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College Grads Create Fake Tesla Commercial That Elon Musk Loves
cartechboy (2660665) writes "Two University of Southern California grads were looking to start a digital content company so they decided to roll the dice and create a home-made (but incredibly professional looking) television commercial for Tesla — just to see if they could get some attention for it. Well, apparently, mission accomplished. R.J. Collins and James Khabushani took $1,500 and created a 60-second Tesla 'faux-mercial' dubbed 'Modern Spaceship' that is well, pretty good. Elon Musk noticed, tweeted it and has helped the thing go viral."
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My answer: no.
This is an enjoyable commercial.
Question: why cannot the "professional" commercial makers do this sort of thing? Why are current car commercials always screaming at me?
It's not a fake commercial. It's a real commercial. They just made it without having been asked or paid.
Better known as 318230.
It is all about being frugal. I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it left.
Really? I'm making under 100K in Canada and I'm driving one... Why? I don't have to line up at Costco for gas... It just goes. Ya, so it's more expensive up front compared to other cars, but it just works. I don't have to look at the gas gauge and try to figure out my next route to the gas station. I simply bypass the people making a right turn right onto the highway. Oh ya, and the carpool lanes also allow green cars... instead of being stuck in traffic going to work, I have a pass to ride the pool lane by myself to get to where I have to.
BTW my other car is an 2013 Odyssey, half the price, to go camping... It does about 15l/km fully loaded. So I get about 300km/tank... But I get there.
I eval'ed a Kia Rio 5 vs the Ody. On an unloaded trip up north, I got 5.9 on the Kia Rio (dealership let me try it for a few days) and 6.1 on the Ody (213Km trip). (I do contract work). The Telsa just blows everything away. I got pulled over on highway 12 a couple of times, because the OPP wanted to check out the car. Let's just put it this way. From requested tests, the Tesla can blow away anything for a fraction of the cost of the really beefy cars.
Instead of linking to some site linking to or embedding the ad from youtube,
here's the actual youtube link.
This is a very common kind of thing done in most college film schools, where students are encouraged to make a commercial about some product that they like and promote it as if they were hired by that company. I had a rather progressive high school where I did that as a high school junior for a television communications class.
Really, it isn't that big of a deal. If the company itself picks up the commercial and runs it as if it was their own, that is where the FTC gets real nasty.
The other thing to worry about is that these guys posted the video on YouTube. Technically Tesla could yank the commercial as a violation of their trademark, and I suppose if it was misleading or doing something to ruin their reputation, they certainly could send in a DMCA request to YouTube and cause the commercial to be pulled. On the other hand, if it is this good, it is free advertising for them and generates buzz with a whole lot of people seeing their products in positive light, so it generally is a win-win situation for companies to support
Just like the Chinese have been able to undercut the price on SpaceX rockets?
Not saying that just because *one* of Musk's companies managed to make something (in the USA!) for less than the Chinese or Russians could manage means that *all* of his companies will have the same fortune, but there's a lot of engineering knowledge that goes into making a Tesla. Yeah, cheap knockoffs - things that don't have anywhere near the specs - will probably appear, but they won't have much penetration outside of Asia.
Tesla doesn't just "make electric luxury cars". They make electric cars that have both more range *and* more efficiency than anything which can reasonably be called a competitor (i.e highway-safe enclosed multi-passenger vehicle). I don't have a clue how they manage to beat the others so handily on efficiency, but it's a critical factor for an electric car. A gasoline car with low fuel economy can just use a bigger tank, but that strategy breaks down with batteries much earlier.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
'Self made' is a myth, all of them had to first develop strong and binding connections with sources of capital, influence and discreet knowledge not their own. It is as much, and more in most cases, the cultivation of these relationships as it is their talents and vision that make for success.