[rollinggoron]

Agreed. I know nothing about aerospace engineering or aircraft design, but the hype around Boom always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical supersonic jet, then surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, airplane design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

[chadash]

I agree with you, but to play devil's advocate, what if I changed your comment to:

Agreed. I know nothing about automotive engineering or car design, but the hype around Tesla always puzzled me. If this start up can all of a sudden make an economical electric car, then surely the existing automotive manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper. Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, etc... already have existing designs from decades past that they could at least use as a base. They have experts in material science, car design, and actual resources/contracts to actually build one. If it made sense.

Sometimes the incumbents are just too entrenched in what they are doing to make what out an outsider sees as an obvious move.

[Ajedi32]

Yeah, I hate this kind of weakly justified pessimism. Sure, if you just assume every new idea will fail you'll be right 95% of the time. But if everyone did that we'd be stuck in the dark ages.

I applaud people and organizations that take that chance, innovating and trying new things even when there's a high chance of failure. Worst-case, they fail and other people can learn from their mistakes and hopefully do better next time. Best case, they change the world.

[rollinggoron]

I wasn't trying to be pessimistic, just trying not the fall for the "too good to be true" hype machine common in tech (e.g. new batteries with 100x the capacity are right around the corner, carbon nanotubes uses, etc...).

Is this a new idea, though? It's not like supersonic commercial jets are a new thing and they haven't been built. The economics of building a commercially viable production supersonic plane is much more difficult to do than building a car or writing a new website to disrupt Facebook or Google.

I 100% agree that people need to be exploring this stuff. That being said, I'll believe it when I see it.

[cycomanic]

The difference there is that the traditional car manufacturers didn't want to push EVs because that would have canabalized their ICE business and their competitive advantage (electric motors are really easy to build in comparison to an ICE). That's how Tesla could just zoom past them, they did not want EVs to be successful.

The situation with supersonic flight is very different, the requirements and skills are very similar the ones of traditional plane manufacturers and supersonic flight wouldn't really canabalize their traditional business. I think they simply see that it doesn't make sense. I mean boom can't really explain what has fundamentally changed since tge concorde that supersonic flight is now economically viable.

[senko]

One can certainly argue that Tesla is overhyped.

[nfw2]

Sure, but no one could argue that Tesla is a Theranos-like operation. Arguments can be made about whether Tesla's valuation is reasonable, but it's certainly a legitimate car manufacturer.

[microtherion]

Tesla certainly delivers cars. But there are parts of it that are quite Theranesque, especially the self driving:

* Re-sell third party products for a while ("Until our own offering is ready"). If the recently posted self parking video is to be believed, the in-house products are still not on par with the third party predecessors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsb2XBAIWyA

* Pre-sell your product years before it's ready.

* Aggressively suppress internal and external criticism.

* Avoid objective evaluations of your product.

[panick21_]

Tesla has literally opened up its FSD Beta an allowed people to film it. We have more insight into its behavior in a huge range of different driving conditions then we have for anything else.

They have even change the terms&conditions to make it clear that beta testers were allowed to share.

Beta testers have shared lots of not-flattering things and Tesla has not 'aggressively suppressed' them.

They have asked for the outright fraud and slander campaign conduct by a competitor to be removed.

> * Avoid objective evaluations of your product.

Like what?

Tesla Vision (no radar/no lidar) has just been objectively tested:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/model-y-earns-5-star-safety-ratin...

There are no objective evaluations for FSD as nobody has actually made general full sell driving work.

But you can get the Beta and do any kind of 'objective evaluations' you want. You can even publish all the details, amount of interventions and so on of all your drives.

[sidewndr46]

You forgot "engage in lots of dubiously legal union busting"

[vkou]

That's pretty normal for all new firms, regardless of whether or not their promises have much to do with their deliveries.

[mrguyorama]

I'd say tesla's "full self driving" and "autopilot" claims are pretty theranos like.

There's zero way they don't KNOW internally that asking an inattentive driver to take over with no warning doesn't work, and that they aren't as safe as they are trying to spin.

[pclmulqdq]

What about the times when they announced different types of car models, promised delivery in a year, took pre-orders, and then didn't deliver (and still haven't)? That's pretty Theranos-y behavior.

[panick21_]

Delays in the car industry are pretty normal and you can get your reservation money back if you cancel.

[nfw2]

you read my mind :)

[gamblor956]

The existing automakers are making EVs faster and cheaper than Tesla did, and the EVs they are making have substantially greater build quality than Tesla's vehicles.

[signatoremo]

Tesla’s profit margin is higher than most of automakers. So no, EVs made by traditional automakers are not cheaper. If anything that means Tesla’s cars are more desirable because they can command a premium.

Faster? What is that supposed to mean? Tesla is the largest EV maker by volume (not sure if I miss any Chinese ones).

Substantial better build quality? Define substantial. Who decide that? Certainly not the consumers, because they can’t get enough of Tesla cars.

[gamblor956]

It's easy to goose profit margins when you don't use automotive grade parts and skip quality control.

Consumer Reports stopped recommending Teslas because of the abysmal quality of their vehicles. And every Tesla owner I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.

[panick21_]

This is just complete nonsense. Go look at the tear-downs of Tesla where actual engineers with automotive analyses each part. The reality is Tesla is ahead in a whole number of areas and have better quality in many areas.

Tesla have top ranks in safety, the best most performant interior board computer, their glass roofs are pretty amazing, their internal heating/cooling system is the best in the industry by far. The reliability of their engines and battery packs is actually extremely good. Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry. The Model S is literally the fastest production car in the world. They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging.

If Tesla gets criticized for quality control most of the times its fit and finish something a lot of people don't actually car that much about. The majority of Tesla cars are produced in China and those cars have an excellent reputation for quality.

> I personally know has said their first Tesla will also be their last.

Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry.

But I'm sure your personal experience is what is most important in this discussion.

[gamblor956]

Ah you mean Munro, who owns a ton of Tesla stock and has a commercial interest in promoting the "quality" of Tesla vehicles?

Because, objectively speaking, Consumer Reports, Car and Driver, and thousands of actual Tesla owners think that the build quality of their cars is crap. Literal 90's era Kia crap. And notably, unlike Munro, CR and C&D buy their cars anonymously so that Tesla can't goose the reviews.

Tesla has the highest consumer satisfaction ratio and the highest costumer retention ratio in the industry.

Objectively false, and indeed Tesla's abysmal customer satisfaction (nearly the industry lowest) is one of the reasons why CR stopped recommending Teslas.

Tesla have top ranks in safety

As does every other EV with a frunk. And a number of ICE vehicles like Subarus. The safety review tests rank cars collectively, so Tesla are in the top rank but are not the top-ranked, because that's not how the safety reviews are scored. And to claim otherwise is just another example of Tesla's deceptive marketing.

Their structural engineering with their castings is ahead of anybody in the industry.

Yes, it's so good that the Cybertruck has been delayed another year because Tesla discovered that they don't actually understand how structural engineering works. (Here's a hint: car panels are shaped and curved because it provides additional strength; creased flat panels are actually the weakest design you can use for automotive purposes on the basis of mass and need tons of reinforcement.)

They have the largest global fast charging system and the single best integration of cars and charging.

This is the only true statement in your comment. It's too bad (for Tesla) that they're planning to eliminate their only competitive advantage by opening it up to everyone. (Literally the only reason the several dozen Tesla owners I know still own Teslas instead of better EVs is because the Supercharger network is 10000x better than the alternatives. They're willing to put up with the shoddy build quality of the car and the absolutely horrific customer service because the charging experience dominates.)

[silon42]

They can easily make a better interior on usability.

[ngcc_hk]

Or better QC.

[mrtksn]

Unpopular opinion but wasn't Tesla subsidised and missed the cost goals anyway? My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Almost as if Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos imitated Musk instead of Steve Jobs and kicked the can down the road and delivered traditional but improved blood test machines and kept promising stuff down the road by collecting money and be edgy on Twitter, she could have been a hero by now.

I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Tesla makes the best computerised vehicles out there and has built a valuable charging network, not the stated goals but valuable anyway.

[MichaelCollins]

I wish Tesla would cut it out with the computerized car bullshit and focus on making the best battery cars instead. They shouldn't need bullshit like "it will be fiscally irresponsible to not buy our cars because it will be a robotaxi that pays for itself"; it imperils the long-term success of the company for a short-term boost in sales. And it alienates anybody with a modicum of critical thinking.

[mrtksn]

Okay but the genius of Musk was this computerised car stuff and it's exactly where the traditional car manufacturers fail. Just recently the CEO of VW changed and the important part of the failure of the previous CEO was their shit software on their electric cars.

It's not like Tesla managed to make cheap electric cars? They managed to make cars with good computers and this is something that people actually want.

Essentially, Tesla made the first usable as daily driver electric car by promising stuff that people believed they want(but very hard to make) so they can collect money and make sales but doing stuff that people actually needed(within the reach of the current technology) to live with electric cars.

[mrguyorama]

Actually, I desperately want the software world to stay as far away from cars as possible. Even in a VW, I know I will go 100k miles with zero issues with most of the stuff. Someone somewhere wants to put javascript between me and that, and I hope they have a bad life.

[mrtksn]

I suspect you are thinking of touchscreens, not necessarily the computerised cars?

[sidewndr46]

Musk didn't even contribute to the automotive technology, at all. It's the result of an acquisition of a company called "AC Propulsion".

[panick21_]

The narrative about Musk being some genius exploiter of subsidies playing 4D chess with all kinds of financial and marketing trickery is total nonsense if you actually look into it.

In terms of subsidies, Tesla wasn't actually subsidies that much. The received a 400M loan from the DoD for advanced vehicle manufacture. At that point however, even without the DoD they could have raised that money. Tesla payed that lone back early and with interest. DoD also gave much larger loans to GM and Ford, neither have fully paid back their loan yet.

The tax subsidies only started years later and Tesla profited from the 7500k tax credit. However this was limited to 250k vehicles and Tesla blew threw that very fast and have since operated without a tax credit and had to compete against vehicles coming in from all the global car companies that all got this tax credit. GM also used that tax credit. So did Tesla get a subsidy that helped them, I would say yes but this was open to all car companies and a number of them took advantage of it.

Tesla also gets the same tax reductions as any large company that makes large investments in particular regions.

> My impression is that Tesla succeeded thanks to Musks personality that made the customers forgive unfulfilled promises that they paid thousands of dollars for.

Not sure what this is based off. You don't build a company the size of Tesla based on forgiving costumers.

Yes, sure some costumers waited a while for their model 3 because of production issues, but this isn't really unique to Tesla. Car production often gets delayed. And costumers did not 'forgive' this universally, many canceled their order and bought something else.

But here is the thing, the demand for Tesla electric cars was so high that it didn't matter.

Tesla was successful because they had a product that a huge amount of people desperately wanted, and after some initial delay they got it to those costumers in very large numbers with very good unit margin.

In fact, Tesla often increased the spec of the delivered product compared to the one that was initially ordered.

And the money from reservation undelivered vehicle and FSD is certainty not why Tesla is successful.

Tesla is successful because they sell a 1 million+ vehicles a year with an automotive margin of 30%.

> I mean, Tesla still delivered stuff that people value. Just not the promised ones.

Can you explain what you mean? What did they not deliver on?

Some people (a minority of costumers) didn't get the FSD but that certainly not most costumers.

[mrtksn]

This comment itself is an example of forgiving customers.

If we agree to not make it a big deal of people not receiving the products they paid for and if we agree not to make it a big deal for delays and low quality then sure, Tesla is just as any other company.

If people didn't make it a big deal that Theranos runs its test on Siemens machines we wouldn't have had a Theranos scandal too!

If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos. Let's not make a big deal on how much blood is actually required to run the tests today, it would be 1 drop next year(update the next year every year)!

If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies. I think TicTac sweets had some trick like that, i.e. if you define 1 TicTac as one serving and if the calories of 1 serving is below the threshold to report you have 0 calories per serving and as a result you can claim the whole box is calorie free!

It really depends on what you choose to forgive or not, I guess.

[panick21_]

I have never spent a single $ on a Tesla product so I have nothing to forgive.

People should be able to get their money back for the FSD package, I totally agree. I don't know what the status of that is. In my opinion that it should legally clear that you can get your money back as it clearly does not does what it said on sale but I have not read the contract.

As a costumer that would piss me off if I couldn't get my money back on that and law suite would make sense.

Given the absurdly high demand for second hand Tesla and your ability to resell the FSD package while there are lots of people who pay extra for that package, it isn't nearly on the same scale as what Theranos did. In fact since many bought it of much less then it is now, you might have a change of making money.

And FSD sales are a tiny % of Tesla overall business. That makes it very different from Theranos. What makes it also very different is that Tesla has a reasonable chance at delivering and is continually investing and improving towards that goal. They have the capital to continue to work on that, they are not just burning investor money.

Theranos had no realist hope of ever making money and no capital to continue research.

> If we not make it a big deal for Tesla missing the targets for making the cars cheap and collecting pre-order money for products that not deliver(or deliver late if you kick the can down the road long enough) we can say the exact same thing about Theranos.

No we can't. That's an absurd claim. You reserve a product and you can get your money back if you don't get it, that is no different then many other reservations and is totally common practice in the industry.

And no idea what 'making the cars cheap' is supposed to mean.

> If you choose to put the threshold of "subsidy received" above what Tesla received, you can claim that Tesla did not receive subsidies.

Every large industrial company receives subsidies of various kinds. This is simply the world we live in. But some how it gets brought up far more often with Tesla then with other car companies while Tesla actually received less and they absolutely for certain did not receive enough subsidies to somehow claim Tesla was bootstrapped by the state or had some sort of unfair advantage.

So its really just used to downplay what they achieved, "Oh look they had X subsidy therefore XYZ". The reality is the car and road transport are subsidized and Tesla is part of that market.

I would prefer much of that money being spent on trains but I'm not gone shit on Telsa for existing in reality.

[mrtksn]

Sure, if you forgive every wrongdoing and if you omit every action of Musk that does not fit the narrative what is left is a honest cars manufacturer that succeeded purely on its own merits.

I can't really argue against that.

[klintcho]

This argument could be made about any big SV company the past 30 years.

- Anyone of IBM, Microsoft or Yahoo could build a better (quicker and cheaper) search engine than what a bunch of new grads from Stanford can (Google)

- Anyone of the car manufacturer can build a better (quicker and cheaper) electric car than a software millionaire (Tesla)

I don't agree with the statement, I think there are numerous reason people embark on ambitious project that incumbents "could" do, but are not doing;

- An unexpected insights,

- A new research breakthrough from some other field

- Collecting a bunch of the most bright people coming up at the same time in the field (Mueller for SpaceX comes to mind for instance) etc.

But most of the time it's just that it's not really in their business to do a 100 million dollar - 1 billion bet on something that risky, they are in the business of returning like 7 - 10% a year to their shareholder, not producing 5x returns (like the VC/startup business).

[rollinggoron]

Eh, I figured I would get this response but writing software e.g. your IBM, Yahoo, and Microsoft example is much easier and faster to do than building a cutting edge, physical, supersonic commercial jet. To build Google, all you needed was a computer, and a new approach/algorithm to solving web search. Software companies are much easier to disrupt than physical product companies.

As others have pointed out the Tesla isn't a great example either because building a car is still 100x easier to do than building aircraft, let alone supersonic planes.

"Unexpected Insights" and "A new research breakthrough from some other field" seems to be handy wavy. A supersonic jet breakthrough is not something that can be discovered in a dorm room. It requires millions in research and expensive materials to build and test against.

[klintcho]

I did include SpaceX as well, and I'm not sure one can find a better example than that, but there are others as well:

- Cruise + other self driving car companies (obv also a bunch of software, maybe even software focused, but looking at Waymo, they developed all their own hardware, LIDAR tech etc.)

- Commonwealth Fusion + a bunch of other fusion startups (obv they haven't really gotten to a product yet one could argue, but a bunch of breakthroughs in high powered electro-magnets has been made)

- Heart aerospace - electric planes

- Canvas construction - robotic plastering and painting for construction.

While supersonic flight has been proven, albeit not economically viable, it's still something that has been done, and done like 40+ years ago. It's not really on the "fusion power"-levels of difficult. But sure, I guess on could argue both sides equally well :)

In regards to research breakthrough, sure they were handwavy at least as it relates to jet engines capable to support supersonic flights. I don't have any sources but I have little doubt that jet engine / material breakthroughs has been made since the 80:s.

[chadash]

SpaceX, yes. But I think some of these other examples work against your point. Yes, some of them have raised lots of money (or even sold for lots of money), but revenue for Cruise + Commonwealth Fusion + Heart combined (I haven't heard of Canvas) is about $0 so far. It's yet to be seen if any are viable businesses even if they have already invented cool shit. To your point above, Boeing is not in the venture capital business. Their investors most likely want dividends and stock buybacks, not capital intensive moonshot bets.

[panick21_]

I mostly agree with you. I think Heart will manage it, doing an short range electric plane is not comparable to a supersonic jet liner. And the short range electric plane has a pretty clear market fit and very little technology risk unlike the supersonic jet.

[raverbashing]

Except costs for prototyping and building a plane are (no kidding) 100x the costs of prototyping and building a car

And that's for "easy" stuff like electric cars. Not a supersonic plane (which has a full bag of hurt to go with)

If you don't believe me just look at the price tag of a brand new Cessna (which is old/proven/boring technology)

[nfw2]

I also know nothing about the subject, but just to play devil's advocate here, doesn't SpaceX show that a startup could potentially solve hard physical engineering problems more effectively than established incumbents?

[pclmulqdq]

It does, but a supersonic personal jet is a much bigger feat of engineering than a rocket that lands. Most people don't appreciate that. We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem).

And SpaceX started with engineers who knew a lot about the domain of the actual problem (rocket engines). Boom has never designed an engine.

Starlink satellites are a great example of SpaceX solving engineering problems that an incumbent couldn't, but SpaceX was a pretty large company at the time the effort started.

[signatoremo]

Boom isn’t trying to do something completely new. Concord was in commercial services for many years. Benefits and shortcomings are well known.

OTOTH, there was never a rocket that could land, only suborbital prototypes. Shuttle doesn’t count since it’s reusable in name only, as it still cost substantial amount of money and time for refurbishing. In fact there are still no other reusable rockets, seven years after SpaceX did it for the 1st time.

[pclmulqdq]

I didn't realize that the Concorde was a private jet. Also, I'm not so sure that SpaceX has managed to achieve reusability (launch turnaround cost) better than end-of-life space shuttle yet. The space shuttle did take a lot longer to work out the kinks than falcon 9, but it was also a much more complicated vehicle.

[chadash]

> We had landing rockets in the 80's, but Boom was trying to do several things that are completely new. SpaceX's real technology is about launching the rockets cheaply, not re-using them (which is only part of the problem).

And we had supersonic passenger jets in the 60's. But they weren't economically viable. I'd argue that Boom is trying to do exactly what SpaceX is doing for rockets, which is to make supersonic air travel make economic sense. Any engineering that they need to do is really towards that goal.

[bell-cot]

Yes, definitely. BUT - there is a very wide and thinly-populated gulf between the folks who only talk about doing that, and those who actually deliver viable, working systems.

SpaceX went from founding the company to their first orbital launch attempt in 4 years, was obviously d*mn close to successful orbit 1 year later, and actually made orbit another 18 months after that.

Vs. Boom Supersonic, not having had to design nor build its own jet engines, is already 5+ years behind on their 1/3-scale, zero-passenger technology demonstrator even trying to taxi down the runway.

[samatman]

I would say that a brand-new rocket company making a rocket which can land itself would sound more implausible than what you're describing, if we didn't all know that it in fact has happened.

That doesn't mean Boom is that, however.

[hef19898]

Landing rocket boosters happened in the 70s already, and said rocket company benefited heavily from NASA, government and defence contracts and research. If Boom would have had access to supersonic jet research from the government, along with government contracts, development or production doesn't matter, RR wouldn't have stopped the cooperation.

Edit: Reusable or VTOL rocket were tested, successfully landing, in the early 90s by McDonnel Douglas under the DC-X program. No idea where the 70s thing came from...

[signatoremo]

Which rockets landed in the 70s?

Note that SpaceX didn’t get any meaningful defense contract until they’ve proved themselves with Falcon 9.

[MichaelCollins]

He must either be talking about the Apollo Lunar Module which first landed on the Moon in the 60s (but was not "landing a booster", much less on earth.), or more likely he's talking about the Delta Clipper which was in the 90s (and also not a rocket booster.)

Probably the latter, because there are some low-brow skeptics on reddit and youtube who inexplicably seem to think the Falcon 9 is a stolen Delta Clipper with a new paint job.

[hef19898]

I kind of take ofense with the low-brow reddit sceptic :-) Obviously, a Falcon 9 is not a reused DC-X. The technologyvto land a booster was already there before, it wasn't invented by SpaceX and was discussed as far back as the 60s. SpaceX made it possible, which in itself is quite an achievement. That nobody else tried so is due to the fact that there were not enough launches to make it economically viable (I found a ESA study on that topic a couple of years ago and subsequently lost it again, Google and DDG fail to dig it up again ever since). And whether or not reusable booster do make econommic sense or not, and just how many launches are needed to break even, is impossible to tell without SpaceX financials, they are the only ones doing it right now, which we don't have.

[panick21_]

But you are underestimating the challenge here. There is a difference between the landing and getting an orbital rocket first stage into a position to even attempt a landing.

The actual landing with propulsion is actually the easier challenge if you have an engine that can hover.

However SpaceX had to figure out how to get do supersonic retro-propulsion and basically making a heat-shield out of fire to protect the rocket on its way down, then navigate a terrible air-frame at high speeds and then do a never before tried hover-slam maneuver with an overpowered rocket engine.

That is very, very different from a DC-X that just goes up a bit comes straight down and then can do a slow landing.

I know some of the old space companies did some studies, you can also find a very long detailed post by Tori Bruno on the topic. The problem is, these studies and opinions are no necessary correct and in fact we know that they were very much incorrect. The assumptions both technical and economical these companies were making were simply not correct, at least not with the right engineering and investment behind it.

The study that you are talking about was from the 2010ish time right, not the 90s or something like that?

Arianespace/ESA totally fucked up with Ariane 5, instead of designing a booster that can dominate the launch market they designed a very niche booster and were forced to relay on Soyuz and couldn't beat Proton in many markets.

Partly this was because of Hermes and as they design Hermes it became bigger and bigger and so did Ariane 5. And then Hermes was canceled and Ariane 5 remained oversized.

[rockemsockem]

The reason why startups continue to make things that big companies don't is because your assumption that big companies *can* do it is wrong. They cannot due largely to organizational challenges and inertia in one direction or another. It is very rare that a large company successfully continues to innovate indefinitely.

[tarunkotia]

Also known as Innovator's Dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

Most established players don't want to cannibalize their existing market by launching a product in a niche segment. Sales and Marketing $$$ eat into the profits which is not easy to justify when you are profitable. If you are fighting for your survival then it's easy to reallocate resources to fight.

[deepnotderp]

Agreed, SpaceX has no chance against ULA /s

[pbreit]

"surely the existing plane manufacturers could do it quicker and cheaper"

How could you possibly think that?