"Grip Car" | Hacker News Reader

"Grip Car"

teenage.engineering

37 pointslvkv46 comments

It’s an actual expensive toy - a €249 fidget car - released by a company famous for producing expensive toy-like musical devices.

I guess overpriced products like this are good at generating social media buzz and anchoring the brand as more prestigious. Not much different from gold apple watches or overpriced mac pro wheels. It’s basically free marketing.

I can only see this as diluting and harming the brand, not as making it more prestigious.

I wouldn’t say that - the brand is a design shop. They designed furniture for ikea, a handheld console, a clothing line, a PC case, and more. This toy is also well designed; I think it matches their brand well.

Their stuff seems more like art to me, like collectible examples of interesting industrial design.

In other words, it's a Veblen Good.

Teenage Engineering has reached peak Teenage Engineering. Not that it's a bad thing. Gotta respect the fact that they've got such a strong brand they can just put out a pure collectible / art piece.

And that thing looks like it's built to last a 1000 years.

Rubber tyres won't last a 1000 years. In videos available of it they already look a bit worn and dirty.

Some of the diagrams look like “introduction to drafting” assignments from back in the day.

Detractors don't see the need for this. But they already put out two other toys to be used as race tracks for these:

https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7/

https://teenage.engineering/products/po-80

Say what you want about that company and its products, but everything they make is absolutely, absolutely gorgeous.

They nail aesthetics. Good Lord.

It's actually highly disgusting for three reasons.

0: Were you the company, with that amount of money, you WOULD be able to do the same.

1: Drowning child argument plus social preface of wanting to be "good" & "altruistic" (applies to most humans; amplified by companies).

2: The fact that we need order, EG this. Perhaps most disgusting. By need, I mean that a superintelligent robot can go to a garbage dump & turn chaos into greatest instrumentation of the world, while humans "need" things to be beautiful & neat due to physical limitations.

Knowledge of this leads to celebration of OTHER things, at least in my case.

Out of curiosity, can this geometry be used for building electric cargo bikes/trikes. I'm always on the lookout for geometry that gives the same tilting gravitational forces as a bicycle but with the ability to be stable when stopped, and this looks promising.

I don't think just geometry will give you any of that. Weight distribution and dynamics might.

Hmmm...looking at the images the wheels rotate inward allowing a natural turn, while the center piece tilts in towards the center of the turn, so I think it does in fact allow you to tilt into a turn and thus be forced into your seat, the same way as a bike.

The geometry, with the front and rear axles turning on opposedly-angled tilted axes, looks identical to that of (the old four-wheeled kind of) roller skates. Swiveling the axles into a turn makes the whole thing tilt -- and conversely, tilting it swivels the axles so it turns.

And of course, come to think of it, skateboards.

Were those originally invented by nailing rollerskate trucks under a plank, or what? I'm fairly sure skateboards use bigger -- certainly wider -- trucks nowadays, but rollerskates definitely predate at lest the "modern" (i.e. post-1970s) skateboard boom... Just a WAG.

Are you not just describing a skateboard?

Found a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEwcCsT6AHg

It a lot bigger than what I imagined. Looking at those picture I thought its size of a keyring.

Is there any comprehensive list of all their contracted work? such as the rabbit device?

Playdate

Frekvens for Ikea (which included an unreleased turntable)

WTF is this thing? That's just about what I think with every teenage engineering product. Some of their others have been something I'd actually buy were the price affordable, this one on the other hand is just a big WTF. I had to double check that it's not Αpril 1st.

A very expensive Tech Deck

I feel like this would have done well on kickstarter as a reasonably priced fidget toy. $250 is nuts.

If you have to ask what it's for, you don't get it. It's art.

When you conceive of Teenage Engineering first and foremost as a design firm that incidentally tends to release neat synthesizers, so much of what they do will make way more sense.

Perhaps the act of fidget-spinning spurs on musical creativity

I seriously thought these were to hold in your hands and be able to "skate" in a prone position... (I wasnt thinking about the feet) -- but I was disappointed when I didnt find a video of some dorks in the 'burbs having an extreme summer with grip-carz

I have a feeling TE realised ages ago that as long as they design something well and provide a hip marketing page for it, they can sell everything. Borderline trolling by now.

One can admire their consistency: started with overpriced toys and continue with overpriced toys.

Doesn't the 194.5 number in the "FRONT" diagram need a bracket around it?

It could be the 194.5 or any one number (e.g. the 10), depending on which measure is actually considered important by the designer.

As presented, the designer would get points deducted in a drafting 101 exercise.

I see all the comments on this thread show as being only a few hours old at most, but they were posted several days ago. Not sure what's happening.

>This post has been rescued by the second chance pool at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

>When this happens, the relative timestamps (X minutes ago etc.) are reset to the time at which the post is selected for the front page. The absolute timestamps in the tooltips, like you have discovered, show the actual time in this case.

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37241997

Sadly, this in sort of on brand… but it is symptomatic of the infantilisation of society , which is all good except for the fact that it strips them of their agency and makes them ideal tools for the select few. Oh, and infantile parents also create terrible, unhappy, disturbed children, so there’s that.

Welcome to the prestige fidget spinner society.

Sigh.

Hey man, maybe just disconnect from the Internet for a while. I'm not trying to be snarky at all.

Legitimately when I feel like society is headed towards the end, I go do volunteer work at a soup kitchen or women's shelter or nursing home or something. It helps me understand that the mess I see online isn't necessarily real.

Not trying to be judgemental, but your comment sounds like you might need to just unplug for a couple weeks. A toy car shouldn't make you question some sinister plot to destroy us. Seriously.

Society has problems, but it's still pretty cool in the world.

This discussion feels very familiar. Didn't we have basically exactly the same set of comments earlier this week?

Ha! I had this exact same moment happen to me before[0]. Apparently:

>This post has been rescued by the second chance pool at https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37241731

Ah, thanks. I didn't realize the timestamps got updated too!

You're not going crazy :)

Hover over the "minutes ago" string on any of those comments & you'll see the original timestamp. I guess this is a repost, comments got merged, and the "minutes ago" strings are cached/pre-generated from the old thread?

Highest-end fidget spinner I’ve ever seen. Instantly appealing to my inner 6-year-old.

Imagine archeologists in 1000 years unearthing one of those and trying to figure out its purpose or cultural meaning… (and no, your data won’t survive)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dodecahedron

"They rarely show signs of wear" ...

This is depressing and infantile, honestly. At least before TE maintained a veneer of being related to creative activity. Now they really are a toy company for rich hipsters

They have always been toy company for rich hipsters. If I have had the money I would have had a lot of their products next to my other music toys that I sometimes (seldom) play around with to soothe my creative yearnings, some midi interfaces and some guitars. Would I label my toying around "creative activity"? I don't know, I think you have to define that for me, you make it sound so pretentious.

You don't have to buy it.

> Now

Now?? This is literally the most affordable teenage engineering product I've seen posted on hackernews.

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