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

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.

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.

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.

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…

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

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)

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 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.