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| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Do they at least pay good interest on the money they took in? Because a decade long interest free loan is a really weird thing and non-refundable only makes sense if they end up shipping them, and they should probably ship them before a sizeable fraction of their customers has died. 9 years to make a car... |
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| ▲ | btilly an hour ago | parent [-] | | A number of the people who paid those downpayments, were invited to the recent Roadster demo. Where they got to see a similar car demonstrated, complete with flying. And with no sense of whether it will actually be built, or will be street legal. |
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| ▲ | api 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Preorder down payments are a thing I won’t do anymore. Never done it on something that huge but I’ve been burned on one or two kickstarter type things. If you can’t pay and then take delivery it doesn’t exist. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I see kickstarter projects as gifts until proven otherwise. | | |
| ▲ | woadwarrior01 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Did you mean grifts? | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm an hour ago | parent [-] | | No, I would have added an 'r'. But seriously: there are obvious grift kickstarters, though the platform operators do quite a bit of work to keep those out. But at some point the line between 'grifter' and 'highly motivated but delusional founder' gets blurry and I'm happy I don't have to make the call. More so because it's going to be a mess of false positives and false negatives with plenty of overlap, even for experts in the various fields. So making it a marketplace is a good idea, the problem with that is that it then becomes a competition in marketing and glitz rather than solid financial, technical and commercial planning. Even so, iirc a good 65% or so delivers something and 10% or so delivers nothing, some other percentages in there were for partial deliveries or refunds. |
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