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Not to defend Nikola, but people are quick to forget that iPhone's first presentation was a lot of smoke and mirrors? "Hours of trial and error had helped the
by fma 6y ago
Not to defend Nikola, but people are quick to forget that iPhone's first presentation was a lot of smoke and mirrors?
"Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked."
https://gizmodo.com/the-iphones-first-demo-was-buggy-as-hell-1441324523 https://gizmodo.com/the-iphones-first-demo-was-buggy-as-hell...
- jryle70 6y agoThat's common for tech demos, especially software demos. Hardcoded values, scripted paths, etc. Nikola's presentation was something else: > "We will have a chain on the seats to prevent people from coming in just for the safety. I don't want someone to end up doing something and driving this truck off the stage," Milton said. "This thing fully functions and works, which is really incredible." He specifically boasted that it was a fully working machine. That's a lie.
- gibolt 6y agoThey didn't take 4 years more to get something working afterwards. Nothing that was promised or shown didn't work, even if hacky
- jo032 6y agoNikola unlike Apple has no track record of shipping anything. But I do see your point about what they're doing (overhyping the future roadmap) being quite common. IMO the people comparing this to Theranos are wrong. Theranos sold a product to consumers that didn't have the capabilities it was advertised to have, whereas this is a transparently stupid company without a single product or customer except for the founder's self-dealing at his house. A lot of retail investors are gonna be hurt by this, but it's not clear to me that it's fraud
- ric2b 6y agoThe difference is that's a demo and companies don't say "this prototype I have right here is fully functional", that's just a bold faced lie.