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Comment by aww_dang | Hacker News Reader

I saw this flame war on youtube and reddit.

I noticed that there was a statement from the driver about crosswinds blowing him onto the shoulder during his fastest run. However, I didn't see anything like that in the video. I assumed this meant they didn't want to show that run because the potential danger of being blown off the road wouldn't look good. Perhaps they mixed the speed data with a safer run from earlier in the day. This would explain the discrepancies.

If this is true, perhaps they are simply using the calibration talk as a red herring to distract from the misleading video. This scenario would allow them to not take responsibility and comeback with a genuine record.

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They pretty much got caught blatantly lying. It’s possible that Shelby didn’t know it was faked at first, but by now he’s had the chance to find out and is complicit in the lie since he hasn’t confessed. I think a lot of other companies are going easy on them because they have also cheated and don’t want to start throwing stones in their zillion dollar sky castles, lest all the ultra rich owners that never drive their cars find out it’s a lie.

But expect to see a lot of hemming and hawing about how they’re having a tough time getting this next attempt scheduled and ask the permits in place. Because it isn’t going to happen. If it could, then they would have released the real footage and data to begin with.

So what exactly makes you think it's not possible for this car to achieve that speed? Do you think all of the publicly released stats are a lie?

The publicly released stats by them? Yes I think they are a lie for now, they’ve been shown to be dishonest. If a Tuatara owner wants to post specs that weren’t measured with the help of SSC, then I might believe them. But so far the independent analysis points to the car not going that fast.

This wasn’t an “editing” error where the framerate of the video accidentally was slowed down, it wasn’t a GPS calibration error, it was a company being caught in a lie. It happens from time to time, especially in motorsport.

Edit: to clarify, it’s not on me to prove that the car isn’t the fastest in the world. It’s on SSC, which is making the claim, to prove it. That their first attempt has been debunked means they will be given more scrutiny the next time around, and I’m not confident that they will do it. Because if this was just an editing error, why don’t they just go back to their footage and show us the real stuff? Did it conveniently get deleted?

That's valid, there's certainly something going on with the video thing. I guess my current thinking is that trying to fake the video in the first place would be tremendously stupid. Then on top of that to do such a bad job. So maybe it was an accident in video editing. But yeah, it's possible they're completely full of shit.

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