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Tesla 'Cannot Guarantee' Roadster Reservation Holders Will Ever Get a Car

https://www.thedrive.com/news/tesla-cannot-guarantee-roadster-reservation-holders-will-ever-get-a-car
51•healsdata•1h ago

Comments

xvxvx•1h ago
Elon:’This is a car people will be able to own and drive’.

Someone add that to the list of bullshit he said.

sneak•37m ago
I’d take the other side of that bet. $10k USD says that normal consumers are owning and driving Tesla Roadsters within 10 years.

If you believe what you write, it’s easy money for you. Deal?

wlesieutre•33m ago
Can I take that bet on the one that does flips?
skeeter2020•33m ago
do you normally commit to - and pay a sizeable deposit - ten years before you take deilvery of a new car?
alistairSH•3m ago
$250k USD invested today is ~$400k to ~$600k in 2036.

And that $50k deposit made 9 years ago? That could have been nearly $300k in 2036.

"A fool and his money..."

I don't have any particular problem with a modest (a few 10s of thousands) deposit on a ~3 year timeline that's reasonably confident. But six figures on a 100% speculative consumer good (ie not even remotely an investment)? Oof, no thanks.

clipsy•31m ago
Within 10 years of today, or within 10 years of when it was announced 9 years ago?
sneak•26m ago
From when the statement in question was made, obviously.
2OEH8eoCRo0•22m ago
Did we invent a new logical fallacy? If you believed that you'd bet money on it and since you aren't betting money on it then your argument is invalid!
jefftk•20m ago
If you mean one that can do the stunts from the demo I'm in, but not for $10k: that's more than I'm willing to bet with people I don't know. How about $100, since most of the point of a bet is formalizing a disagreement and showing that you're serious?
otterley•19m ago
Just bet on Polymarket or Kalshi so we can all take your money instead. Post a screenshot of your position so we know you’re not full of baloney.
xvxvx•10m ago
Yeah, I don’t gamble. Just make a mental note that, in 2036 when there are no flying Roadsters for sale, you’re a moron.
vannevar•5m ago
The "other side of that bet" would be betting that ordinary consumers will be driving it in 2028, which is what Elon claimed. A lot can happen in ten years---if Tesla ends up selling a clean-sheet sports car called something else by 2036, would that still count? Or are we talking about this specific model with these specs?
lubujackson•2m ago
"Tesla Roadster" in name, maybe. Tesla Roadster as a flying car that drives up walls? 0% chance of that seeing the light of day.
ourmandave•7m ago
There's a website dedicated to Elon's predictions.

He tweeted back in 2019 there would be a flying roadster.

Promises made, promises kept?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1083095876392964096

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1083128521801822213

Broken clock, etc.

https://elonmusk.today/#flying-roadster

Kevin_Flynn•1h ago
... because it was always a PR stunt.

The dialog of the event spelled it out.

"We are here at SpaceX's uh rocket test and development center in McGregor, Texas. It's 4,000 acres. Thank you for having us. Thank you for hosting us, SpaceX."

Establishes SpaceX as a giant.

"we're 20 years from when Elon first introduced the Roadster to the world. And it was really a proof of concept that proved EVs were viable product, fun to drive, could go the distance."

Establishes Elon/Tesla as an innovator. Spells out clearly the context "proof of concept." Associates "demonstrations" with "proof." Introduces the concepts of "fun", "viable", and "longevity" aka "distance."

"They were real cars. And look at how far we've come in those 20 years."

Compares introduction of a car, with current demonstration, and establishes the idea that todays "flying car" is going to be just as successful, given time.

"But you know, the last time we had Roadster and SpaceX together, we put Elons's into orbit."

Establishes "the sky as the limit" as to what these two companies can do together. The heart of the entire sales pitch.

"And you can see there, and you know, Starman is still out there somewhere. Amazing feat."

Defines "creating more space junk for publicity stunts" as an "amazing feat."

"you're going to see the results of what happens when you have a collaboration with the world's best car company and the world's best rocket company."

Repetition of the sales pitch to cement it.

"The future is autonomous, Elon, right? Yes. But this is not an autonomous car. It is the last. Well, it it is technically autonomous for this demo to make sure we don't kill anyone. Correct. So, just in case. Uh, but uh this will actually be long-term the only uh manually driven car that Tesla makes. You're going to have some fun sometimes. Yeah. And so, if you're going to have only one manually driven car, let's uh let's take it to the limits and way past the limits."

Confusion. Establishes autonomous with inevitibility. Claims demo car is not automous, then claims it is autonomous, because its dangerous to drive it manually. Plants the idea that its the only car you're gonna need, you can drive it manually, and its the ultimate experience.

Then, as everyone is confused, they start the countdown, and the magic show commences.

Either you see the scripted psyop aka sales pitch or you don't.

We all watched the same demo.

Some of us saw an amazing future.

The rest of us saw a circus selling timeshare condos.

Tesla and SpaceX are "engineering companies." Engineering is at the heart of what they do.

Wouldn't you have more confidence, if they had engineered something useful for a demonstration as an investor, instead of the song and dance ?

Companies are supposed to produce useful products to generate profits, which is why investors invest, right ?

To me it looks like they are out of actual real useful ideas. If they had a new useful idea why didn't we see it ?

I think this might have lowered institutional investor confidence because it looks like a vegas show and smells like a tourist pump and dump intended to capture the "retail publics" money.

You can do better Elon. I know you can.

ps. I am a Starlink subscriber, and I love the service. Please don't cancel me.

hingler36•58m ago
As much as I dislike Tesla, a lot of this feels like pretty standard legalize that would be in most reservation or pre-order documents to protect the company. Can anyone speak to if this is truly unique for in this case?
__m•54m ago
well, people are waiting since 9 years, i think that's unique
lberk•30m ago
Unique in what way?

The Trabant often had wait lists of ten or more years[1][2].

The Soviet Lada often had wait times of five to ten years[3].

Even the Morgan Plus 8 had wait lists of (reportedly) a decade long as recently as 1990[4].

[1] - https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbp016 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant [3] - https://theses.gla.ac.uk/71079/1/10390647.pdf [4] - https://www.morganville.org/history/the-waiting-list

Svip•22m ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, no one has taken delivery of the Roadster announced 9 years ago; all of your examples are cars having more demand than supply (and in the case of the Trabant and the Lada, fewer years); as for the Morgan Plus 8, Morgan make a deliberate choice to keep the production figures where they were, despite the high demand. The key difference seems to be between little supply (your examples) and no supply.

Usually, if you had been unable to deliver a product in that time, it's probably about time to cancel it. Of course, I may be wrong, but my understanding is that 9-year-ago-announced Roadster has not been cancelled, and people have not been refunded.

micromacrofoot•58m ago
There's probably going to be a single trick car someone can demo remotely (no passengers) somewhere like an hour away from LA, it will very often be down for maintenance, and everyone will only be able to buy the street legal version of the car which won't be available for another 3 years
kylecazar•57m ago
The reservations are refundable, and even if they weren't, his fanboys with means would buy them anyway.

He still has a lot of wealthy acolytes (for some reason) and they live for exclusive new shit.

jgilias•55m ago
Wouldn’t be a first
r0ckarong•53m ago
It has vapor thrusters to glide above the ignorant fools who didn't buy one.
delichon•44m ago
You'll have about 4 to 11 seconds to gloat.
JSR_FDED•44m ago
Very briefly, before coming back down to earth.
epolanski•49m ago
Musk treating delusional fans like an ATM as always, lovely.

There's 1000 people that preordered their Roadster in 2017 for 250k $....

And they are rumoring now 2028 production, which in Tesla style will be deep in 2030s. If it ever happens.

bamboozled•44m ago
I love that the FSD feature still hasn't been delivered while they're demonstrating they're next idiotic product idea / stunt...no one mentions it.
LewisVerstappen•42m ago
It has been delivered.

I have FSD and it’s amazing.

amanaplanacanal•39m ago
What he delivered is not what he promised.
treis•33m ago
At some point why does anyone care? If something "amazing" was delivered what's the difference if it was exactly as promised.
bamboozled•19m ago
People he has been conning people out of money for 10 years ?
bamboozled•19m ago
Recently the name of the producet was updated to be called "FSD (Supervised), ffs, even if it was delivered, it was called FSD in 2017...basically 10 years ago.
jansport123•40m ago
one one hand, i think showmanship can be used to generate interest for something that is far off and thus allow humans to pursue long term goals and i think elon has used this tactic in the past for the right reasons but these days it seems like he just uses this tactic to deceive people - almost like trump.
sportsracersss•37m ago
He's using it to hype his case for SpaceX acquiring Tesla.

Elon's M.O. is to roll his tapped-out prior ventures (including debts) into the current white-hot thing.

andsoitis•32m ago
> He's using it to hype his case for SpaceX acquiring Tesla.

> Elon's M.O. is to roll his tapped-out prior ventures (including debts) into the current white-hot thing.

SpaceX is the long game. It started before Tesla. It is not a fly by night operation.

parsimo2010•27m ago
While I understand your thinking, he rolled Twitter into SpaceX. He absolutely uses it as a financial vehicle, regardless of how legitimate the space business is.
andsoitis•15m ago
It is standard practice for companies to have some of their businesses subsidize other parts of the overall business. Not sure why people are so fixated on this case. It is also not unique to technology at all.
ambicapter
Hydraulix989•35m ago
Even the Cybertruck reservations took years to materialize, at a much higher price.
mvkel•32m ago
I maintain that the entire event was to create a trail of evidence that justifies merging Tesla and SpaceX. No car will ever ship.

You can hear it in the voices of the creators, when they're giving an overview of the car to MotorWeek and other car media outlets. 99% focused on the rocket and battery tech/innovation, almost zero about the actual driving characteristics of the car, or that it -is- a car. Seems more like a rolling marketing mule.

andrewtbham•19m ago
100 percent agree... PR stunt to assist acquisition of Tesla so Musk can gain control of Tesla
vannevar•14m ago
The specs of the base (non-rocket-powered) car are pretty mediocre: RWD-only with 320 mile range. That's not terribly impressive in 2026, by 2028 it will be obsolete on delivery. The styling can charitably be described as generic. I agree, I don't think they have any intention of making this car.
ourmandave•26m ago
Wasn't it purpose built for the Hot Wheels demo?

Insane acceleration to get up the ramp and enough fuel to land safely.

Unless you have a giant ramp or a penchant to drive off cliffs who is lining up for this?

jefftk•24m ago
> Insane acceleration to get up the ramp

It climbed the ramp very slowly. It doesn't require insane acceleration at all, just a reasonable amount of power at the wheels combined with a fan that can hold it to the track.

ourmandave•19m ago
Sorry, I'd only heard a 0 to 60 mph in 1 second and assumed. =[

I suppose the Fast and Furious guys are work shopping a scene around this.

jefftk•18m ago
If you have not watched the ramp video, I really recommend it. It's very impressive, even if it doesn't make any sense in a consumer vehicle.
gandhiandy69•17m ago
100k people will be driving Tesla Roadsters on Mars in 3 years
ZiiS•10m ago
Conversely, I can guarantee they won't get the functionality demoed.
ok123456•1m ago
No insurance will touch that car with a 10-foot pole.
cyanydeez•1h ago
Worlds richest nigerian prince wants list of most gullible people.
Kevin_Flynn•1h ago
I would pay you to write executive summaries for me.

That was perfect.

onlypassingthru•56m ago
Serious question, do better how? What if reusable rockets and S3XY cars were the breakthroughs and everything after is just meh?
Kevin_Flynn•49m ago
To be clear, my intention was not to throw shade on SpaceX or Tesla as companies, or on any of their USEFUL products. I like both companies, and their products. I'm a customer.

My intention was to demonstrate the intent behind the demonstration, as physics says this is 100+ times more inefficient than a business jet, and will never fly more than 5 miles given its current size. Thats not me, thats PHYSICS.

This was a sales pitch for a corporate merger, not a product launch.

This is financial engineering.

So by "do better" I meant, think longer term, solve a real problem. They have the resources, and the talent, and we got a donkey show.

pfdietz•44m ago
Literal Skynet may be something, but "meh"?
bcatanzaro•31m ago
Tesla isn’t interested in building cars. They canceled SX in order to build the Cybertruck. I expect they’ll let 3Y just get really old.

Instead of S3XY cars we get stunts. Solar roofs, Concept car roadsters, and of course humanoid robots.

If only Tesla would be interested in cars again.

RobotToaster•22m ago
First time I've seen "longer queues than the soviet union" used as a defence.
gremlinunderway•6m ago
This has to be a satirical response. Please tell me it's satire. If it's satire it's actually a pretty bad caricature of elon fan boys.

Because I can't believe anyone would seriously make a comparison to a 55+ year old car manufactured in a communist country.

It's like saying that an email server that takes a week to send emails is fine because the wait times for a posted letter in the 1960s could take 2 weeks.

WarmWash•22m ago
The media will turn anything into a story if they sense it can be framed in a way that draws clicks.
ambicapter•4m ago
If there's anything we've learned in the US in the past ten years, is that this new breed of corporations and government officials will gladly take the "standard" set of rules that everyone has been operating in in good faith and exploit the gaps as hard as humanly possible.
•
2m ago
X is less of an "other part of the overall business [SpaceX]" and more of a bolted-on, completely unrelated part merged together b/c of financial difficulties.
otterley•21m ago
It’s all about how you frame it. He could have framed it as a technology demo instead of as a new car that will ship. That would have been equally impressive and more honest.

RepRapMicron

https://github.com/VikOlliver/RepRapMicron/wiki
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