres every 8000 miles.
Like yes, speed is awesome - fast acceleration is cool. But the obsession with it is destroying the industry - like, it's so clear that a lighter Lamborghini with 400bhp would be a lot more fun to drive than a 2 tonne one with 1000 horsepower, no? Even if the latter does pretty good on the race track. But because everyone only cares about 0-60 times and horsepower we are where we are.
Your just getting old, I mean I agree with u but I'm also old,
Most young boys have the Lamborghini poster on the wall even if it actually sucks to drive, especially the iconic Countach,
I find pure joy in driving my old beetle now, or the past weekend a friends 1957 MGA, horrible safety, tiny engines, zero comforts, not even a radio, just a pure carthat can't even be sold anymore, but there will never be a better driving experience than an proper ancient British roadster.
This is a sports car with a deposit that costs more than an ordinary new car, and with a price that would probably buy you a decent house. Nothing about this is meant for a normal person.
It's one thing they can brag about, you know. Dumbing everything down to a single number, regardless of whether it's meaningful, feels impressive.
The vast majority of LLM users -- not the average person here on HN -- doesn't know which "model" they are using, can't tell the difference and don't care, including many software engineers. You could ask the same thing about those LLM benchmarks.
as with lots of muscles, it's actually the dudes who care about this the most :D get hugely muscular, buy a nice sports car and dudes will absolutely love you.
Amazing tech demo. I would have liked to see more discussion of the cold-gas thrusters in the earlier Hacker News article. Some people seemed confused and made claims that the demo was a separate "rocket" version that used a combustion technology.
Well it is a separate rocket version, it just doesn't take jet fuel. "Invite only" for the rocket version means probably less than 5 will ever be made, if that.
I strongly suspect that the invite-only version is the tech that was described in the demo, and differs from the $250K version by the size of the air tank and compression motor.
I doubt it is actual air. When compressing gas to 10,000+ psi and then running it through a rocket motor, clean/dry nitrogen is the way to go. Normal air has moisture, which can form ice, and oxygen which gets extremely reactive when heated.
And many a rocket scientist would be insulted by the comparison of a nozzled rocket motor to the simple pipe of an air rifle.
I agree. I remember as a kid getting so excited for Detroit concept cars that never hit the market. Now, unless something is actually for sale, I basically ignore it.
Really disappointing to see such low quality discussion here. Feasibility aside, we would not be seeing such reactions even 5 years ago. Polarization ruins everything.
Why blame this on “polarization” and not on the guy who did the polarizing? Nobody forced Elon to do all that stupid shit that got so many people hating on him. He did it if his own free will. He ruined it.
If you don’t like his politics and lean into that difference in opinions to criticise something orthogonal, like his technical innovation, then it’s YOU that is being divisive and partisan.
Why is it my responsibility to carefully compartmentalize every aspect of someone no matter how loud and outrageous they are, and not their responsibility to stop being a colossal asshole in public? He gets to publicly disown his children and support proto-fascist political parties and call people pedophiles for displeasing him, but we are the ones who have to carefully manage our feelings so we don’t accidentally let them spill over? Nuts to that.
You think he's being terrible in public. I don't, and I'm not alone. The way certain people judge his actions is quite obviously partisan and a subject of great emotional overreaction. Those exaggerated, sensationalised negative traits you described (which were fed to you by a leftwing media with vested interests) actually have zero effect on your life - so you are simply choosing to be offended by them.
If, instead, you had a grounded, balanced opinion about the man, you'd understand the great good he's delivered, and continues to deliver for the world, from Tesla (making electric cars desirable and mass-market) to Neuralink (making viable brain computer interfaces to give heavily disabled people back their lives), to SpaceX (giving humanity hope for a brighter, more exciting future in space, as governments once did, but have since failed to do).
What's wrong is all of the older models they sold do not have what you experienced. They were sold FSD but their car's hardware can't run the latest software, and the older implementations required much more babysitting (aka not FSD).
Nobody needs that kind of acceleration on a car designed for use on public roads, and anyone who uses that capability in the vicinity of other people or vehicles deserves to be arrested. Its just criminally dangerous.
Like the Cybertruck, this is just the Musk "fuck you, get out of my way" worldview realised as metal and plastic.
Rapid adjustment of drone flighpaths with micro-thrusts?
Getting interceptors out of tubes faster without explosions/temps/fumes?
Anything where rocket propellant, heat is a problem?
Breaking, emergency braking in trucks? Kind of like reverse thrust in airplanes.
> just endless anti-tech hate, downstream from idiotic TikTok politics.
The hate and politics obsession of the people you're complaining about on here pales in comparison to the guy doing this presentation. He is doing it 24/7 I'm not even sure he sleeps he is so engaged in it.
Why is this all so political? Why can't you meanies just maintain my priors that this man is personally engineering the coolest tech and saving humanity despite all evidence he is an idiot and hates people? I am going to find a forum where I'm not subject to this
So this is a really neat technical demo, using spacecraft cold-gas thrusters and guidance hardware/software to do crazy stunt stuff in a car, but what's the relevance to an actual product that can be sold, even as a small-volume exotic? These are pressurized gas thrusters, so either the tanks, valves, and piping take up most of the interior of the car, or it has a low-single-digit number of seconds of thrust before recharge, probably both. Also the tanks for these things tend to use incredibly high pressures and are apt to explode spectacularly in any sort of accident.
This is sort of like demonstrating a car that softens the asphalt in front of it with lasers to get a better grip; difficult, technically impressive, and zero chance that it will ever be allowed on a public road.
Edit: According to this Motor Trend article, it uses a big carbon-fiber pressure vessel at 5500psi, so basically an enormous fragile bomb. And the one that did all the stunts had two of the pressure vessels which would have filled most of the interior.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-roadster-thrust-system...
Well, yeah. The full thruster version only seats one, and is invite only for purchase, and is not street legal.
I'm wondering if it could even be sold to individuals given that the thrusters probably count as restricted military technology?
[dead]
Why do car manufacturers brag about hitting 60 mph in 1, 2 or whatever seconds? For a normal person, does this really matter - what is the big deal if a car hits 60 mph in 5 seconds instead of 1? There are more important things like safety, repairability, longevity etc right?
Speaking for myself I love the quick acceleration of electric cars because it enables you to safely pass other cars quickly on two-lane roads without needing to linger in the oncoming lane.
It’s standard measure of acceleration. If you are going to sell a car on performance (like say… a sporty roadster), it’s a great metric.
People in the market for a car like this care far more about performance than they do safety, repairability or longevity.
That’s why performance oriented cars talk about their acceleration, and minivans talk about safety, and pickup trucks talk about longevity. Their target market determines which of the various metrics are going to be the headline.
Not to mention top speed. The US should have a federal or at least NY/CA state law that modern cars be electronically limited to 112 mph, as it is in Japan. There is no valid reason for a street legal passenger car to be travelling faster than that.
I take my road car to racing events (SCCA) and get above 112 routinely.
I think Nissan had a workaround I could live with: GPS fencing around known tracks would activate/deactivate the speed governor.
You answered your own question in your very second sentence. “For a normal person”. The modern economy increasingly does not cater to the “normal person” and they prove this constantly. Granted “normal people” stopped existing a long time ago. You have poor people, soon to be poor people, and people who think they will soon be rich but will really soon be poor. Of course then you have the rest but they are not people.
It's just one stat and it makes for a good headline. Obviously those other things are important but they don't exactly fit into a headline. Oh and some people like fast cars. Why is that so confusing?
For the Roadster, it's a supercar. None of those things matter much.
For something like the performance versions of their high-volume vehicles, it's partially for the same reasons people like sports cars, or at least how some people like a sports car that is faster / quicker and gives them more excitement while driving (obviously a lot of the appeal for sports cars otherwise is the sporty look/sound of the engine, which Tesla doesn't really deliver on at all).
People are interested in speed performance. What other measure should we use?
As someone who has had a Mercedes AMG that could do 0-60s in less than 4s for a few years, it just gets boring so fast, and it makes you question why you bought the thing in the first place. It's unusable in almost every situation on the road, except for the rare "opportunity" when you stop at traffic lights next to a Golf R and yes turns out you have a bigger.....turbo.....than them. Well done, that 5 second ego boost was really worth all the money and looking like a dick to anyone above the age of 25.
Nowadays as a "petrol head" when I look at stats I want to see weight - as little of it as possible. Horsepower needs to begin with 2, maybe with 3 in some cars, any more than that and it's silly. I want reviewers to say the car puts a smile on their face driving it to work every day, not doing 160mph on the race track. And of course, high speed is "fun" - one of my favourite memories is driving at 158mph past Berlin at 4am - incredible. But the modern obsession with horsepower and 0-60 is...just stupid. Fast 0-60 time does not make for a fun or an engaging car. It just makes it fast.
" It's unusable in almost every situation on the road"
Yet it's a useful, comparable, measure for acceleration and is frequently exercised on track. If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it. Image?
Maybe 30-70 would be more useful for determining overtaking capability, but that would require everyone in the motoring industry to agree to change at the same time.
>>If you had an AMG and haven't taken it for at least one track day then I question why you bought it.
Oh I have, and it was awesome. But 99% of the time I drove it to work and back, sitting in traffic, thinking to myself I'd much much much rather be in something more comfortable, more quiet, something that isn't using quite so much fuel just sitting there and something that didn't require new tyres every 8000 miles.
Like yes, speed is awesome - fast acceleration is cool. But the obsession with it is destroying the industry - like, it's so clear that a lighter Lamborghini with 400bhp would be a lot more fun to drive than a 2 tonne one with 1000 horsepower, no? Even if the latter does pretty good on the race track. But because everyone only cares about 0-60 times and horsepower we are where we are.
Your just getting old, I mean I agree with u but I'm also old,
Most young boys have the Lamborghini poster on the wall even if it actually sucks to drive, especially the iconic Countach, I find pure joy in driving my old beetle now, or the past weekend a friends 1957 MGA, horrible safety, tiny engines, zero comforts, not even a radio, just a pure carthat can't even be sold anymore, but there will never be a better driving experience than an proper ancient British roadster.
The more powerful the motor, the better the brakes and safety features.
I hope.
This is a sports car with a deposit that costs more than an ordinary new car, and with a price that would probably buy you a decent house. Nothing about this is meant for a normal person.
It matters a lot, when playing Top Trumps [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Trumps
It's one thing they can brag about, you know. Dumbing everything down to a single number, regardless of whether it's meaningful, feels impressive.
The vast majority of LLM users -- not the average person here on HN -- doesn't know which "model" they are using, can't tell the difference and don't care, including many software engineers. You could ask the same thing about those LLM benchmarks.
Bruh. Chicks man. Chicks dig fast cars.
as with lots of muscles, it's actually the dudes who care about this the most :D get hugely muscular, buy a nice sports car and dudes will absolutely love you.
Haha, that's exactly the reaction you could hear from the crowd in the demo video. Made for bros by tech bros.
Tesla Roadster vaporware edition MK2: now with actual vapor!
Amazing tech demo. I would have liked to see more discussion of the cold-gas thrusters in the earlier Hacker News article. Some people seemed confused and made claims that the demo was a separate "rocket" version that used a combustion technology.
Well it is a separate rocket version, it just doesn't take jet fuel. "Invite only" for the rocket version means probably less than 5 will ever be made, if that.
I strongly suspect that the invite-only version is the tech that was described in the demo, and differs from the $250K version by the size of the air tank and compression motor.
Cold gas or not, these are still rocket motors.
Without fuel or an oxidizer or combustion? Not really. It's compressed air, like an air rifle.
Motors don't need combustion, they just need to provide power. See electric motors or compressed air engines.
I doubt it is actual air. When compressing gas to 10,000+ psi and then running it through a rocket motor, clean/dry nitrogen is the way to go. Normal air has moisture, which can form ice, and oxygen which gets extremely reactive when heated.
And many a rocket scientist would be insulted by the comparison of a nozzled rocket motor to the simple pipe of an air rifle.
It takes genius to take rocket motors and cover them in cringe.
Looks like more hype nonsense to keep excitement going while continuing to delay actually delivering a real product.
I agree. I remember as a kid getting so excited for Detroit concept cars that never hit the market. Now, unless something is actually for sale, I basically ignore it.
Original roadster is one of the best looking car designs for my taste. This... subdivision modifier over the Cybertruck.
Makes sense, it was a Lotus Elise.
It's just a Lotus body, though I agree that Lotus cars are pretty
With a weird horizontal loop cut.
Some more discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112657
one seat, designed by and for the most friendless man in the world.
All they were missing was the shark.
is it me or does it just look ugly?, was expecting the original roadster looks...
The original roadster was a Lotus Elise, all Tesla did was swap in an electric drivetrain.
Tesla has never really shown they can design anything compelling that doesn’t look like a lumpy shoe.
I think OP means the one they revealed 8/9 years ago, which still had a less-boxy supercar look.
What??!? You don't like the design of the cybertruck?
Tesla has been in the business of ugly cars for some time.
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112657
I no longer like Elon and Tesla but, damn, that's a great looking Lamborghini, and a cool stunt to launch it!
Really disappointing to see such low quality discussion here. Feasibility aside, we would not be seeing such reactions even 5 years ago. Polarization ruins everything.
> we would not be seeing such reactions even 5 years ago
5 years of broken promises and actively fighting to make the world worse will do a lot to opinions.
Why blame this on “polarization” and not on the guy who did the polarizing? Nobody forced Elon to do all that stupid shit that got so many people hating on him. He did it if his own free will. He ruined it.
If you don’t like his politics and lean into that difference in opinions to criticise something orthogonal, like his technical innovation, then it’s YOU that is being divisive and partisan.
Why is it my responsibility to carefully compartmentalize every aspect of someone no matter how loud and outrageous they are, and not their responsibility to stop being a colossal asshole in public? He gets to publicly disown his children and support proto-fascist political parties and call people pedophiles for displeasing him, but we are the ones who have to carefully manage our feelings so we don’t accidentally let them spill over? Nuts to that.
You think he's being terrible in public. I don't, and I'm not alone. The way certain people judge his actions is quite obviously partisan and a subject of great emotional overreaction. Those exaggerated, sensationalised negative traits you described (which were fed to you by a leftwing media with vested interests) actually have zero effect on your life - so you are simply choosing to be offended by them.
If, instead, you had a grounded, balanced opinion about the man, you'd understand the great good he's delivered, and continues to deliver for the world, from Tesla (making electric cars desirable and mass-market) to Neuralink (making viable brain computer interfaces to give heavily disabled people back their lives), to SpaceX (giving humanity hope for a brighter, more exciting future in space, as governments once did, but have since failed to do).
Is this polarization or is this just people finally figuring out the grift after 10 years of "we'll be on Mars in 2 years"?
Name a single person on Earth who has got us closer to Mars than Musk.
Well, NASA has conducted surface operations on mars 5 times without any involvement from Musk, the CNSA has gone once....
What has Musk actually done to get us closer other than talk about how humanity ought to do it?
With such a powerful suction system, I can see this replacing street-sweeping trucks in a few years.
I you sweep up an hedgehog, will it be thrown out through the exhaust?
Sure, you'll get a finely chopped hedgehog [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/_lq-DpCE9rU?t=1011
Or a banana. Mario Kart suddenly starts making sense.
Totally thought this was AI when I first saw this.
Paid subscriptions everyere, I bet.
EPA won't like the gas emission
It's compressed air.
Nitrogen specifically
> An invite-only "Rocket" variant is a single-seat model with a "full flight system."
Tesla should be sued into oblivion over "full self driving", but after that, if you believe this nonsense and buy one that's on you.
Why? I’ve sat in a self driving Tesla, with the attendant’s body rotated towards me while we chatted in Florida. What specifically is wrong?
What's wrong is all of the older models they sold do not have what you experienced. They were sold FSD but their car's hardware can't run the latest software, and the older implementations required much more babysitting (aka not FSD).
This is going to be the next oceangate and I fully support it.
Nobody needs that kind of acceleration on a car designed for use on public roads, and anyone who uses that capability in the vicinity of other people or vehicles deserves to be arrested. Its just criminally dangerous.
Like the Cybertruck, this is just the Musk "fuck you, get out of my way" worldview realised as metal and plastic.
It is not a roadster. A roadster is defined as an open-air, two-seat convertible.
This one is a hard-top super-coupe and I recommend calling it the "Cyberwedge"
Awesome, another technology we want to implement before we have the infrastructure to support it.
Exactly this... Which city will allow for a car they cannot chase with a patrol?
It would have been much better if it was a skateboard, tbh.
Not from the US, but I don't see political pushback on rocket launchers for police cars.
Can we get the original Dropbox hater guy to comment here too?
What has HN become - just endless anti-tech hate, downstream from idiotic TikTok politics.
Is it the moderation system that amplifies this nonsense here?
If those cold-air thrusters are getting commoditized, the real discussion here should be around what could be built around them. How to HACK them.
Reddit exists for this other nonsense pile on.
I'll bite. What do you see as applications of for commodity cold gas thrusters? Excluding rockets.
Rapid adjustment of drone flighpaths with micro-thrusts? Getting interceptors out of tubes faster without explosions/temps/fumes? Anything where rocket propellant, heat is a problem?
Breaking, emergency braking in trucks? Kind of like reverse thrust in airplanes.
More important to signal that they think Elon is a nazi, apparently.
> just endless anti-tech hate, downstream from idiotic TikTok politics.
The hate and politics obsession of the people you're complaining about on here pales in comparison to the guy doing this presentation. He is doing it 24/7 I'm not even sure he sleeps he is so engaged in it.
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Why is this all so political? Why can't you meanies just maintain my priors that this man is personally engineering the coolest tech and saving humanity despite all evidence he is an idiot and hates people? I am going to find a forum where I'm not subject to this
Was this real? I thought some wires were visible?
Greatest American company run by an African American ever.