It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
It's being sold in two modes. One with cold gas (no combustion) seemingly just for extra forwards acceleration (no flying) and one with real combustion rocket engines, the latter was in the video and is "invite only".
Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
Even just the cold gas variant seems like a nightmare for production, there's a high pressure COPV in that thing and that's gonna make crashes much more.. exciting, and Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways. But very few of these are ever getting sold anyways.
This is probably just to hype up the stock. The stock is down 5% (5 days), up 1% (1 month), down ~7% (6 months), down ~20% YTD, down ~16% (1 year). It has a PE of 336 and dwindling YOY sales. Tesla’s U.S. vehicle sales fell approximately 14% to 20% year-over-year through the first three quarters of 2026. Rest of the world, Tesla is not competitive and will probably go down rapidly soon.
This Tesla event was apparently performed in front of a live audience. Yes I'm sure there's a hype strategy here but equating this with the Nikola scam is a stretch.
Also Tesla events rarely (if ever) get followed by a durable stock bump.
--
Edit: Credible independent videos have been released on YouTube by reputable people. There's no doubt that the spectacle did happen as shown by Tesla. That's not to say it's anything more than a carefully staged spectacle, but claims that it's fake or AI or CGI are absolutely debunked.
Just be aware you're moving from the territory of reasonable questions to moderately desperate conspiracy theory. Whatever it is we saw, it's clearly not lightweight. That much is obvious from the kinetics.
What you just relayed is another misleading claim purveyed by obsessives. Cybertruck is not a true exoskeleton design, but neither are the steel plates decorative. It is a hybrid -- the unibody shell carries some minimal structural load, but it's not sufficient on its own. The exterior skin is structurally necessary for torsional rigidity and contributes meaningfully to the overall chassis strength.
All major exterior panels are welded and/or bolted on. On the earliest revisions, the thin upper door trim strips were bonded using a bad structural adhesive which became brittle with temperature cycling. These were recalled and remedied with a different structural adhesive plus a welded stud. Such recalls are very common; the current generation Ford Explorer had multiple recalls for exterior panels falling off.
All car manufacturers demo "concept" cars that are real and work(for most parts) but mass production with reasonable price is just not worth it, in this case there is legal challenges too.
I suspect this is going to be a Cybertruck/Boring Company situation, where we may get something ostensibly called the same and may even do something one could consider similar when squinting (maybe a bit higher than U9 jumps in scope) but with the specs and implementation differing so greatly that it shouldn't be considered the same. Exoskeleton vs body panels, 200kph+ on electric sleds vs Teslas (driven by human operators; tells you how much they trust their FSD tech) in a tiny tunnel, FSD on HW3 vs an upgrade maybe someday, etc.
And inevitably two groups will clash, one pointing out how much this deviated from the original, often decade long promises vs another pointing at the identical naming, how it's still a product they like and of course the all time winner "I don't see you do X"...
For what it's worth, I'd file this as a RCS demo for SpaceXGrokSI (or whatever they call themselves this week) above all else and if I were a betting man, might be a prelude to fusing them into SpaceXSuperXTeslaXIntelligenceX...
FYI the dawn project was debunked as crackpot scammers who had their feet on the accelerator pedal to fake an "FSD crash", along with a slew of other underhanded and misleading tricks.
Don't forget that the leader of Dawn Project has financial conflicts of interest:
His software company, named Green Hills, supplies the RTOS for Mobileye, which formerly supplied driver-assistance hardware and software to Tesla (and continues to do so for other car companies). Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
So he has a very real financial incentive to convince the world that Tesla's system is bad.
Yeah no, something is very off on this and I cannot put my finger on it, the video looks odd to me. I want to say AIgen feel, but I only saw little tiny vids, rest were blurry as sin.
Makes sense though. First time I saw video of two falcon rockets doing a synchronized landing I felt the exact same way. Our brain is used to this type of stuff in movies and we know it's CGI. So when it happens for real and is filmed in 4K and a cinematic color scheme is added, it's hard for the brain to adapt.
Reading https://www.tesla.com/roadster, it seems like both variants only use cold gas thrusters, and the difference is that the "normal" (lol) one only has them pointed rearwards while the flying one has them pointed in all different directions as well.
Red flag thing was the UK's Locomotives Act 1865, which dated from before what we call cars were invented. More aimed at traction engines (steam engines that go on the road). Exactly the type of regulation people like to mock the EU for.
No, that's the mind of a person speaking that is thinking of the motorcycle standing at the traffic light just behind this car. Action, reaction, that sort of thing.
Best guess is that it's disabled for anything but track/trick stuff. There will be some cool videos eventually showing up with tricks people pull with this. I don't know what else it's for.
I can imagine the lateral thrusters helping it turn faster on the track. Although I wonder if the extra weight is going to net out positive for lap times.
But really, a few very rich people will buy the full-rocket version to impress their friends. They'll play with them on private property.
Solo track use at that. I can't imagine that other drivers are going to be all that happy if they get hit by the exhaust from one of the thrusters in a corner.
Gases dissipate very rapidly, even moreso if doing pulsing or whatever. Probably very unsafe for a human standing literally right behind it, but it'd likely have 0 effect on another car at typical driving distance.
Tesla's stock price might be detached from reality, but is their actual business in trouble? I ask because anywhere I travel (Europe, UK, HK, NZ for example) there are just tons of Teslas, most of them the latest refresh models. There were more Telsas than BYD in Hong Kong!
The business is doing fine, they’re profitable and regularly beating various targets. Honestly I think Elon is more level headed than people give him credit for, his companies are consistently profitable and generally produce competitive products.
If anything his companies are doing well despite of him, not because of him. There's level-headed and competent leadership in them resisting his bullshit.
The counterpoint of course is that he has demonstrated a consistent ability to build and run successful businesses, many of which are extremely high risk
The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies
SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed
Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc
These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.
I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)
I thought somewhere in the video they said that it is just regular compressed air that is held in a tank, and that the car itself has a compressor and regenerates the compressed air over time. Obviously to stabilize that amount of weight the gas has to be ejected at such a high rate it is practically frozen at the nozzle outlet, but it is still just regular air.
The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."
> Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model.
Teslas evaluation is based on hype. This is as hype as it gets for a car. To me it looks like they were in need for "the coolest thing". To me, this has the smell of desperation implying the beginning of the end of their high evaluation.
The Rodenator is an applicable device that injects a precise mixture of oxygen and propane into the dens of burrowing rodents, and kills them with a concussive force that collapses the rodents' tunnel system as well.
> devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible mode
Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value. There is a huge economy revolving around people annoying other people just for a glimpse of their attention. This captures the attention and pleases people. Other car companies should start getting creative too.
I suspect it "actually flies" much the same way the cybertruck is bullet proof and has an ultra hard stainless steel exoskeleton, in that it doesn't. This seems like smoke and mirrors conman shit pumped up to 11.
Is your assertion that the car shaped object we watched drive for a distance and then levitate over a distance was something other than a car that actually flies?
What distance did you actually see it "drive"? There is no evidence that the car shaped object was anything but a lightweight shell using compressed air to levitate and do tricks like any modern day drone can do.
It's compressed air RCS. The compressor, regulators and a ton of hardware take up the entire space from the seats back to literally the very last inch of the car. Hard pipes run along the door frame for the forward RCS, meaning only one person (driver) can sit in it and enter from the drivers side. Huge carbon RCS tanks fill every other space.
No idea how long it would take to recharge the tanks after venting them.
There's no room for 'car' stuff in it.
Interestingly there is a big... sleeve of wizard... that extends down under the car to assist the ground effect fan. Packaging that and the RCS stuff into it is a real engineering feat.
But it didn't look to have crash structures, or any other production ready hardware.
I think everyone is getting too caught up in the Thrust and Rocket variants. There aren’t going to be very many of those. But the base model will just be a regular Tesla.
I am pretty skeptical that that’s actually what was used in the demo. It would be so much simpler to just use whatever they use for the rockets for the demo, which certainly isn’t rechargeable
The website lists three modes, which all have the fan but differ in thrusters. The variants are: no thrusters (thus no COPV), acceleration-only thrusters, and flying thrusters. The flying one has the disclaimer "Note: Not approved for public road use." OTOH the acceleration-only thrusters may be street legal. However, I expect that the COPV will be kept empty (thus not dangerous) unless you select a special "launch mode".
Hopefully there will also be a warning siren while it is pressurized. "Dangerous enough to need a warning siren" seems like a plus for the target market, honestly.
>Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
it's wild to me after all of the on-stage lying that we're even considering what the future economics of the rocket-powered-road-car are going to be.
it's wild to me that he has yet to deliver on the self-driving stuff, but has decided to progress into rocket-powered circus vehicles.
it's wild to me that he's getting credit for a fan car, after 50+ years of on-track existence and the recent production of the McMurty.
I'm curious to see how it all pans out, and whether or not he has enough Washington connections to get a fan-powered rocket car onto the streets, and I am curious to see the first LA block-shutdown street race accident involving an intentionally aerial vehicle.
Historically fan cars haven't been allowed on the streets because they 1) destroy asphalt and 2) throw chunks of destroyed asphalt into traffic.
I'm not entirely sure how thrusters that can lift a 3k+ lbs sports car off the road jibe with preserving the roads for others.
Looks like a sensible turning down of the Cybertruck aesthetic into something that looks good.
That said, the production issues with the Cybertruck mean you’d be a fool to reserve one of these. Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls. Tesla has torched their engineering reputation lately and this page is making a lot of promises about revolutionary things.
The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.
This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.
Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).
> Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones
That's pretty standard. An M3 has long pushed the tolerances of things in the engine more than a base-model 3 series. An S-class has more whiz-bang-hope-it-still-works-in-ten-years stuff than a C-class. A Lexus has more going on than a boring base Corolla.
This type of vehicle isn't intended to drive at speed, at least not very far. It's targeted at collectors who will park it in a garage with their other supercars. It's a status symbol with wheels, not transportation or even a toy for track days. (And I don't mean that as a criticism, there's nothing wrong with wealthy people buying collectibles.)
Everyone is talking about the Cybertruck, but both the 3 and the Y have plenty of engineering problems as well. I believe both cars are listed as below-average reliability by CR.
Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ on an yearly basis until you get sick of fixing the suspension. Tesla claims to have fixed the issue on newer models (and apparently they did a lot of work on the suspension), but they don't really take responsibility for their old cars so I doubt they will take responsibility when their design causes problems for you.
I do enjoy driving my 2019 SR+ Model 3, but I hate when people do the whole "Well on first principles, EVs have less parts so they are more reliable..." thing. My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
Early Model 3/Ys built in the US were unreliable. The ones built in Shanghai, though, are excellent. Berlin is somewhere in the middle.
FWIW, I'm into my fourth year of (Chinese-built) Model 3 ownership and it's been rock solid, the only services so far were to replace the air filter and wipers.
Kind of a silly question but I want to be sure I’m piecing together a fair picture: both of those are five minute tasks you do yourself outside the auto parts store / driveway, right?
So many things you just said are wrong. The control arms are 100k mile parts, and you can easily replace them with Unplugged Performance versions for under $1k.
And I have no idea what kind of driving he's doing to spend 2-3k$/y . I got Front Upper Control Arms replaced under warranty, exactly once, in the lifetime of my 2019 M3 (also Fremont-built). I do a yearly inspection just to catch issues before they have a chance to become really problematic, but for the past 4 years I've always been told that "the car's underside is just perfect, there's nothing wrong with it".
> My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
This is less about EVs vs ICEs and more about Toyota's engineering quality vs Tesla's engineering quality, which is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Homer Simpson's barbecue pit.
I should note that I didn't mean to imply it was inherent that EVs were less reliable, but rather, that engineering mattered and Tesla's engineering always had underdeveloped parts.
That was my first thought, Cybertruck: The Car. But then it drove up a wall and stopped on the ceiling and flew down. That was awesome. I'm sure it will be a nightmare to own.
Not many. Elon said their plan was to produce 500k per year and they did less than 5% (15k) of that over the last year. Their installed production capacity is 125k.
The Ford Edsel is widely regarded as one of the greatest car flops of all time and it sold 60k cars per year for their 2-year production run.
The CyberTruck is a massively bigger flop than that.
Batteries are just not there. Rivian is not selling that well, Lightning got cancelled. New Ford truck looks interesting tho.
As for Cybertruck - they don't seem to be dropping the prices just yet and prices on secondary market haven't collapsed either. Like it or not - it's here to stay.
Name a few that you think are bigger and by what metric you think so.
I doubt any program has lost the $1 to $1.5 billion that Cybertruck is reasonably estimated to have lost. And that’s including their quarter where SpaceX bought like 20% of their production for definitely-totally-legitimate-reasons.
Following a loss of over $250 million (equivalent to $2.72 billion in 2025 dollars) on development, manufacturing, and marketing on the model line, Ford quietly discontinued the Edsel brand in November 1959, shortly after the 1960 model line was introduced
The latest car Tesla released, the cybertruck, was one of the biggest automotive flops ever, production is essentially halted, demand is non-existant.
Tesla announced and started taking reservations for their roadster TEN YEARS AGO. People who made reservations and paid the $50k-$250k cost are STILL WAITING.
And now Tesla has announced yet another vapourware car, with a controversial design, taking reservation money again.
I think it's not cool to be excited about vapid shit like this after the CEO took a chainsaw to USAID and directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths through the abrupt cutoff of food and medicine.
USAID was a US designated regime change operation, funding thousands of anarchists worldwide to do CIA bidding. Is there a government US doesn't like? Sure fund the rioters, opposition media to bring a violent end to regime, in garb of funding NGOs and doing charity.
Bangladesh, South American countries are perfect examples of it.
I don't like Elon but am forever in debt to him for bringing an end to this madness.
With models you always need to look at assumptions. The paper there assumes 0 adaptation/replacement, simply correlates reductions in mortality with USAID funding trends without even attempting to assess causality, operates entirely at population (as opposed to individual) level analysis, and more. So you're looking at an extreme high end ballpark that is not intended to be used as a prediction or measurement of what will happen. In the study's own words:
---
".. the primary aim of our analysis was not to model in detail the full range of potential USAID defunding scenarios or their varied effects. Instead, it was to estimate the consequences of a worst-case scenario—defined by the most severe funding cuts—relative to a business-as-usual continuation of USAID operations. Importantly, our goal was not to forecast the exact all-age and child mortality by 2030, but to compare two parallel scenarios that differ only in the path of the main exposure variable.."
---
The vacuum USAID has left began being rapidly filled and replaced by other countries - most notably China but also including the EU nations, Mideast, and many others. You'll be able to look at the death rate of countries like Nigeria (where USAID spending was quite high) in the near future to see the impact. If it was anywhere near as significant as the extreme scenarios, it'll show up very visibly in the death rate data. I do not expect we will see anything like that.
Have you heard starlink cut access to Ukrainians in the middle of an attack? The story has been buried on HN (wonder why). Who is the "killjoy"?
But please, give more money and fame to Musk, so that he can get Paxton elected. He's already down a quarter billion $ trying to make that lying cheater senator.
Starshield which is operated and funded by the US GOV. Some of you really need to touch some grass if you think military war technology is not controlled by the US GOV.
Get real. Musk was on Twitter viciously attacking Zelensky as Starlinked service waw pulled from Ukraine. Musk makes no secret of his support for Putin and the other despots of our world.
"Zelensky has gone too far" said Musk. Not Putin, not Trump, specifically Zelensky.
> Holy shit some of you are seriously just joyless wet blankets. Please touch grass
Yeah, like why do people keep going on an on about all the bad stuff the Nazis did, instead of enjoying their rocket planes and other cool stuff? Total joyless wet blankets. /s
It is not as if Musk was trying to fan a race war in the UK and wasn't participating in AfD meetings. And spending a quarter billion dollars (!) to prop up Ken fucking Paxton.
Cool, but not realistic. This is a prototype, if you have enough money you can build a prototype car that does just about anything. When the car starts shipping the "cool" features will be missing.
What is the practical use case of having a bunch of high powered jets all around the car? It could be used to automatically avoid fatal accidents, or at least reduce risk and damage in an accident situation. I thought everybody who watched the presentation video would reach that conclusion.
you know what happens to you if a jet engine moves your car out of the way? you have the accident inside your car by yourself, you become the accident. physics states that all forces will be equal.
Yes, let's combine Twitter, an AI company, and a space company with a solar company, car company, battery company, and robotics company, so that we can have one huge valuation that can't be possibly delivered upon and losses will be absorbed for a short period. What could go wrong?
Japanese keiretsu also usually have a bank at their center or have both horizontal and vertical integrations. Where they don't have integration, they at least have financial integration. Whatever Musk is doing is far less cohesive in every way.
I'm pointing out that Japanese companies can do that because they're organized and managed like Japanese companies. Tesla is not, and in fact lacks pretty much all the organizing characteristics and long term planning that enables keiretsu to function.
but... All elon companies. More valuable bundled, because all the elon lovers don't have to pick where they throw their tithes. I'd love it even more if they throw in a tunnel construction and a human brain implant company in the mix while they are at it.
This would be a horrible deal for Tesla investors.
Long-term investors would lose about 40% of their investment to subsidize the inflated valuation of X (bought by xAI), the inflated valuation of xAI (bought by SpaceX), and SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
The valuation of both companies was inflated prior to acquisition, and Tesla shareholders will be asked to dilute their investment by absorbing that cumulative inflation.
Not even to mention that Musk would have exclusive control over the entire conglomerate, with not even the pretense of a Board to check his power.
When even Steven Mark Ryan is like "let's pump the breaks a little bit," you know it's bad.
> SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
Well, that and being the only reusable rocket company ever with an even bigger version on the horizon and a global Internet service that's about to get a whole lot better thanks to aforementioned rocket. Both of which are hugely profitable.
- Performance: road ready, seats two, active aero and a “multi-mode suction system.” 0-60 mph in under 1.6 seconds. Available by reservation.
- Thrust: race ready, seats two, adds rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters. 0-60 mph in under 0.9 seconds. Limited release.
- Rocket: seats one, adds thrusters around the perimeter of the car for upward and rotational movement. 0-60 mph in under 0.59 seconds and a top speed of over 230 mph. Invite only.
Unfortunately, it's impossible for us to verify what parts of the demo are 'realistic'. Did they use assisting technologies (e.g. a wire rig)? Is anything repeatable, or are the components one-and-done?
The software industry has taught me how sneaky a demo can be ;). That's without considering Tesla's history of bonkers claims and sus demos (anyone else remember the bulletproof windows?).
Edit: Removed a rhetorical question about the demo. Apparently there was a live audience, so they couldn't have just made a very tiny Roadster haha.
Which may have been tailored for the demo - for example, put a very small battery pack in there, so that the weight is much lower than the weight of the actual car would be - it only needs to drive a few meters, doesn't it?
Based on the record of Musk & co straight out LYING in such events (remember Solarcity?), I am very confident in saying that a large portion of what they demonstrated they have not actually solved how to fit in a real production car.
This is a tech demo until it actually ships. Actual engineering requires things like cost effectiveness, reliability, and reparability that are yet to be seen.
It’s not like this is the first time that Elon has overpromised and underdelivered.
I really wonder why I think the N Vision 74 looks so much better; it just has more personality somehow. I do agree though that the new Roadster looks a lot less bad than the Cybertruck.
I'd agree with you and merit the design has more thought as an upgrade to the look of the cybertruck. However it still looks like something to be left in a scrap heap of a destruction derby within Tron.
Dislike the design, look and edge of it. Feels cold. Each to their own.
I guess you didn't see the video of a car sitting on a ramp upside down, doing flips in the air, jumping over a semi and other cars...
Odd world we live in when we don't see that as being cool. But, we're seemingly headed there. At some point, it's going to be hard to imagine something that could surprise me.
Also wouldn't be that crazy for them to put together a demo that'll never actually be a production vehicle. Dunno why anyone thinks this will ever ship like this. One thing to market a car, another to just show off features that just wont be real.
>> It is weird. I am not fan of Musk, but one has to have some crazy blinders on not to give him credit here.
For what? For an unpractical vehicle that now has the ability to launch and crush another car? If said to be true. As if driving wasn't already dangerous and stupid enough.
If he would show maturity for a change rather than his childhood antics then I would give him credit.
<< If he would show some and maturity for a change rather than his childhood antics then I would give him credit.
Man only manages to coordinate an engineering feat and your response is "why can he not offer something responsible like a lightly breaded toast"?
Beyond the obvious part where I say that his antics are part of the product demonstration ( roadster is space moment being another notable moment ), is your objection truly that he didn't come to the podium with a clipboard and say:
"
Begin communication
- it jumps
- it go up upside down
- it can go 0-60 in 1 sec
End of communication."
You can't wonder when the man offering the wonder is a man of fraud. It's 2026 and we are now spiralling in to a pit of despair with no return.
Elon shows no care to the world or you. It sounds like you have fallen hold to his playbook of a new shiny toy you'll probably never own outright.
We have wars going on killing innocent people and then have a man who disables Starlink.
A man who raided your country, America. Sabotaging jobs of hard workers, important folk and ruining their lives. Does that not matter now for which we should forget the governmental damage caused due to his "DOGE" antics?
There is no wonder in fracking, cruelty to animals or destruction of planetary resources.
You know he fracks right and know that his brain-chip has tortured innocent animals?
That is all fine if folk want to live in fantasy land, I do not. I want to live in a functioning real land.
You want wonder? I've been wondering when humanity will actually work together and improve society but that's just wishing upon a dying star.
His toys and vision do not align with mine and his fraud outweighs any ingenuity that may come from.
You want to know something else? He's not even American, he's South African.
If you're a democratic voter and you buy this car, you're no worse than the republican president. You might as well vote for republican seeing as you are supporting a fraudulent South African republican reality.
I am English who lives in the United Kingdom. If you wanted an outside in perspective you got one.
This is a real question and not a bait: if you are that hard pressed.. why are you here arguing with a rando over billionaire toys and not securing medicine and/or food?
I know you’re using a throwaway account but in case you come back to read this: we’re all tired of being scammed. Virtually every hot tech company now routinely overpromises and underdelivers. Some products are scams; some products kind of work but at great personal risk to oneself and others. The future we are excited about is one where technology SOLVES ACTUAL PROBLEMS.
Here you go: it's cool. A cool waste of money. You realize driving upside down and jumping is a) useless, b) illegal on public roads, c) staged? You think there are controls in the car that'll let you do 3D maneuvers? It's all preprogrammed.
The only half-usable feature here is super fast acceleration.
While you were busy getting baited by flashy non-features, you probably missed that this is coming out minimum 8 years late, with half the promised range, seat space, and the acceleration numbers all depending on unspecified consumable gas which you'll have fill up on somehow. If it ever comes out at all, what with Tesla's track record.
BTW, the reason you haven't seen this before is nobody in their right mind would have spent so much money on something this pointless, not because this is some cutting edge tech.
What's so disruptive on these kind of events is, that companies always used to do development for PR-stunts, or to show off their capabilities and vision for the future, but never at this scale of pure engineering investment.
Drawing a parallel, manufacturers presented rollable mobile devices already a decade ago, modular devices with replaceable components, etc. The archives of Nokia and Ericsson (and others) are full with these kinds of products. Car manufacturers did the same. They presented a vision, not a commitment to a product because there is much more to this than just "being able" to build it.
But it was never economically feasible or sensible to do this at SUCH a scale of engineering cost, and presented with the unrelenting confidence of "this will be yours in two years", despite all the fundamental roadblocks still to overcome.
It appears that this is the most disrupting aspect of their presentations: People are not used to being presented a "vision" of such a scale with so little regards for practical execution.
They like the journey they are taken on, and willingly fill all gaps and doubts with "they wouldn't present this if they didn't think of everything already"
That's also true, but I meant to say something different. I am referring to this sheer blindness to the rationality of what's being presented.
This event was like Disney presenting a mass-production rollercoaster you can pre-order for your home, but the general public seems to glance over how utterly irrational this is.
So far companies did alot of fundamental due diligence before making such an announcement (and the prior R&D investment!), because the consequences could be fatal.
The average consumer apparently still assumes that this due diligence phase was passed, thinking it's impossible that a known company presents something that big it cannot deliver on...
It's a cool demonstration, I'll give them that. From what I've seen online, people don't even seem to consider whether or not they would actually want this, just because the novelty of it.
I'd even ignore that and call it good marketing, if that's what they would actually try to sell here - but you need some kind of special invitation access to even get those, while they use this demonstration to boost the pre-orders for a car without the features everyone is talking about (or at least trying to, we'll see how many will actually go for it).
Yeah, that's what I meant. The gap between what's presented as ready-to-order and the actual practical feasibility of the product is so big, it wows people because they are still accustomed to presentations of actually consumable products.
And also your point: It is a company presenting a jet-pack to actually sell a premium back-pack under the same name.
They invested in the engineering of 1-10 jet-packs, to sell 200-2000 backpacks...
The demonstrations seems to be very specific, it probably can't do anything more than fall to the ground. The practicality of actual levitating the car may out of reach.
Everyone calls it a "flying car" the idea is planted in people's mind and they let people's imagination or credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
I agree this is more of a "jumping car" than anywhere near an actual "flying car". My main issue with both is that if ground based cars have an issue, for example an engine failure, in most cases you can still get the car to safely stop at the side of the road. If you're flying, that's a very different story.
Even if we would accept the premise that flying cars will be the norm at some point, I'm not sure what people imagine that would do for them. Technically you could solve traffic jams to some degree, but still not entirely because I can't imagine that at any point flying cars would mean that you just fly wherever you want. It would give us multilayered traffic, which is cool to reduce traffic jams, but does it really do anything else?
But prior to any of that, I'm fascinated by how irrational it is to think that this jumping car is even remotely feasible to participate in any kind of traffic.
That's why I assume that the general public expects that Tesla has already solved all these problems, as they otherwise wouldn't announce such a product.
In reality, we apparently have entered times where they could present a teleporting machine and start a 200k USD pre-order with little to no public scrutiny.
Using suction to create downforce is an idea that’s been built for race track usage in the past (and been successful in F1 in the ‘70s), but the near certainty of mortal injury from the system failing (and thus destabilizing the vehicle at high speed) made it unpopular and its incorporation has been very limited (McLaren and Ariel did versions, I think). I’m confused how this has (or will pass) regulatory approval for road use. Is the idea that the driver should only utilize this on a track?
> I’m confused how this has (or will pass) regulatory approval for road use.
It won't.
And this is also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH. Some cars come with "Donut" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
I think others have used a skirt that needs to extend quite close to the ground to work, so uneven ground can cause sudden loss of suction. Maybe this is solvable somehow?
I'm more worried about the COPVs exploding in a crash, for the thruster version. Hopefully it will keep the tanks empty unless a special launch mode is enabled with a warning siren sounding as long as they're pressurized.
The suction system is interesting. It's possible for it to work on the street but incredibly dumb. The kind of gap you have to keep is millimeters off the ground and your typical streets in the real world have so much damage and inconsistency it's hard to imagine it working for anything but straight line acceleration on a newly paved road. This would be a suicide mission to drive this on Skyline with the expectation to get 2-3g in the bends.
The concerns about debris and so forth are somewhat valid but can be taken care of. Similar to dust collectors for woodworking - this will have a cyclone separator, mesh, and whatnot that will prevent the blades from getting wrecked by a rock. But wouldn't want to tail this thing. It'll be pelting your car.
It'll be another "car goes really fast in a straight line" feature which electric cars have always done well with. While it'd be cool to use the suction system to get incredible g forces in bends - it'll be too dangerous for public roads. You'd immediately fly off the road if you lost any suction and I don't know what public roads (especially in the Bay Area) you could run such a system reliably on.
Production and other realities aside, I've seen some cool shit in my life and this demo is high up there! Did you guys catch 0.5 mach target top speed? That's 600kmh. It'd better do that flying because there probably aren't any rubber tyres that could endure that before exploding within seconds.
So this is a completely obvious scam, right? I don't see anyone else calling this out and I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell, it would basically be a bomb. Also, the battery pack that would go in the car would be so large that they couldn't do the stunts they showed in their drone vehicle.
Are we not calling an obvious stock pumping charade what it is out of some sense of politeness?
I feel like it's also crazy irresponsible to sell this deathtrap to the public, since it's pretty much guaranteed buyers will joyride this on public roads.
- The cold-gas only version will shotgun debris into onlookers, and possibly yeet anyone behind it.
- Active suction is very cool until a rock punches through your intakes.
- Lithium batteries and pressurised tanks in the same package, yippee!
Thank god it'll take them years to manufacture this thing.
It isn't being sold to the public. Of the three versions, the one that is "road ready" doesn't have the gimmicky thrusters. The one that is displayed is available by invite only, and even if you have a quarter of a million to reserve the racing model, you aren't likely to get a license plate for use on public roads.
They'll make a handful that a select few billionaires will get to keep in a hanger somewhere for bragging rights.
There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I agree with the first two points, but why do you think the thrusters have to be manually controlled? My expectation would be it'd just perform one of the pre-programmed tricks taking in the sensor data to adapt mid-way, the same way they do auto-landings in SpaceX (no one is controlling the landing booster manually, right?).
Explain what you mean please. First, this is not going on a public road anytime ever, so in an unlikely event this product will actually see the light of day, it’s very likely that anyone who attempts this will do it on mostly static controlled circuit/pad. I don’t know how they did the demo, but I don’t see it as something outside of the realm of reality to calculate ‘kickflip’ on the fly using whatever sensors they put in this thing.
I wouldn’t want to sit in it tho (and I’m guessing no one in the demographic this will be sold to would want this level of risk either).
> There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I'm not even sure if a fighter pilot could. The passenger compartment of the "Rocket" model is probably packed full of tanks and other equipment, to deliver total of a few seconds of flight time. Doing anything in the air would probably require such precise timing no person could do manually, and it probably can't even be done automatically outside very controlled conditions.
Well we could examine the history here, for instance when he bought Twitter that it would immediately collapse (now its more popular than ever and Bluesky is the one that's falling apart) and when the Cybertruck was announced there were lots of people saying it could never be made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437
It’s crazy how many Cybertrucks I see in my hometown, and I don’t live in that big of a city. They are incredibly popular. This car will be incredibly popular to. Peoples are getting bent out of shape about the “thrust” and “rocket” variants, but who cares? Those will be few and far between. For rich collectors mostly. How about just the base model? It looks wild, I’m sure it will be fun as hell to drive. They are going to sell a ton of these things.
Maybe if you don't like driving? It's really a solid car. Much better than the WRX, which is quite good. Make sure you set steering to low assist. The performance models in general are serious machines. Top of class in their price range by a long shot.
You forgot about how everyone was insisting the Hyperloop would never work and then it became the principal mode of transportation. Or how we couldn't possibly have a Mars colony in 2024. Or how twitter would never become the West's everything app. Etc.
Elon Musk causes incredible amounts of historical non-examination. There are now so many examples that it's actually difficult to list them all. My guess is that people just get very confused by the difference between late delivery and non-delivery.
No kidding. Musk is SIX YEARS late on delivering the previous version of the roadster, which has been superseded by today's announcement, promising its delivery in a few years, and everyone is just lappin' it up.
Well I see no numbers saying how long it will fly. Perhaps it "hops", could easily see that happening with a burst of air below the car. (While standing still, accelerating the car upwards for 1 second with a burst of air)
I suppose at least we can say there is a working car that seems to be able to actually do the things as advertised, which is more than one could ever say for e.g. the Moller Skycar.
I wouldn't be surprised if the presented "invite-only" variant will mostly be aimed at Saudi investors, and they will get an invite if they invest a billion into the company.
This would even be a sensible choice for Tesla, because it will put that car in a garage far away from public scrutiny...
(thinking just about all the debris damage-potential of those thrusters here, not even any potential quality issues)
> The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell
The cybertruck is for sale and FSD is active in the US. The US lets automakers "self-certify" that they are safe. So although I don't think this thing should ever be sold, it may end of on US roads.
My big question is, would anyone want one? It's an interesting life size hotwheels car but who would want one other than to show at a monster truck rally. The original Tesla Roadster was a masterpiece compared to this new one. Talk about missing the mark by a mile...
I was #12 Tesla Roadster owner. I spoke across the country with my father. We drove from coast to coast in 2014 at a time when there was a lot of doubt. — I supported elons “mission” and now we know it’s a neo Nazi front of a company. This company and Elon has been a scam since he stole JB Straubel. How do I know? JB Straubel is my father.
If you wanted another pretext to merge Tesla and SpaceX this would be a good way.
The existing tech fab plus this car maybe makes it harder to sue once the merger happens - but he will still be sued. “Look we’re making it rocket cars with AI of course we should be one company”
He actually says in the video that it might not be legal to operate but they could still sell you one. Anything is legal off-road on your own private property.
FAA jurisdiction over the airspace is not the same as a rule prohibiting every form of powered lift-off within it. There's a lot of grey area in FAA regs - for instance you can land a plane on your lawn in class E (if you could manage it).
I think it’s real, the “invite only” version could probably do the kickflip over the semis, but would probably completely exhaust the tanks and require special equipment to refill or take hours with an onboard pump. And the flip is certainly a scripted stunt, not something you’d actually be able to do live. The math doesn’t seem to be completely unreasonable as a one off demo
They said there is a compressor to re-pressurize the tanks while driving. It made it sound like a power-up in a video game. You can't use it all the time, but if you wait for it to charge up, use it as many times as you want.
I think the bigger issue with be making it street legal. Kickflipping over traffic, and refusing visibility for everyone to 0 in the process, can't be good.
When I searched for Tesla on YouTube at the start of the event, the first live event returned was this, an AI generated Tesla presentation with Elon telling users to send bitcoin and he'll send you back double as a promotional event like an X Money thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5EDp2rEbFA. The QR code went to this site: https://roadster.tv. I reported it to YouTube.
China has had flying cars since 2023 so I don't see how this is a scam. The flying mechanism is unique for the Roadster so that's still to be seen how it would perform out in public.
XPeng has been spruiking flying cars (really just giant quadcopters) for a while now, but while they exist and can fly, they're more of a publicity stunt. For example, while you can buy the X2 in Australia, you can't legally fly it.
I mean, Tesla demoed, promised, and took reservation money for a roadster reboot that _also_ didn't contain any technology China didn't have in 2017, and at this point they still haven't delivered on that and it feels safe to call it a scam.
Just because the technology is technically feasible doesn't mean that a specific company is not scamming you when they promise it.
And Tesla already has enough of a history of fake promises (your tesla will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep within a few years, FSD will take you across the country while you sleep by next year, humanoid robots, the new roadster is taking reservations now and will deliver soon, regulation is the only thing holding up FSD, etc etc).
To be fair the main reason why FSD hasn't been a wide spread thing is mostly due to local regulations. The technology exists and performs fairly well. FSD is allowed in pretty much all the same cities Waymo is allowed to operate so we can see from this that its a regulatory issue not a technological one.
I mean it looks cool but considering they haven't produced any of the other Roadster models in any meaningful quantity, and have repeatedly come up short on much more reasonable product offerings... Idk I have just the slightest doubt about a flying electric car hitting the market any time soon. Hasn't it been nearly a decade since the promise of a software update that would turn your Tesla into a self-driving taxi that can earn money while you're not using it?
Can this be scaled down to a Roomba? Then it would both be more useful at picking stuff up off the floor, and able to recover from falling down the stairs.
Square-cube scaling being what it is, I think it'd be much more reasonable to use propellers (like quadcopters) than try to scale down COPV's to a Vroomba! size. That's actually an interesting product idea. A small flying vacuum cleaner could clean a variety of surfaces; not only floors.
(And you could even mount the charging station on the ceiling, so it doesn't take up floor space).
Anyone know the physics of mach diamonds purely from compressed gas? I'm not a physicist, but I thought one of the key aspects of compressed gas is that it can't expand faster than the speed of sound in that gas -- the speed of sound is literally the limit to how fast it can expand?
Gas expanding faster than the speed of sound is called a shockwave - and the Mach diamonds are essentially the expanding gas shockwave “bouncing” back and forth as it hits the atmosphere, forming a standing wave of high and low compression zones.
I thought so at first but then Musk mentioned the thrusters can recharge themselves with pumps in the car. So it will actually be something owners can use repeatedly without needing complicated refills from Tesla service.
Not that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.
But where would you (be allowed to) use that and risk wrecking your car and life? They weren’t confident to put a person in either. I guess it’s for shows only, the reservation page says invitation only. It’s definitely impressive but it will probably stay a marketing tool.
I wonder whether they will actually be able to recharge to that pressure level in a production car. I kind of doubt it, plus it will be noisy, consume a ton of energy and take a long time.
Not to mention the mass. Perhaps the pressure vessels could be relatively lightweight, but a pump that could charge such a pressure vessel to the pressure and capacity needed for this type of stunt will not be lightweight.
And mass is one of the top engineering concerns for these types of performance vehicles, even those which do not need to fight gravity.
The fact that the one that can fly is invite-only makes me wonder if there would be ITAR issues with the guidance mechanisms that they have to put into it.
I'm not saying that there aren't lower hanging fruit reasons why they wouldn't make more of those, but you can see how the guidance necessary to make this move the way that it does could be dual use.
I suspect it's more because some rando could actually try to use it in public space. The invite only means they could send it to people who will give them good PR, are known not to be idiots, and can be invited to sign many responsibility disclaimers.
That makes a ton of sense, yes! To be honest, I was wondering less about their reasons for invite-only and more about whether this kind of gentle and precise guidance with cold gas thrusters might hit ITAR.
Been a while since I was impressed with a tech presentation. I was waiting for a clear case of AI assisted movement ( though I personally expected to see it for the first time in a military chopper ).
**
Side note, as I was looking for the right stream, youtube gave me a link to a different deep fake 'Musk' stream where he extolled virtues of sending him money ( https://roadster-tesla.com/#participate ). Everything has changed man. I am sure the scammer actually got some people.
They first started taking deposits on the Roadster 9 years ago in 2017 with a 2020 production date. It’ll be shocking if they ever sell this car they showed today. If they do, it’ll be many years late, not fly, and cost twice what they are saying. Just like the CyberTruck.
BYD has made the more practical cousin of this, and you can actually buy it. They have a car which jumps over potholes automatically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIKAn8yDkpA
The thing that made the design of the original Tesla cars successful, before they went all in on this "future looks like the future" idiocy, is that they just looked good. Tasteful. All that crazy new tech was put in a package which hid it and it just became a sleek, good looking car on the road. Now Tesla design is obsessed with it cosplaying a Ridley Scott 80's wet dream and it looks stupid. The cars look like a show at universal studios theme park. When you do the "future looks like the future" it's always a sci-fi author's idea of "the future" which is cheesy and outdated as soon as its done. This is a boomer's idea of "future" aesthetics and it's not what the actual future looks like.
Also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
Cars seem so full of gimmicky features these days. A friend's car yesterday stopped us when exiting because it thought we left behind belongings in the back seat - it was just an empty package. That was not something I would have ever thought a car would flag. It's not that fancy of a car (entry level SUV) but it is fairly new, it just kind of bothered me.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
The back seat thing is probably the things cars have been adding to try to combat those freak memory accidents when parents forgot to drop the baby off at daycare and left them in the car in the sun all day with disastrous consequences.
I don't think this is true: drag increases with the square of velocity, so that's close to double the drag from 150 to 200, and I believe somewhere above 60/70 mph, aerodynamic drag starts to overtake road resistance as the main friction source, i.e. it takes significantly more horsepower to be able to do 200 than 150.
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
I’m sure they’ve factored in road debris. Tyres also throw stones and dirt at cars behind, sometimes with remarkable force.
The intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
It's an awesome performance, but I don't know why you'd want this in your actual day to day car and pay a premium for it, all power to you if you do but I wouldn't call not sharing that preference 'poo pooing the incredible tech'.
It’s cool, I’d love this if I had the money to afford it. Maybe in a decade, it will be more practical and have more legitimate use cases, I’m not sure!
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
I watched the ~16 minute presentation on YouTube and it was as if Elon and the two other guys presenting were doing a skit at a talent show. They seemed extremely unprepared. Maybe they were intentionally trying to come across as off the cuff, but it felt unnatural and cringey. Together they have the charisma of a paper clip. These guys are so full of themselves that it’s difficult to appreciate whatever accomplishment this may or may not be. And, of course, no
way it will be street legal with air thrusters. What a complete joke.
When presenting the world with a flying car, one doesn't need much extra charisma, the demo does it all. I think most people would be pretty excited (or full of themselves) knowing what they were about to show.
Tesla presentations (and Musk presentations generally) have always been weirdly awkward.
As an engineer who dislikes polished presentations of unimpressive things, it encourages me that it’s still possible to do a bad presentation about an amazing thing and (most) people don’t grumble too much.
Given how Tesla's profitability nearly vanished due to Elon outing himself with the "roman salute", I don't see why he thinks his company will be around long enough to actually get this out the door.
I have no reason to believe this isn't another Deplorean.
The suction and air recovery part might be forward thinking for how we design roads or tunnels. They might not all need to be flat. Especially when autonomous.
Definitely not upside down, I was thinking of short inclines, possible as a sort of tunnel bypass. Assuming all the cars are networked for mechanical failures and the batteries can handle it. But that's only after the 5 minutes I spent considering the idea and mostly stolen from I Robot movie like most of Tesla's ideas.
You've got to be kidding. That's mighty uncomfortable when the angle is only a bit steep, the inclined lanes would be exclusive to expensive cars with this kind of capability (which no tax payer will want to subsidise), and when there's a traffic jam that takes a minute longer than your battery capacity, your car will just fall on top of another?
Yeah I was thinking it would suck for a passenger which is why it would only be useful for temporary bypass situations, since tunnels can clog up if cars fail. But that's a lot of engineering just for that one usecase. But I do except tunnels to become much more popular as cities become more dense and cars become automated.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
If helipads can only handle one chopper ever few minutes, and they are surrounded by clear and open space, then that tells you that theres no way flying cars with the frequency of typical roads or even quite streets will ever happen.
I think that's to do with the wake/vortices a helicopter creates. Apparently, the effect is so strong that it can affect lift in a fairly large area over a few minutes. There's a recent case where a light plane took off in the neighborhood of a heli that just landed, and it veers off course, and hits the heli.
Finally. We've been waiting for flying cars for a while now!
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
I don't know the practicality of this car, or if the production version will have these thrusters, but the demo was epic. It tickled my childhood dream of working with mechanical stuff.
The video goes against my intuition for how much performance you can get out of cold gas thrusters. I wonder if someone could do some back of the envelope maths on how much thrust and impulse you can get from a setup like this?
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
Based on the statement that the suction fan generates 2g of downforce, and the telemetry showing the fan operating at 4,700 kg @ ~95% load, the Tesla Roadster weighs approximately 2,300 to 2,500 kg.
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.
On takeoff you can stabilize against opposing forces, so especially without the weight or inertia of a driver it is quite straight (rockets also don't need to stabilize on take-off).
But once that phase is overcome, how stable is the car actually mid-air?
It looks to me that they added the barrel-roll because everything else would have looked worse...
I've been recently playing a game called Approximately Up. You start from simple building blocks, thrusters and can use the in game logic system to build complex controls. One of the things I came about to learn was something to make a hover system for my ship was a simple PID controller. The side and bottom firing thrusters just remind me of my ship in the game. While the game is oversimplified and a bit arcadey, does anyone know what actually goes into this in the real life and is the huge feat the improvement on the weight of the whole car?
As Doug DeMuro would say, this is a “rich guy go fast” car.
Is it going to be fun and engaging to drive? Absolutely not. It doesn’t even have a steering wheel.
Finally, a vehicle that’s perfect for the CEO in your life who wants to upload his brain to a data center powered by the body heat of his employees hooked up to the pods from The Matrix.
It has a steering yoke. F1 cars also have a steering yoke. Are F1 cars not fun and engaging to drive?
It also has steer-by-wire which makes the steering yoke practical as they can tweak the steering ratio to prevent the need to go hand-over-hand. As they did for the Cybertruck.
The real feat would be to actually ship the gas-equipped models. The on-stage demonstration was certainly quite impressive but handling real world terrain is a whole different story. Not to mention compensating for drivers who will skew lead-footed without any experience of handling a third dimension.
I am skeptical that this feature will prove to be much more than a publicity stunt, especially since the availability of these models will be so limited.
there are approximately 450 in existence.. (ever made)
Lets assume this car costs 1M each. (i bet its less)
so if they sold 450 of these they'd make less than 500 million.
If they ever deliver a single unit that's a low enough bar to make it completely economically infeesable.
if they somehow managed to sell a couple of thousand... it might become profitable.
this has to be just a fantastic bit of marketing to jazz up their share price.
also.. I'd love to see a blooper roll of making it do these things...
I suspect the blooper reel is less interesting than we’d expect. SpaceX has demonstrated competency at putting cold gas thrusters on arbitrary masses and making them move as desired.
I am amazed at how steady and in control the car was when flipping and jumping. If that kind of control on a vehicle is achieved today, it seems like flying car tech just took a giant lurch forward. Just in time for America's crumbling road infrastructure.
If I'm understanding this correctly, it uses the electric motor to compress air into large tanks? How much thrust could that generate (and for how long)? It'd be amazing to jump over East River or the Hudson.
I'm so glad Elon exists. He must have spent over $100 million to build the flying variant with no hope of ever profiting off it. I can't imagine any other CEO ever doing that.
I mean, this is the gimmicky of gimmicks for the ultra-rich.
It just means you can do jumps and stunts programmed into the vehicle at the push of a button with zero skill at being a stunt driver.
The Dukes of Hazzard had to do that without the thrusters.
Can't wait to see how people kill themselves and other people with those things by being stupid...
Hopefully that shit gets blocked by the DOT and kept off public roads--which is probably the goal to get a bunch of drooling simps outraged over "government overreach" keeping them away from their "flying cars".
idk about the safety of involving jumping cars into car crashes, I'd still prefer the brakes (obviously not always enough time). The one useful situation I could see is if you're driving (accidentally I hope) off a cliff.
I worked at Tesla when they announced the Roadster 2 and said they’d start production. That never happened. Funny to see everyone eat this up, let’s see when or if they deliver.
What's up with wheels not being round anymore? How is that supposed to work? I understand it for Formula 1, but for real world driving, it doesn't make any sense
I hate Tesla for their politics, broken promises, and all the drama that we are all aware and tired of hearing about.
That being said, that was the coolest damn thing I've ever seen a car do.
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that it'll never make production like this, but what I see as being demonstrated is a suborbital lander/off-world ground transport concept that can work in low gravity environments etc. This will aid autonomous delivery vehicles etc to be dropped from low orbit and find their own landing sites, and then drive to location.
I wonder how many maimed kerbals are stranded around the space X facility while testing this.
Very cool stuff but all the "extra-terrestrial" stuff is complete bunk. This thing wouldn't survive Max-Q, let alone any kind of landing that isn't on a clean slab of concrete. It's a cool rich person toy, no other notes.
You miss my point. They're demonstrating a landing system, it's just wrapped up in a car to fool the idiots that are going to pre-purchase it again so they can use that money to build more space X technology.
The car is just a façade.
Edit: And to expand on this. Owners of GM T.50' say they can't use the ground effect fan anywhere in public due to the debris it picks up and throws, and are ineffective on anything but near perfect roads. So that's not impressive to me. And the jet boosters are also ridiculous, there is not real-world application where you could use them outside of completely closed environments with no one nearby. It's a huge investment into reaction thrusters for a car that would never, ever be used - unless it was to demonstrate thruster technology for another reason.
Ah I see. Yeah looks like it's pretty much just RCS for cars. Space landing systems are pretty well understood from the rocketry side afaik. The hard parts seem to really be around autonomous landing site selection [1][2] in novel environments. We'll have to see if the Roadster can do significant in-flight landing manoeuvrers.
Even if it does, these features aren't useful and can't be used in any realistic scenario. At best they're just party tricks.
1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem.
2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.
These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.
The rocket flip part looks like CGI, in my opinion. I get the same feeling as when I see CGI on some random B movie. Would be happy to be proven wrong if there was a crowd of people filming from their angle though.
Also "Beyond The Limits of Physics"... would any actual engineers at Tesla/SpaceX agree with that marketing statement?
Absolutely incredible demo. Jesus Christ, I don't know what I was expecting. Didn't know this was planned and skipped forward to see what they were showing off and thought it was CGI for how outlandish it is. My god, man. This is amazing.
Jaw-dropping stunts aside, I am really disappointed with where all modern car design is going. What is that ugly low poly shit? The previous Roadster concept had a style, it had sex and taste. How did we get from there to here?
> Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Bullshit, no it can't.
> Advanced cold-gas thrusters use all-electric actuators to offer precise thrust, completing micro adjustments within a fraction of a second. This helps stabilize the vehicle in flight.
In flight? What? Did I miss the joke, or what? It's a fucking car... The image even shows it hovering off the ground. How is this not blatant false advertising?
ETA: okay, skimmed some of the livestream. These is absolutely no way that any of these features will ever be part of a production model. People get serious whiplash injuries just from being rear-ended at low speed. What do they think is going to happen to the occupant when they tell their car to jump over a semi and do a fucking barrel roll? Seriously, what are we doing here?
Watch the video - the car jumps into the air. Not exactly flight or what we’d consider a flying car, but it’s careering through the air off the ground.
I mean, this isn't crazy. In fact, it's already been done. Ever heard of McMurtry? (https://mcmurtry.com/). They're notorious for exactly this - using fans to provide extreme downforce (urr... upforce if you're hanging upside down?).
> In flight?
Did you see the stunt where it literally flew over vehicles? I mean, maybe it's a bit closer to a controlled super-leap like the original Superman, but... yeah, my personal reaction to that was more "holy shit" than "well, that's not flying".
If you scroll down on the page, it shows that the "rocket edition" is invite-only. Probably gonna sell it to a few friends in hopes that the 3-5 they make sell for millions down the road, so to speak.
>> Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Yes, Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip (and damn near every other skate trick), but the reference here comes from a time when Tony Hawk would drive around and yell "do a kickflip" at skaters, if they did a kickflip he would sometimes give them a signed board or other things. Example video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0dI05Xz8s - it became a thing for a little where people would yell "do a kickflip" at skaters they saw on the street.
When I first saw this I was convinced it was AI slop. Nope! This is absolutely incredible. I've also never really resonated with Tesla aesthetic in the past but they really nailed it here imo. This car looks phenomenal - I hope this style trickles down to other models.
I absolutely detest the leadership and what he is actively doing to this country... but holy fucking shit. I want to reserve one, but when you're broke as a joke... ooph.
It's apparently not fuel but pressurized air being refueled by the car itself.
> "Will it even be maintainable?"
Probably doesn't matter. I don't think it will be permitted on public roads anyway.
The presented variant is invite-only, so I guess it will be made to put in the garage of some (Saudi) investor who commits a billion dollar investment...
Very useful in England’s countryside, imagine all the puddles you can jump over! Eliminate these passing bays when cars can jump over each other in the narrow lanes!
This is one of those products that offers a thrilling demo but I have no desire to own one. I much prefer the 2020 design that never made it to production.
The car is not using momentum and centrifugal force to stay on the ramp. It has fans providing tons of downforce - so much downforce that it's able to stick to the road nearly completely inverted
It's a tech demo marketing presentation with a jumping car in it, not a flying one. It does look pretty cool though. Let's first wait and see if/when this will even be available and not just a marketing stunt.
The technology is jaw-dropping, the engineering staggering, and this thread -- it's just embarrassing. I've been on HN since the beginning and I don't even recognize it anymore.
Yeah Apple really synthesising a platonic ideal of Steve’s product release smarm without any of his hubristic charm at this point. Tesla and SpaceX seem like humans just getting on with sh*t and onto the next.
I can’t do a tech demo of a simple software feature on zoom without at least one thing messing up. They launched a car off a ramp live and were honest from the beginning of the stream it might not work.
The last decade of social media has shown that humans care more about authenticity than perfection in presentations.
It did work! The point is they did a terrible job of producing the event and being clear what they were talking about and showing the product. The product, for all four people who will be able to buy it ("invite only"), seems very cool. But that is not what I was commenting on!
Pretty big nothingburger. Production starts 2028 and honestly, the taunted feature... it's not a flying car, it's a jumping car. Do people actually want this for themselves? I'd wager the valuation would go down after this presentation.
OK sure. I don't have a lot of use cases in my day to day commute that would be better handled by this jumping over a semi like it's the TF2 soldier, hence, a big nothingburger.
yes its a nothing burger no one will be able to use this other then a few billionaires... just like that BYD car that can jump wtf are we doing? why do we need cars to jump... we need them to drive us from point a to b
Yea, i was going to reserve one of these sub 1 sec 0-60 vehicles with rocket motors and suction fans, but then I didnt because of the ergonomics of the door handle design.
It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.
It's being sold in two modes. One with cold gas (no combustion) seemingly just for extra forwards acceleration (no flying) and one with real combustion rocket engines, the latter was in the video and is "invite only".
Wild that they devoted so much effort to an economically completely infeasible model. I wonder if the combustion version will even break 3 figures sales.
Even just the cold gas variant seems like a nightmare for production, there's a high pressure COPV in that thing and that's gonna make crashes much more.. exciting, and Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways. But very few of these are ever getting sold anyways.
For Eg, we have self driving trucks. Nikola admits prototype was rolling downhill in promotional video: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...
Tesla’s History of Faking Demonstration Videos: https://dawnproject.com/teslas-history-of-faking-demonstrati...
This is probably just to hype up the stock. The stock is down 5% (5 days), up 1% (1 month), down ~7% (6 months), down ~20% YTD, down ~16% (1 year). It has a PE of 336 and dwindling YOY sales. Tesla’s U.S. vehicle sales fell approximately 14% to 20% year-over-year through the first three quarters of 2026. Rest of the world, Tesla is not competitive and will probably go down rapidly soon.
Also Tesla events rarely (if ever) get followed by a durable stock bump.
--
Edit: Credible independent videos have been released on YouTube by reputable people. There's no doubt that the spectacle did happen as shown by Tesla. That's not to say it's anything more than a carefully staged spectacle, but claims that it's fake or AI or CGI are absolutely debunked.
There are lots of ways for sleight of hand. Do you remember the time that guy made the Statue of Liberty disappear?
It's not at all conspiracy theory. It's just same old over promise and under deliver that Elon does.
All major exterior panels are welded and/or bolted on. On the earliest revisions, the thin upper door trim strips were bonded using a bad structural adhesive which became brittle with temperature cycling. These were recalled and remedied with a different structural adhesive plus a welded stud. Such recalls are very common; the current generation Ford Explorer had multiple recalls for exterior panels falling off.
And inevitably two groups will clash, one pointing out how much this deviated from the original, often decade long promises vs another pointing at the identical naming, how it's still a product they like and of course the all time winner "I don't see you do X"...
For what it's worth, I'd file this as a RCS demo for SpaceXGrokSI (or whatever they call themselves this week) above all else and if I were a betting man, might be a prelude to fusing them into SpaceXSuperXTeslaXIntelligenceX...
His software company, named Green Hills, supplies the RTOS for Mobileye, which formerly supplied driver-assistance hardware and software to Tesla (and continues to do so for other car companies). Mobileye is no longer a Tesla supplier because Tesla insourced their ADAS.
So he has a very real financial incentive to convince the world that Tesla's system is bad.
It would encourage me to sell, if I had, seeing this nonsense.
Mind you that when Karl Benz invented the automobile in Germany, he didn’t have a permit as well
So many things that were invented in Europe couldn’t be invented today.
Like leaded gazoline, whose effects can still be seen presently...
I can imagine the lateral thrusters helping it turn faster on the track. Although I wonder if the extra weight is going to net out positive for lap times.
But really, a few very rich people will buy the full-rocket version to impress their friends. They'll play with them on private property.
Watch Ford v Ferrari for an idea of what auto companies are willing to invest for bragging rights.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/tesla/earnings/
The only new western car company in decades to not fail, based on a technology nobody believed in at the time, least of all other car companies
SpaceX being a private space company, which was completely unheard of. No experts though they could succeed
Smaller earlier businesses like Zip2, paypal, etc
These are gigantic high risk companies with high failure probabilities, the chance they they all happened to be successful despite Musk and not at least in part because of him is stretching reasonable doubt for me.
I'm absolutely no fan of his politics or personality, but the man can run a business that nobody else even dares try (at least until he demonstrates viability and the market starts to generate competitors)
The site states it's cold-gas thrusters for both models: "Features a multi-mode suction system paired with cold-gas thrusters positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle that support forward and upward acceleration as well as lateral rotational movement."
Example RC toy car that drives on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
I don't think they'll sell these, at all in the future. No way they'll hound out actual rocket engines to en users. Too much IP in there.
Teslas evaluation is based on hype. This is as hype as it gets for a car. To me it looks like they were in need for "the coolest thing". To me, this has the smell of desperation implying the beginning of the end of their high evaluation.
Can't help but think of the not-a-flamethrower
(friend bought one for $500, now they seem to be worth $1500-$2000)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Merchandise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_B_Meyer_Inc.
that sounds quite amazing, and it looks like something out of ghostbusters.
Aku: You can fly?!
Jack: No, jump good.
Okay, so I guess it doesn’t fly in the same way a rocket doesn’t fly? Distinction without meaning in this case.
Just like economically infeasible Twitter, it has tremendous PR value. There is a huge economy revolving around people annoying other people just for a glimpse of their attention. This captures the attention and pleases people. Other car companies should start getting creative too.
Here's an RC car that can drive on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
1. Why don't they show a driver entering or exiting? 2. How much do that particular "car" weigh?
It's compressed air RCS. The compressor, regulators and a ton of hardware take up the entire space from the seats back to literally the very last inch of the car. Hard pipes run along the door frame for the forward RCS, meaning only one person (driver) can sit in it and enter from the drivers side. Huge carbon RCS tanks fill every other space.
No idea how long it would take to recharge the tanks after venting them.
There's no room for 'car' stuff in it.
Interestingly there is a big... sleeve of wizard... that extends down under the car to assist the ground effect fan. Packaging that and the RCS stuff into it is a real engineering feat.
But it didn't look to have crash structures, or any other production ready hardware.
https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/s/efxEqCJxQR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Draco
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomethylhydrazine
If that is what they have done. That may just be a large drone looking like a car.
Hopefully there will also be a warning siren while it is pressurized. "Dangerous enough to need a warning siren" seems like a plus for the target market, honestly.
it's wild to me after all of the on-stage lying that we're even considering what the future economics of the rocket-powered-road-car are going to be.
it's wild to me that he has yet to deliver on the self-driving stuff, but has decided to progress into rocket-powered circus vehicles.
it's wild to me that he's getting credit for a fan car, after 50+ years of on-track existence and the recent production of the McMurty.
I'm curious to see how it all pans out, and whether or not he has enough Washington connections to get a fan-powered rocket car onto the streets, and I am curious to see the first LA block-shutdown street race accident involving an intentionally aerial vehicle.
Historically fan cars haven't been allowed on the streets because they 1) destroy asphalt and 2) throw chunks of destroyed asphalt into traffic.
I'm not entirely sure how thrusters that can lift a 3k+ lbs sports car off the road jibe with preserving the roads for others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
That said, the production issues with the Cybertruck mean you’d be a fool to reserve one of these. Let others do it, find out how late it arrives, what glued panels fall off at speed and wait for the inevitable recalls. Tesla has torched their engineering reputation lately and this page is making a lot of promises about revolutionary things.
The Lotus Elise was famously glued together instead of welds. The original Roadster also had the same innards.
This is clearly not a car for someone who wants to go from A to B, but a lot of Tesla components gets binned together for the next iteration of the cheaper car because they always order too many of them.
Oddly enough this makes their cheaper cars more reliable than the expensive ones (think about the Audis right when Ferdinand Piech took over Lamborgini).
That's pretty standard. An M3 has long pushed the tolerances of things in the engine more than a base-model 3 series. An S-class has more whiz-bang-hope-it-still-works-in-ten-years stuff than a C-class. A Lexus has more going on than a boring base Corolla.
there's a whole lot of systemic issues with wealthy people buying low-poly cars to their collection.
Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ on an yearly basis until you get sick of fixing the suspension. Tesla claims to have fixed the issue on newer models (and apparently they did a lot of work on the suspension), but they don't really take responsibility for their old cars so I doubt they will take responsibility when their design causes problems for you.
I do enjoy driving my 2019 SR+ Model 3, but I hate when people do the whole "Well on first principles, EVs have less parts so they are more reliable..." thing. My Toyota Sienna has been far more reliable than the Model 3, despite having many, many more parts.
FWIW, I'm into my fourth year of (Chinese-built) Model 3 ownership and it's been rock solid, the only services so far were to replace the air filter and wipers.
(Also my Tesla is 74.5k miles, so nowhere near 100k)
-edit-
I was a victim of misinformation from my local EV repair shop.
https://www.dormanproducts.com/pages/products/oe-fix/article...
The prices you are talking about are incorrect but there are 3rd party parts now.
This is less about EVs vs ICEs and more about Toyota's engineering quality vs Tesla's engineering quality, which is hovering somewhere in the vicinity of Homer Simpson's barbecue pit.
Given some of the tauted 'features' of this thing, I'd be more concerned about it blowing up in my driveway.
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Lamborgh...
9 years since the announcement of Roadster v2, people who paid 50k deposits are still waiting.
Time to up the promises, and ask for more $50k deposits for v3!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/NextGenT...
(just personal preference)
The Ford Edsel is widely regarded as one of the greatest car flops of all time and it sold 60k cars per year for their 2-year production run.
The CyberTruck is a massively bigger flop than that.
As for Cybertruck - they don't seem to be dropping the prices just yet and prices on secondary market haven't collapsed either. Like it or not - it's here to stay.
I doubt any program has lost the $1 to $1.5 billion that Cybertruck is reasonably estimated to have lost. And that’s including their quarter where SpaceX bought like 20% of their production for definitely-totally-legitimate-reasons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsel
> https://www.drive.com.au/news/europes-biggest-loss-making-ca...
Tesla announced and started taking reservations for their roadster TEN YEARS AGO. People who made reservations and paid the $50k-$250k cost are STILL WAITING.
And now Tesla has announced yet another vapourware car, with a controversial design, taking reservation money again.
If you fall for this, you are a fool.
It's like buying a car from Kissinger.
“Cool” can’t be faked or bought, you have to actually be cool deep down inside.
This isn’t just an Elon thing. If Henry Ford was alive I wouldn’t be buying a car from him, either. Not cool.
Bangladesh, South American countries are perfect examples of it.
I don't like Elon but am forever in debt to him for bringing an end to this madness.
'cause these folks did the math: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...
---
".. the primary aim of our analysis was not to model in detail the full range of potential USAID defunding scenarios or their varied effects. Instead, it was to estimate the consequences of a worst-case scenario—defined by the most severe funding cuts—relative to a business-as-usual continuation of USAID operations. Importantly, our goal was not to forecast the exact all-age and child mortality by 2030, but to compare two parallel scenarios that differ only in the path of the main exposure variable.."
---
The vacuum USAID has left began being rapidly filled and replaced by other countries - most notably China but also including the EU nations, Mideast, and many others. You'll be able to look at the death rate of countries like Nigeria (where USAID spending was quite high) in the near future to see the impact. If it was anywhere near as significant as the extreme scenarios, it'll show up very visibly in the death rate data. I do not expect we will see anything like that.
But please, give more money and fame to Musk, so that he can get Paxton elected. He's already down a quarter billion $ trying to make that lying cheater senator.
"Zelensky has gone too far" said Musk. Not Putin, not Trump, specifically Zelensky.
Yeah, like why do people keep going on an on about all the bad stuff the Nazis did, instead of enjoying their rocket planes and other cool stuff? Total joyless wet blankets. /s
Patently absurd, of course, but amazing too.
By rough estimate, using hydroxide jet packs as a reference, I’d say they got it down to about 600kg.
AI Elon pressure selling "act decisively, double your money" by transferring crypto to some wallet and getting 2x back - yeah, right
(PS Google shut it down)
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-spac...
Until they sold all their compute to anthropic, Ai was the boat anchor.
No way in hell is Twitter making a lick of profit.
Long-term investors would lose about 40% of their investment to subsidize the inflated valuation of X (bought by xAI), the inflated valuation of xAI (bought by SpaceX), and SpaceX (whose valuation is based on the assumption that demand for inference is effectively unlimited, and that everyone will prefer hardware in space over Earth).
The valuation of both companies was inflated prior to acquisition, and Tesla shareholders will be asked to dilute their investment by absorbing that cumulative inflation.
Not even to mention that Musk would have exclusive control over the entire conglomerate, with not even the pretense of a Board to check his power.
When even Steven Mark Ryan is like "let's pump the breaks a little bit," you know it's bad.
Well, that and being the only reusable rocket company ever with an even bigger version on the horizon and a global Internet service that's about to get a whole lot better thanks to aforementioned rocket. Both of which are hugely profitable.
- Performance: road ready, seats two, active aero and a “multi-mode suction system.” 0-60 mph in under 1.6 seconds. Available by reservation.
- Thrust: race ready, seats two, adds rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters. 0-60 mph in under 0.9 seconds. Limited release.
- Rocket: seats one, adds thrusters around the perimeter of the car for upward and rotational movement. 0-60 mph in under 0.59 seconds and a top speed of over 230 mph. Invite only.
Per Electrek: https://electrek.co/2026/10/15/tesla-unveils-cyberfied-new-r...
The software industry has taught me how sneaky a demo can be ;). That's without considering Tesla's history of bonkers claims and sus demos (anyone else remember the bulletproof windows?).
Edit: Removed a rhetorical question about the demo. Apparently there was a live audience, so they couldn't have just made a very tiny Roadster haha.
Based on the record of Musk & co straight out LYING in such events (remember Solarcity?), I am very confident in saying that a large portion of what they demonstrated they have not actually solved how to fit in a real production car.
It’s not like this is the first time that Elon has overpromised and underdelivered.
Hahah, the failure modes are going to be exciting.
Car looks half decent too.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyundai_N_Vision_74
Dislike the design, look and edge of it. Feels cold. Each to their own.
Odd world we live in when we don't see that as being cool. But, we're seemingly headed there. At some point, it's going to be hard to imagine something that could surprise me.
It is weird. I am not fan of Musk, but one has to have some crazy blinders on not to give him credit here.
<< At some point, it's going to be hard to imagine something that could surprise me.
It is hard to believe your eyes -- I assumed it was magnetic or something initially.
For what? For an unpractical vehicle that now has the ability to launch and crush another car? If said to be true. As if driving wasn't already dangerous and stupid enough.
If he would show maturity for a change rather than his childhood antics then I would give him credit.
Man only manages to coordinate an engineering feat and your response is "why can he not offer something responsible like a lightly breaded toast"?
Beyond the obvious part where I say that his antics are part of the product demonstration ( roadster is space moment being another notable moment ), is your objection truly that he didn't come to the podium with a clipboard and say:
" Begin communication - it jumps - it go up upside down - it can go 0-60 in 1 sec End of communication."
Fuck man. Where has your wonder gone?
You can't wonder when the man offering the wonder is a man of fraud. It's 2026 and we are now spiralling in to a pit of despair with no return.
Elon shows no care to the world or you. It sounds like you have fallen hold to his playbook of a new shiny toy you'll probably never own outright.
We have wars going on killing innocent people and then have a man who disables Starlink.
A man who raided your country, America. Sabotaging jobs of hard workers, important folk and ruining their lives. Does that not matter now for which we should forget the governmental damage caused due to his "DOGE" antics?
There is no wonder in fracking, cruelty to animals or destruction of planetary resources.
You know he fracks right and know that his brain-chip has tortured innocent animals?
That is all fine if folk want to live in fantasy land, I do not. I want to live in a functioning real land.
You want wonder? I've been wondering when humanity will actually work together and improve society but that's just wishing upon a dying star.
His toys and vision do not align with mine and his fraud outweighs any ingenuity that may come from.
You want to know something else? He's not even American, he's South African.
If you're a democratic voter and you buy this car, you're no worse than the republican president. You might as well vote for republican seeing as you are supporting a fraudulent South African republican reality.
I am English who lives in the United Kingdom. If you wanted an outside in perspective you got one.
Tesla does have ~700k other employees.
Panem et circenses
Fuck the downvotes.
Who gives a shit.
Musk ruined this planet.
What's cool about that?
I think that's extremely reckless, dangerous, etc.
The only half-usable feature here is super fast acceleration.
While you were busy getting baited by flashy non-features, you probably missed that this is coming out minimum 8 years late, with half the promised range, seat space, and the acceleration numbers all depending on unspecified consumable gas which you'll have fill up on somehow. If it ever comes out at all, what with Tesla's track record.
BTW, the reason you haven't seen this before is nobody in their right mind would have spent so much money on something this pointless, not because this is some cutting edge tech.
To me it looks like a mashup of a Ferrari and a Cybertruck. That's not a good thing.
Drawing a parallel, manufacturers presented rollable mobile devices already a decade ago, modular devices with replaceable components, etc. The archives of Nokia and Ericsson (and others) are full with these kinds of products. Car manufacturers did the same. They presented a vision, not a commitment to a product because there is much more to this than just "being able" to build it.
But it was never economically feasible or sensible to do this at SUCH a scale of engineering cost, and presented with the unrelenting confidence of "this will be yours in two years", despite all the fundamental roadblocks still to overcome.
It appears that this is the most disrupting aspect of their presentations: People are not used to being presented a "vision" of such a scale with so little regards for practical execution.
They like the journey they are taken on, and willingly fill all gaps and doubts with "they wouldn't present this if they didn't think of everything already"
This event was like Disney presenting a mass-production rollercoaster you can pre-order for your home, but the general public seems to glance over how utterly irrational this is.
So far companies did alot of fundamental due diligence before making such an announcement (and the prior R&D investment!), because the consequences could be fatal.
The average consumer apparently still assumes that this due diligence phase was passed, thinking it's impossible that a known company presents something that big it cannot deliver on...
And also your point: It is a company presenting a jet-pack to actually sell a premium back-pack under the same name.
They invested in the engineering of 1-10 jet-packs, to sell 200-2000 backpacks...
The demonstrations seems to be very specific, it probably can't do anything more than fall to the ground. The practicality of actual levitating the car may out of reach.
Everyone calls it a "flying car" the idea is planted in people's mind and they let people's imagination or credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
Even if we would accept the premise that flying cars will be the norm at some point, I'm not sure what people imagine that would do for them. Technically you could solve traffic jams to some degree, but still not entirely because I can't imagine that at any point flying cars would mean that you just fly wherever you want. It would give us multilayered traffic, which is cool to reduce traffic jams, but does it really do anything else?
But prior to any of that, I'm fascinated by how irrational it is to think that this jumping car is even remotely feasible to participate in any kind of traffic.
That's why I assume that the general public expects that Tesla has already solved all these problems, as they otherwise wouldn't announce such a product.
In reality, we apparently have entered times where they could present a teleporting machine and start a 200k USD pre-order with little to no public scrutiny.
It won't.
And this is also true of being able to go over 90 MPH, despite many sports/premium cars touting an ability to reach a top speed above 150 MPH. Some cars come with "Donut" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
I'm more worried about the COPVs exploding in a crash, for the thruster version. Hopefully it will keep the tanks empty unless a special launch mode is enabled with a warning siren sounding as long as they're pressurized.
Why would you solve that? Open roads aren't a track, we don't build highways with 90 degree turns, there is no need for such thing
Corruption? Musk is already down a quarter of a billions in donations to the GOP for these incoming elections.
The suction system is interesting. It's possible for it to work on the street but incredibly dumb. The kind of gap you have to keep is millimeters off the ground and your typical streets in the real world have so much damage and inconsistency it's hard to imagine it working for anything but straight line acceleration on a newly paved road. This would be a suicide mission to drive this on Skyline with the expectation to get 2-3g in the bends.
The concerns about debris and so forth are somewhat valid but can be taken care of. Similar to dust collectors for woodworking - this will have a cyclone separator, mesh, and whatnot that will prevent the blades from getting wrecked by a rock. But wouldn't want to tail this thing. It'll be pelting your car.
It'll be another "car goes really fast in a straight line" feature which electric cars have always done well with. While it'd be cool to use the suction system to get incredible g forces in bends - it'll be too dangerous for public roads. You'd immediately fly off the road if you lost any suction and I don't know what public roads (especially in the Bay Area) you could run such a system reliably on.
No to mention there was no actual driver in it.
The thing that they showed off isn't something that they could legally sell, it would basically be a bomb. Also, the battery pack that would go in the car would be so large that they couldn't do the stunts they showed in their drone vehicle.
Are we not calling an obvious stock pumping charade what it is out of some sense of politeness?
- The cold-gas only version will shotgun debris into onlookers, and possibly yeet anyone behind it.
- Active suction is very cool until a rock punches through your intakes.
- Lithium batteries and pressurised tanks in the same package, yippee!
Thank god it'll take them years to manufacture this thing.
They'll make a handful that a select few billionaires will get to keep in a hanger somewhere for bragging rights.
There's a reason we don't see a driver in these demos and they don't do anything beyond very choreographed stunts. There's no way a human can actually control those thrusters in a way that doesn't kill you. Unless you're a fighter pilot.
I wouldn’t want to sit in it tho (and I’m guessing no one in the demographic this will be sold to would want this level of risk either).
I'm not even sure if a fighter pilot could. The passenger compartment of the "Rocket" model is probably packed full of tanks and other equipment, to deliver total of a few seconds of flight time. Doing anything in the air would probably require such precise timing no person could do manually, and it probably can't even be done automatically outside very controlled conditions.
They sell 20k of them per year. It's the opposite of popular
The Mitsubishi Outlander outsells it.
I can’t imagine a car without a steering wheel benign fun to drive. Tesla has never been known for handling and driving dynamics.
Numb steering, crashy handling, that’s what the gearheads seem to say about Tesla vehicles.
They go fast but they are absolutely not at the top of the class for driving dynamics.
I’ve test driven a Model Y Performance and the steering was lighter and more numb than my basic economy car. The car goes fast but that’s all it does.
If the roadster has drive by wire like the cybertruck that’s going to be even worse.
Looks like 4 seconds or so.
This would even be a sensible choice for Tesla, because it will put that car in a garage far away from public scrutiny...
(thinking just about all the debris damage-potential of those thrusters here, not even any potential quality issues)
The cybertruck is for sale and FSD is active in the US. The US lets automakers "self-certify" that they are safe. So although I don't think this thing should ever be sold, it may end of on US roads.
The Tumbler? Oh, you wouldn't be interested in that.
Flying / rocket acceleration are special versions they can sell one offs capable of doing the stunt once per canister change.
The base model has the suction fans which will make huge gains.
Next model up has rear thrusters for the acceleration, which will be more insane. It’s limited production.
Final model that can fly is invite only and will be a joke on the track, using those thrusters to go around corners way, way faster than normal.
I wish they had shown track laps and 1/4 mile times instead of the gimmick of flying.
They also wouldn’t have wanted it on test tracks before today.
If that thing would have looked like a huge drone (which I strongly suspect it is) no one would be up in arms about it.
The existing tech fab plus this car maybe makes it harder to sue once the merger happens - but he will still be sued. “Look we’re making it rocket cars with AI of course we should be one company”
Was it a an amazing demo? yes.
Also yes you can legally sell it. Whether you can legally operate it is a different question.
Also Cybercab.
How many Optimus robots are out in the wild?
It is a scam, 100%.
Cybercab is operating already on the roads? They're building the factory for mass producing them right now.
Optimus robot is still in development.
Optimus is coming, the huge factory in Austin is being built now.
Late? Always. But coming.
Two outta three ain’t bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Causby
The corvette ZR-1 had a special key that would unlock all the performance. I don't think it met emissions when unlocked.
Lots of newer muscle cars have performance modes and dragstrip modes that you shouldn't use.
Even other teslas, like model 3 performance and model s plaid have have track mode and dragstrip mode that shouldn't be used on public streets.
I think the bigger issue with be making it street legal. Kickflipping over traffic, and refusing visibility for everyone to 0 in the process, can't be good.
For closed courses, movies, etc it's really cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZpQZSBTi7k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2c-B3y7yGQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU5viDOjWLw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSjXf7IUSDw
https://volonaut.com/
https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/australias-first-flyin...
Just because the technology is technically feasible doesn't mean that a specific company is not scamming you when they promise it.
And Tesla already has enough of a history of fake promises (your tesla will be a self-driving robotaxi earning money while you sleep within a few years, FSD will take you across the country while you sleep by next year, humanoid robots, the new roadster is taking reservations now and will deliver soon, regulation is the only thing holding up FSD, etc etc).
Square-cube scaling being what it is, I think it'd be much more reasonable to use propellers (like quadcopters) than try to scale down COPV's to a Vroomba! size. That's actually an interesting product idea. A small flying vacuum cleaner could clean a variety of surfaces; not only floors.
(And you could even mount the charging station on the ceiling, so it doesn't take up floor space).
Not that I'd ever spend that much money on a car or need this at all, but for people who buy luxury vehicles I can see it. Definitely something we've never had in car history.
And mass is one of the top engineering concerns for these types of performance vehicles, even those which do not need to fight gravity.
I'm not saying that there aren't lower hanging fruit reasons why they wouldn't make more of those, but you can see how the guidance necessary to make this move the way that it does could be dual use.
They have to sell one to say that it exists. It’s marketing.
Absolutely nobody who owns that vehicle will be “flying” it.
**
Side note, as I was looking for the right stream, youtube gave me a link to a different deep fake 'Musk' stream where he extolled virtues of sending him money ( https://roadster-tesla.com/#participate ). Everything has changed man. I am sure the scammer actually got some people.
Some cars come with "Donut Mode" or drift modes. Donuts and drifting are definitely not road legal actions. These, and many other capabilities of sports cars, are obviously for track use only. These Roadster gimmicks are no different.
One reason I hope Slate does well - newer cars have too much useless tech across the board. At least with a sports car the gimmicks are part of the appeal. Entry level new cars should be simpler, modular, and cheaper. Just let me drive and stop trying to be so helpful.
Kinda, but not really. In Germany you can do that on public roads. And there are many circuits you can do track days at that only require a street legal car and a helmet.
Meanwhile even the suction functionality of the roadster will probably be banned at most track days because it throws a bunch of rocks and dirt at cars behind you.
The intake will need to be minimally filtered, my guess is something similar to fly screen mesh (screen door material, for the yanks) or finer. Debris would then just fall to the ground when the fans aren’t running.
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
As an engineer who dislikes polished presentations of unimpressive things, it encourages me that it’s still possible to do a bad presentation about an amazing thing and (most) people don’t grumble too much.
No way?! Elon Musk? Unnatural and cringey?!
I have no reason to believe this isn't another Deplorean.
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
I kind of concluded that they really don't want us messing around up in the air - for reasons. Now, combined with self-driving capabilities, maybe it's back on the table :)
That being said, I suspect that they way do this, as shown in the demo, is sustainable for seconds only. And if I understood it correctly, the system is not really for flight, but for correcting momentum while driving in turns and such.
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
The art of deliberately guiding or diverting an audience's attention away from a secret action (such as sleight of hand) so the trick can happen unnoticed. Instead of forcing the audience to look away crudely, good misdirection makes the audience want to look at something else naturally.
> Tesla Sales Slump in Third Quarter
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/tesla-sales-fell-in-third...
Tesla Q3 sales will be the same tomorrow.
It doesn't surprise me that any particular companies sales are down at the moment, how does Tesla compare to other car manufacturers out of interest.
This isn't special though. 2023 was their best year and sales have been slowly declining since then. The share price has mostly been climbing since 2023. But soon they'll have a huge driverless fleet and robots or something.
It must be incredibly difficult to keep the car stable while mid-air at low speeds, I suspect it wouldn't look that "elegant"...
You’d want something that smoothly hovers rather than a launch then catch with boosters.
Was there a second jump without a roll?
But once that phase is overcome, how stable is the car actually mid-air?
It looks to me that they added the barrel-roll because everything else would have looked worse...
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-079-introduction-to-convex-opt...
Is it going to be fun and engaging to drive? Absolutely not. It doesn’t even have a steering wheel.
Finally, a vehicle that’s perfect for the CEO in your life who wants to upload his brain to a data center powered by the body heat of his employees hooked up to the pods from The Matrix.
It also has steer-by-wire which makes the steering yoke practical as they can tweak the steering ratio to prevent the need to go hand-over-hand. As they did for the Cybertruck.
I am skeptical that this feature will prove to be much more than a publicity stunt, especially since the availability of these models will be so limited.
It's very impressive. Not useful, but impressive.
If they ever deliver a single unit that's a low enough bar to make it completely economically infeesable.
if they somehow managed to sell a couple of thousand... it might become profitable.
this has to be just a fantastic bit of marketing to jazz up their share price.
also.. I'd love to see a blooper roll of making it do these things...
closed tab. thanks.
I'm so glad Elon exists. He must have spent over $100 million to build the flying variant with no hope of ever profiting off it. I can't imagine any other CEO ever doing that.
It just means you can do jumps and stunts programmed into the vehicle at the push of a button with zero skill at being a stunt driver.
The Dukes of Hazzard had to do that without the thrusters.
Can't wait to see how people kill themselves and other people with those things by being stupid...
Hopefully that shit gets blocked by the DOT and kept off public roads--which is probably the goal to get a bunch of drooling simps outraged over "government overreach" keeping them away from their "flying cars".
That's the bit where we diverge.
hmmmm. spacex-tesla merger signalling?
Dunno. Looks like it jumps. Fying seems to require some degree of control over direction but I'm just a gravity-impaired bidep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Draco
I don't think there's any doubt in anyone's mind that it'll never make production like this, but what I see as being demonstrated is a suborbital lander/off-world ground transport concept that can work in low gravity environments etc. This will aid autonomous delivery vehicles etc to be dropped from low orbit and find their own landing sites, and then drive to location.
I wonder how many maimed kerbals are stranded around the space X facility while testing this.
The car is just a façade.
Edit: And to expand on this. Owners of GM T.50' say they can't use the ground effect fan anywhere in public due to the debris it picks up and throws, and are ineffective on anything but near perfect roads. So that's not impressive to me. And the jet boosters are also ridiculous, there is not real-world application where you could use them outside of completely closed environments with no one nearby. It's a huge investment into reaction thrusters for a car that would never, ever be used - unless it was to demonstrate thruster technology for another reason.
i.e. Space X.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IM-1#Lunar_landing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuto-R_Mission_1#Landing_att...
This feels like a delivery mechanism to drop hardware from terrestrial orbit. At least the last leg after parachutes
Also, assuming the delivery vehicle is destroyed at the end of each "delivery", what will it cost?
I think you are on an entirely different page.
My sense is that this is just more Elon Musk bullshit that will never materialize.
1. If you start flying and land on someone or something, that's a problem. 2. My strong bet is what they demonstrated is as far as the thing can fly, which is definitely cool as a party trick, but that's it.
These cars are obviously chock full of machine-learning algorithms to be able to control themselves in the air in that way. I'd much rather see that ML muscle used for something that actually benefitted someone.
Also "Beyond The Limits of Physics"... would any actual engineers at Tesla/SpaceX agree with that marketing statement?
Just like we will have 1 million robotaxis on the streets by 2021?
EDIT: wow it really can fly, that is crazy
An innovative way to make some whoop-de-dooping billionaires with extra cash to spare land upside down on their rooves.
It appears like they always did a barrel-roll because the car is simply not stable after take-off...
Bullshit, no it can't.
> Advanced cold-gas thrusters use all-electric actuators to offer precise thrust, completing micro adjustments within a fraction of a second. This helps stabilize the vehicle in flight.
In flight? What? Did I miss the joke, or what? It's a fucking car... The image even shows it hovering off the ground. How is this not blatant false advertising?
ETA: okay, skimmed some of the livestream. These is absolutely no way that any of these features will ever be part of a production model. People get serious whiplash injuries just from being rear-ended at low speed. What do they think is going to happen to the occupant when they tell their car to jump over a semi and do a fucking barrel roll? Seriously, what are we doing here?
Watch the video - the car jumps into the air. Not exactly flight or what we’d consider a flying car, but it’s careering through the air off the ground.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
I mean, this isn't crazy. In fact, it's already been done. Ever heard of McMurtry? (https://mcmurtry.com/). They're notorious for exactly this - using fans to provide extreme downforce (urr... upforce if you're hanging upside down?).
> In flight?
Did you see the stunt where it literally flew over vehicles? I mean, maybe it's a bit closer to a controlled super-leap like the original Superman, but... yeah, my personal reaction to that was more "holy shit" than "well, that's not flying".
> Bullshit, no it can't.
A proof of concept already exists:
https://mcmurtry.com/upside-down-driving/
Uh what? Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip
Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/LC97wdQOmfI
Will the frame itself hold up?
> "Will it even be maintainable?"
Probably doesn't matter. I don't think it will be permitted on public roads anyway.
The presented variant is invite-only, so I guess it will be made to put in the garage of some (Saudi) investor who commits a billion dollar investment...
>This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Neat car though.
* The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw
The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.
This is just amazing, congrats to everyone who worked on this.
From an engineering pov, it must be the highlight of someone's life and a massive amount of fun to be able to work on a product like this.
this site just toast
Almost all the comments here are just the most generically negative I have ever seen on HN, with just general grumpiness everywhere.
This car is an incredible engineering achievement and a completely unexpected reveal.
You should try having fun and enjoying things once in a while...
see: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Whatever breakthrough they’re making, is it worth funding the dismantling of democracy?
[1]: Silicon Valley edition
The last decade of social media has shown that humans care more about authenticity than perfection in presentations.
How delusional are people? The emperor is not wearing clothes y'all.
And too bad it's associated with a Nazi shitheel. That takes a lot of the joy out of this.
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-tesla-dangerous-door...
But yeah, that's not the part of the vehicle that's gong to kill its first victim.