[jollybean]

Telsa was selling hype to a lot of consumers willing to wait for perfection.

Boom is selling a tiny handful of planes.

So they have to solve these problems, largely when they launch.

Airlines are not going to run at a loss for a decade while things tune up.

[jbverschoor]

No it didn’t. It sold a lotus Elise, because it was the cheapest way to deliver a car, and the MVP to showcase electric. It did not at all sell hype to consumers waiting for perfection

[jollybean]

The early Teslas were overpriced for value delivered. They had shorter range, build problems etc..

People wanted to buy them because they were 'buying a dream' - and helping to move the ball forward.

There was a huge amount of 'good faith' in the process by early customers and supporters. Even to this day.

Tesla is an aspirational brand and people are paying an aspirational premium.

Boom will definitely be that as well. Execs will humble brag about their Boom flights, everyone will talk about - it's super exciting, super cool.

The issue I'm pointing to is scale ... will those smaller tranche of buyers be able to support all of the operational overhead of the airline and the ongoing R&D of the company ... is the question.

[herlitzj]

Honestly even if all we get out of this is an affordable low-carbon jet engine I'd call it a win. At the end of the day, Tesla is battery company that makes cars. Maybe Boom should try to be a jet engine company that makes planes.

edit: I say this as someone having little to no real knowledge of the aerospace industry :)

[nradov]

Elon Musk now claims that the final production Tesla Roadster used very few Lotus Elise parts. Even though the vehicles looked similar they ended up changing almost everything, and in retrospect using the Elise platform didn't save them anything.

[bryanlarsen]

Starting with the Elise provided a massive benefit: the ability to iterate. Big Design Up Front would have massively failed -- there were way too many unknown unknowns.

In the end the product was nothing like the Elise. But intermediate products were like the Elise, and could be driven and test manufactured and could inform revisions. A half complete scratch design could not have been.

[nickik]

Questionable. Going to a company that had experience with car body designs and getting an in-house designer would likely have been a better plan for them.

[bryanlarsen]

Many of their problem was due to the assumption that the electric car motor & batters from AC Propulsion were working as advertised and ready for mass production. That assumption was wrong. So the iteration was because changes in the propulsion system resulted in changes to the car, and changes in the car led to changes in the propulsion system.

[FireBeyond]

Elon also claims that he was the sole founder of Tesla...

... after he bought out the founder(s).

[gibolt]

It was barely an Elise by the time they shipped. So many changes were needed, that they said they'd have been far better off starting fresh, which is what they did with the S.

[jbverschoor]

I don't think that would've been better. It gave them a good start for a POC/MVP.

It's the same as some people who say "next startup, I'll go straight to insert scalable architecture". That doesn't work. You need your flexibility to experiment and find what really works in the beginning.