It didn’t go through

Friday, November 22nd, 2019

I was not expecting Tesla’s new “cybertruck” to look like this:

“As processing power grows,” Paul Graham quipped, “future versions of the cybertruck will have more curved lines.”

Comments

  1. Kirk says:

    If that thing ever sees production and widespread use, I’ll be amazed.

  2. CVLR says:

    Finally, a car that doesn’t look like literally every other car. I can overlook the presentation, which was satanic and tattoo-laced; its ugliness, worse than sin itself; the general vibe of having been transported forward in time from the set of a 35yo movie; the fact that that fat autist actually stood on stage and called the yet-shattered glass “transparent metal”. Literally any innovation at all: I support this movement.

    I want my flying wings, touchscreen walls, flying cars, O’Neill colonies, coriolis-effect coffees, weird genetic mutant Belt untermenschen, and Werner von Braun-narrated quasi-informational public presentations, damnit.

    Why was Chicago of 1893 infinitely superior to that of any “modern” city? Where are the cathedrals the size of pyramids? When will man walk the surface of an extraterrestrial body?

    I demand greatness, and by GOD I shall have it.

  3. lucklucky says:

    Seems a 4×4 Lamborghini

    Btw there was an angular one in 80′s Lamborghini Cheetah and then LM002
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_LM002

  4. Felix says:

    Love the emphasis on how it protects the occupants as they drive through rock throwing mobs. ZarDoz had a more sustainable and green solution, what with their bubble and all.

  5. I’ll bet it has an extremely low radar cross section with all those flat, sloped sides.

  6. Long says:

    Why was Chicago of 1893 infinitely superior to that of any “modern” city?

    I think John Bagot Glubb had this figured out. Perhaps you have read his famous booklet – just a few pages, a very quick read — about the rise and fall of empires.

    http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

    His comments seem to reflect the USA’s history with remarkable insight, e.g.:

    The United States arose suddenly as a new nation, and its period of pioneering was spent in the conquest of a vast continent, not an ancient empire. Yet the subsequent life history of the United States has followed the standard pattern which we shall attempt to trace — the periods of the pioneers, of commerce, of affluence, of intellectualism and of decadence.

  7. Kirk says:

    “I want my flying wings, touchscreen walls, flying cars, O’Neill colonies, coriolis-effect coffees, weird genetic mutant Belt untermenschen, and Werner von Braun-narrated quasi-informational public presentations, damnit.

    Why was Chicago of 1893 infinitely superior to that of any “modern” city? Where are the cathedrals the size of pyramids? When will man walk the surface of an extraterrestrial body?

    I demand greatness, and by GOD I shall have it.”

    There’s something here, expressed in these paragraphs, that goes to a sense I’ve long had about these things, and it’s very much in alignment with things like the lust for “military glory” or “artistic achievement”.

    And, that sense is that the urge for these things creates the seeds for their own destruction. Perhaps they’re necessary, but the reality is that most of the time, most of the places…? They’re utter failures.

    Examine Isambard Brunel’s Great Eastern for an example–He struck out for a ship that could reach Australia without refueling, carrying 4000 people. It never attained operational success in that role, and we remember it more for having been converted over to lay the first transatlantic cables.

    Likewise, the same sort of hubristic failure can be observed in a lot of other fields; the French embraced la gloire at war in WWI, ignoring the prosaic underpinnings of things, and slaughtered entire generations before the guns of those prosaic and practical German bastards.

    You can demand “greatness” all you like, but the reality is that you’d do a hell of a lot better to make sure the goddamn plumbing works the way it is supposed to. You don’t get glory from cholera.

  8. chedolf says:

    CVLR: I want my flying cars…

    What percentage of the public do you think can navigate in vertical axis without killing themselves and random bystanders? If you come up with a number over 10%, you are wrong.

  9. TRX says:

    I had the misfortune of driving both an “anteater” Ford Aerostar and a Chevy Lumina van with an equally long, slanted windshield.

    The angle makes driving them a psychedelic experience, as the slanted glass reflects and refracts light from unlikely angles. The air conditioner and defroster were not up to the acreage, nor were the sadly overworked windshield wipers. The sheer size of the windshields make them collect huge amounts of rain, at sharp angles, so the only wiper speeds are “not enough” and “please, more.”

    They also suck to clean; many owners wound up either leaving them dirty inside, which compounded the vision problem, or resorted to using giant Q-tips made out of old T-shirts taped to broom handles.

    At the speeds cars travel at, the ridiculously-sloped windshields have no aerodynamic advantage over a short vertical one; it’s just styling. (yes, I know it’s counterintuitive; there are several NACA papers at http://naca.central.cranfield.ac.uk/ that go into it)

  10. TRX says:

    > Finally, a car that doesn’t look like literally every other car.

    You might still find a Pontiac Asswi… Aztec that hasn’t been crushed.

    Besides the point-and-hoot styling, most of the ones sitting unsold on the local lots were bright yellow with camouflage upholstery.

  11. Kirk says:

    “What percentage of the public do you think can navigate in vertical axis without killing themselves and random bystanders? If you come up with a number over 10%, you are wrong.”

    I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: If flying cars ever come in bigly, you’re gonna see an equally large movement towards people living in underground bunkers that flying cars can crash on top of without killing the homeowners…

    It’s bad enough living on a rural road with two 90-degree turns on within about a tenth of a mile; you add in a third dimension, and we’re all gonna be ducking and covering every time we hear something fly overhead. Mostly because that will be a rational reaction to the effect of putting several tons of flying machinery into the hands of the lowest common denominator–You want to get twinges of panic over the idea, just go down to your local mechanic and spend some time looking over what people bring into him on the daily. Brake disks worn through, brakes that don’t work, period. It’s a sobering realization, when you recognize what shows up on the highway with you…

  12. Sam J. says:

    I think it looks fairly good. It’s WAY better than the prototype picture that was floating around earlier. That truck was ugly.

    https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/tesla-pickup-truck-accurate-render.jpg

    TRX’s comments about slanted windshields does make sense and could be a great distraction.

    I bet he sells a shit ton of these. Long lasting stainless steel, comfortable interior, cheap to drive with portable power. I bet contractors will buy them by the bushel. They’re perfect for local contractors or any kind of local business that needs a truck every so often. Basically a boss in some sort of small business that needs a bed every so often. It will kill the main line truck manufacturers. They will have to lower their prices and if I understand correctly most all of their profits come from trucks. It may finish off Ford if they don’t do something very fast to catch up.

    I bet if the design looked more like this prototype he would sell more.

    https://d1lss44hh2trtw.cloudfront.net/assets/editorial/2019/11/tesla-truck-concept.jpg

    One thing I haven’t heard anyone comment on is he can bend that body with rollers. An assembly line with sheets of steel running through rollers that bend the creases, cuts the steel to shape and then places and welds it together. It would be easy to automate and he has always wanted full automation.

    I’ve often wondered why they don’t roll body parts for cars. Two big rollers squash the body shape as they roll the steel through. If you look at an english wheel, used to shape body panels before presses, you can make more than one pass to shape the steel.

    https://www.eastwood.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/p/1/p14156.jpg

    You could have an linear assembly line of rough and then finish roller press/dies.
    The traditional vertical die presses are slow. A cylinder roller press/die could zip sheets right through. Cut them with water jets then weld , or even better, snap them together with zip tie type serrations pressed into the sheet metal that are pulled tight by a strip of metal tension bands or wires locked at the ends.

  13. Slovenian Guest says:

    If i had to finally trade in my trusty Lava Niva I’d rather go with the all electric Rivian R1T pickup!

  14. CVLR says:

    Long: “Glubb”

    Thanks for the polite reply, but — oh give me a break. That military-caste-Anglo buffoon, in a desperate attempt to rationalize his lived observations, namely the managed offshoring of the military aspect of the British Empire, whipped history like a rented mule. There was no inevitable end to the British Empire; if it hadn’t been killed off, British soldiers would be haunting Afghanistan to this day.

    “Great civilizations don’t commit suicide. They are murdered.”
    — CVLR

    Yes, I’m also calling out that interstitial denizen of the dustbin of history and all-around nincompoop, Arnold J. Toynbee. He isn’t forgotten because he was a poor historian or an uncivilized man or an abominable boor — he wasn’t…probably — he’s forgotten because wars have consequences, and in the Second World War the Northwest European Protestant got the shiv.

  15. CVLR says:

    TRX: “At the speeds cars travel at, the ridiculously-sloped windshields have no aerodynamic advantage over a short vertical one; it’s just styling.”

    Which speeds? Air resistance increases with the square. Driving around town and driving on the highway are two very different aerodynamic regimes. The “shape” of the displaced air matters a lot too.

  16. CVLR says:

    Chedolf: “What percentage of the public do you think can navigate in vertical axis without killing themselves and random bystanders? If you come up with a number over 10%, you are wrong.”

    I can, and do. Let the 90% eat cake. The FAA has an infinite supply.

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