Tesla Just Showed A Car That Can Fly And Do Kickflips

At SpaceX's rocket development and testing facility in McGregor, Texas, Tesla unveiled the next-generation Roadster with a demonstration that produced one of the most widely shared automotive videos in recent memory. The car drove up an inverted half-pipe ramp, gripped the underside of the ramp using a vacuum fan system, launched itself airborne, performed a flip, and then used 10 SpaceX cold-gas thrusters to right itself mid-air and land on the tarmac. In a separate stunt, the Roadster jumped over a row of five other Tesla vehicles including a Semi, inverted itself, and used its thrusters to land cleanly, a maneuver described as an automotive first. Elon Musk, who appeared onstage and warned the audience that success was not guaranteed before the demonstration began, deadpanned afterward: well, it worked. His post on X afterward read: turns out the future does have flying cars. It passed nine million views within hours. Tesla's own longer clip, captioned Real life, baby, surpassed ten million. The car achieved this using what Tesla engineering chief Lars Moravy described as two SpaceX cold-gas thrusters integrated as carbon-overlay pressurized vessels inside the vehicle, with an ultra-high-pressure air tank system that recharges itself rather than requiring specialized propellant. The thrusters can produce brief but controllable aerial movement, enough to perform the kind of physics-defying maneuvers that movie cars have been doing with special effects for half a century.

Important context: the demonstration used a remotely controlled, unoccupied prototype on a closed private site, not a street-legal vehicle, and Tesla has not addressed how or whether the thruster-equipped version would receive regulatory approval for use on public roads or in public airspace. Production of the new Roadster is not expected until 2028, and no price has been announced. The legal and practical distance between what the video showed and what a customer could actually do on a public road remains significant. None of that changed what the video made people feel. Flying cars have been promised since the 1960s and delivered in movies, concept art, and science fiction for generations. The persistent gap between what people imagined the future would look like and what it actually produced has been one of the defining disappointments of the technology era. What Tesla showed on October 15 is not a flying car in the way science fiction promised one, but a car with rocket thrusters that can briefly leave the ground, invert itself, perform a kickflip, and land. Whether that counts, and what it means for where automotive technology goes from here, is a question the internet spent the rest of the week debating. The video is real. The car is real. The thrusters are real. And the reaction to seeing it happen for the first time was, by almost universal account, the feeling of watching something that was not supposed to be possible yet.

Source:https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-flying-tesla-12576772