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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Not only 80s! Plenty of sci-fi shows had something similar as a generic future car design base, except with a proper paint job and extra lights here and there. This car can be easily turned into something that looks properly modern.

Related, this seems to be something of a theme with Musk's companies. Landing rockets is an old-school concept, and Starship looks like it was taken straight from the cover of some pulp sci-fi work from the 60s.

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Your latter observation is not surprising. The 60s-80s were times of confidence in the future, in progress. We visited the moon, flied in supersonic airliners, and we were confident that we would keep exploring always further, always faster.

Now that spirit has largely faded away, the West seems to have lost faith in progress in exploration and is focused in preserving what we already have - sometimes for good reasons (environmentalism and fight against climate change), sometimes not (disproportionate attention to minor threats like terrorism, fear of immigration, etc.)

Musk clearly still believes in progress and exploration, hence it's not surprising that his designs end up evoking reminiscences from that era.

The 80s were when we thought the US and the USSR would kill all of humankind with H-bombs. Blade Runner if what we thought the future would look like if we were lucky enough to have one.

And this new Tesla seems reminiscent to me of that pessimistic idea of the future, trying to survive the apocalypse on Earth. Not like the optimistic future of 2001 A Space Odyssey.

Did you? While I was not alive yet in the 80's, according to my parents, the threat of a nuclear war was gone in the 80's already, due to Gorbachev. (we are 'from the other side')

Born in late eighties in California. My parents named our first dog after Gorbachev. I think that relief was felt from this side as well.

Yes, the only way Starship could look more retro futuristic would have been to use the ticket from Tintin:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bb/The_Adv...

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