Tesla turns to 50-year-old stunt technology as it tries to Roadster again

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Nine years after first trying to resurrect the Roadster, Tesla is apparently trying again. CEO Elon Musk might have relocated its HQ to Texas, but yet again he has returned to California’s showbiz industry to hawk his wares; last time it was a Hollywood back lot for the remote-controlled Cybercab demo, last night it was decades-old stunt technology to make a show car do tricks in the air.

在首次尝试复活 Roadster 九年后，特斯拉显然又在尝试一次。尽管首席执行官埃隆·马斯克可能已将总部迁至德克萨斯州，但他再次回到加州的演艺圈来兜售他的产品；上次是在好莱坞外景地进行遥控 Cybercab 的演示，而昨晚则是利用几十年前的特技技术让展示车在空中表演。

The new Roadster, we’re told, will be unlike anything else, although the angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Giorgetto Giugiaro’s original Lotus Esprit—Musk is known to own a James Bond prop car—as well as the more recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear are four giant exhaust pipes; these do not signal Tesla’s sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation. Rather, it’s where 100,000 psi jets of compressed nitrogen shoot out.

据称，新款 Roadster 将与众不同，尽管其棱角分明的楔形设计在很大程度上借鉴了乔治亚·久加罗（Giorgetto Giugiaro）最初设计的路特斯 Esprit（众所周知，马斯克拥有一辆詹姆斯·邦德电影中的道具车），以及较新的兰博基尼盖拉多。车尾有四个巨大的排气管；这并不意味着特斯拉除了私人航空排放的碳氢化合物外，突然开始拥抱碳氢燃料。相反，这是 10 万 psi 压缩氮气喷射出的地方。

Unusually, Tesla says it stuck with rear-wheel drive for the new electric vehicle. The battery pack uses the troubled 4680 cells it has been trying to scale up in-house; customer complaints of poor performance were presumably the driving force behind developing what the company says is a special battery chemistry just for this model. Some of the performance claims are even more grandiose than nine years ago. Now, Musk claims a planned top speed of 383 mph (616 km/h), with a 0-60 mph time of 0.8 seconds.

不同寻常的是，特斯拉表示这款新电动汽车仍采用后轮驱动。电池组使用了该公司一直试图在内部扩大规模的、问题不断的 4680 电芯；客户对性能不佳的抱怨，大概是促使公司专门为该车型开发所谓“特殊电池化学成分”的动力所在。一些性能指标甚至比九年前更加夸张。现在，马斯克声称计划最高时速为 383 英里/小时（616 公里/小时），0-60 英里/小时加速时间为 0.8 秒。

And as with the last time this happened, there are already other EVs on sale that are more capable than Tesla’s vaporware claims. You want to drive upside down? And right now, that’s the McMurtry Spéirling, which looks like a miniaturized Batmobile (the good Michael Keaton one) and which is capable of generating up to 3.5 lateral Gs. The best Tesla claims for the new Roadster is 2 Gs. Oh, and the Spéirling will most definitely drive upside down.

和上次一样，市场上已经有比特斯拉这些“雾件”（vaporware）声明更强大的电动汽车在售。你想倒着开车吗？目前，McMurtry Spéirling 就能做到，它看起来像一辆微型蝙蝠车（迈克尔·基顿版的那种），能够产生高达 3.5 倍的侧向 G 力。特斯拉为新款 Roadster 声称的最佳表现仅为 2 G。哦，而且 Spéirling 绝对可以倒着开。

Will any of this happen? Musk claims that the Roadster will go into production by 2028. But the CEO has a long and glorious history of overpromising and underdelivering; in 2017 he told attendees at the previous launch that “We are making it now.” Using the company’s referral program, some people were in line to receive two free cars. But those free cars never showed up, and neither did the ones that people put down $50,000 deposits for; last year Sam Altman discovered how hard it can be to get that money back.

这一切会发生吗？马斯克声称 Roadster 将于 2028 年投产。但这位首席执行官有着长期且“辉煌”的过度承诺和交付不足的历史；2017 年，他在上次发布会上告诉与会者：“我们现在正在制造它。”通过公司的推荐计划，一些人排队等待领取两辆免费汽车。但那些免费汽车从未出现，人们支付了 5 万美元定金的车辆也同样没有下文；去年，萨姆·奥特曼（Sam Altman）发现要回这笔钱有多么困难。

Meanwhile, Tesla’s core business remains in trouble. Even in quarters with decent sales, its profits are vanishing as costs rise and selling prices drop. And most recently, sales have not been decent. Its stratospheric valuation was predicated in large part upon promises of constant growth, something that perhaps seemed possible when its market share was near total and there was little competition for EVs. But now Europe and China have hundreds of models to choose from—only two of which are offered by Tesla.

与此同时，特斯拉的核心业务仍处于困境。即使在销售额尚可的季度，随着成本上升和售价下降，其利润也在消失。最近，销售情况并不理想。其高得离谱的估值在很大程度上是建立在持续增长的承诺之上的，这在市场份额接近垄断且电动汽车竞争很少时似乎是可能的。但现在欧洲和中国有数百种车型可供选择——其中只有两款来自特斯拉。

But as Musk has told us time and again, Tesla is no longer a car company. Currently, he seems more interested in merging Tesla with SpaceX, claiming synergies having to do with AI despite most of his AI-derived revenues coming from renting GPU time to others. But a merger would give SpaceX a backdoor into the S&P 500 index, which rejected the rocket company in June, as it requires several consecutive profitable quarters for inclusion.

但正如马斯克反复告诉我们的那样，特斯拉不再是一家汽车公司。目前，他似乎对将特斯拉与 SpaceX 合并更感兴趣，声称这与人工智能有关，尽管他大部分人工智能相关的收入来自向他人出租 GPU 时间。但合并将为 SpaceX 提供进入标普 500 指数的后门，该指数在 6 月份拒绝了这家火箭公司，因为它要求连续几个季度盈利才能被纳入。