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As long as said stream is next to a conveniently placed ramp and a cheering audience who are equally swollen.

Since the “rockets” only have about a second of propellant, hopping bodies of water with unknown depth seems like a bad idea. Or is this car also supposed to be a boat just like the cybertruck?

I guess as long as we’re thinking up increasingly outlandish use cases, how about being able to park at the top of buildings when there are no parking spots available. Or being able to hop over the parking gates at theme parks. What about bypassing the speed limit at school zones or hopping over stopped school buses. Oh and no more waiting for draw bridges or railroad crossings. The uses really are endless!

Is that where we are on the technology curve, putting rockets in cars to get out of a ditch? I can think of about a dozen simpler and safer solutions if getting out of ditches is the main use case. Anyway isn’t FSD supposed to keep us out of ditches to begin with? If we have to reach this hard to find a justification for a rocket car, then maybe it’s not really justifiable.

What, you don’t think the solution to a situation with too much out-of-control kinetic energy is to inject a whole bunch more semi-randomly-directed kinetic energy?

It can only fly for a few seconds, no? Where are you going to land in a snow storm if the literal Interstate is impassable? Everywhere else would be worse.

We look exactly like the Simpsons before they nerfed the animation.

Me too. But it’s better than wanting a megayacht or some other more ridiculous affliction, isn’t it?

I think for an individual owner there are some downsides, but if you're a big developer buying a large piece of land it can become a selling point. There's a private residential development in my state where they completely enveloped the entrance to an existing state park trail/boardwalk. So to access it, you actually have to go through this gated community. Supposedly anyone can go in if they say they're going to the state park, but I'm not sure that's true in practice and you have to interact with the private guard gate and show ID. I was able to go in with my family, but we look like a typical suburban family, so that doesn't mean others wouldn't have more trouble. It's a pretty gross case of effectively privatizing a public resource.

Not sure if you meant it that way, but this comes across as a bit hostile. Do you care to share some specific rules you think are being violated?

I think a somewhat plausible scenario is that even if you made a great product that’s heavily AI aided, you don’t really gain a lot by trumpeting that fact. There are a lot of downsides to saying it’s made with AI and almost no upsides. So unless AI is somehow central to your product or you’re trying to ride the hype cycle, you’re probably better off not mentioning anything about AI.

According to some AI proponents, that’s like 60 months in pre-AI time.

Ok I’ll play, but you’re not going to like the answer: Xi Jinping. Putting aside all the valid criticisms of China under Xi, the scale at which they’ve embraced electric car and solar energy puts anything Tesla has done to shame. We’re talking more solar and wind capacity added in one year than the U.S. has in total. And China has done more to lower the cost of solar panels and batteries than anyone else while dominating global production. None of it would be possible without an intentional national policy.

I believed this at one point as well, but that’s not happening anymore. Tesla became what it is while leaning on generous electric car rebates that drastically reduced prices of their cars (especially when leasing), not to mention the millions in carbon credits that other car makers paid to it that was basically another subsidy. Then once Tesla achieved economies of scale and paid off the early fixed costs, he no longer supported subsidies for electric vehicles. That’s pretty classic pull-up-the-ladder-behind-you behavior. The net effect is a drop in overall electric car growth and the scaling back of electric car development by many of Tesla’s competitors.

Spending 100s of millions to help elect people who believe that climate change is not real, and who enact policies to delay and roll back what little the U.S. has done to reduce emissions.

What if I told you every bucket within about 4 light years of us is known to have no water, no air, and hot/cold as hell? And even the worst part of the current bucket is better than any other bucket we know of?