By Chris Isidor
TESLA CEO Elon Musk on Thursday unveiled a car that he says will be able to fly – a feature long relegated to science fiction and Saturday morning cartoons.
At a product launch at a Texas test facility belonging to SpaceX, Musk’s other public company, he showed off Tesla’s new Roadster, a two-person sports car that can supposedly go from 0 to 60 mph in a record time of under a second. Musk said the car uses suction underneath to climb a steep ramp and hang upside down, before spinning off the ramp, flipping in the air and using air jets to land.
The car had no actual driver during the demonstration, which was done “to make sure we don’t kill anyone,” Musk told the crowd.
“Success is not guaranteed,” he said. “I mean that. It’ll probably work, but if it doesn’t work, we’re at a safe distance.”
Later in Thursday’s demonstration, the Roadster used the same jets to leap over a line of Tesla’s existing models parked side by side, and then used the jets at the back of the car to accelerate to 60 mph in that record time.
But even with the success of the staged event, whether the car will actually live up to the promise – providing owners with the ability to fly rather than merely hop, while also being able to drive very fast on roads – remains to be proven.
The car uses 10 nozzles and what Musk described as “ultra high-pressure air tanks” to propel itself, both in the air and to accelerate quickly on the ground. He described the technology as “the result of what happens when you have a collaboration with the world’s best car company and the world’s best rocket company.”
He said the car will go into production in 2028, although throughout Tesla’s history Musk has made promises about when things would be accomplished, only to miss those timelines by a number of years.
Musk told an enthusiastic crowd of Tesla fans: “We need an audience to prove that it’s not AI or SI. So you guys can tell people you saw it with your own eyes, because what you see with your own eyes, you will not believe.”
And whether the car is able to truly fly is very difficult to say, despite Thursday night’s demonstration. It certainly did not demonstrate any long-range flight.
In recent years, there have been many advancements in electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, known as eVTOLs. While there are some working models, there are still many engineering roadblocks to road-worthy cars that can truly fly.
“Aircraft are extremely sensitive to weight, whereas with ground vehicles you want them to have bumpers and crumple zones and all that,” Roger Connor, curator for vertical flight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told CNN on Thursday before the event. “Inevitably, something that is a hybrid between the two is going to be a poor-performing aircraft and a poor-performing vehicle, and also quite expensive.”
One car in development, made by California start-up Alef, has been able to get airborne using eight propellers, four at the front and four at the back. But the vehicle weighs 254 pounds, a small fraction of the weight of a Tesla Roadster. It can also carry only one person, who must weigh less than the vehicle itself.
Ahead of Tesla’s demonstration, Alef CEO Jim Dukhovny told CNN that he wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla was able to get its Roadster off the ground during the event. But that doesn’t mean it can truly “fly.”
“It absolutely is 100% feasible,” he said. “That being said, the hardest part on all eVTOLs, and for us, is the transition from rising vertically to moving forward. It needs to be extremely careful, making sure you do not lose lift, and making sure it’s very stable.”
Connor also expressed doubt that any street-legal car like a Roadster would be able to fly anywhere an owner might want it to go.
“We’re not talking about sustained flight,” he said. “We are literally talking about hopping.”
