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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?

This suggestion lands like someone suggesting that people making $25 an hour in the most expensive city in America are going to consider throwing away $190 to save 15 minutes. In other words: incredibly out of touch with reality.

As a side note: the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else. 2,450 sold for the entire production run. A failure for any purpose except publicity. The model S is the one that changed things, and it was never widely criticized as impractical or only for rich idiots.

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> People making $50k a year in Manhattan are going to pay $200 to get to the airport while also having access to a helipad anywhere near where they can afford rent?

Regularly? No. Most people aren't regularly taking helicopters anywhere, in part because their ability to fly around New York usually requires VFR conditions.

Occasionally? Yes. If you live in Harlem and need to get to JFK, you're paying an outsized time tax to get to and through Grand Central or Penn Station compared with taking the West Side Highway down to the 30th Street heliport. If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.

(I'm ignoring the outer boroughs and New York's surrounding suburbs, for whom this could actually be a game changer.)

> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it is a dumb car for rich people

Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.

> If eVTOLs take off, it's way more realistic to site a helipad uptown than dig a new rail tunnel.

We will see what happens the first time one of them crashes.

Obviously there are a lot of variables but helicopter and city bus crashes happen so we’ll have some idea what to expect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Hudson_River_helicopter_c...

https://abc7ny.com/post/mta-driver-injured-bus-crashes-store...

> Without which we wouldn't have any EVs in the West, and globally be years behind where we are in EV adoption.

... Eh? The very successful Nissan Leaf (for quite a long time the best-selling electric car in the world) came out the year after the Tesla Roadster. The Renault Zoe (again, quite successful) came out about a year after that, if you're really hung up on the 'west' thing.

> the Tesla Roadster sales figures completely support the idea that it was a complete flop of a car that didn’t even appeal to impractical rich people or anyone else.

Tesla never meant to sell it in large numbers, and they probably couldn’t have made many more anyway. And this still represented around $3bn if revenue and helped get Tesla off the ground.

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