Tesla Roadster
tesla.comBy 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)
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.
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
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.
Patently absurd, of course, but amazing too.
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.
Car looks half decent too.
To me it looks like a mashup of a Ferrari and a Cybertruck. That's not a good thing.
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Murray_Automotive_T.50
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".
> Bullshit, no it can't.
A proof of concept already exists:
**
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.
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.
Given some of the tauted 'features' of this thing, I'd be more concerned about it blowing up in my driveway.
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.
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 $50k deposits for v3!
Worse, there are no 3rd parties producing cheaper suspension parts, so your old Model 3 is going to have to spend 2000-3000$ 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.
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.
(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.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/NextGenT...
.jpg){kind=link}
(just personal preference)
https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Lamborgh...
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/tesla-spac...
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.
closed tab. thanks.
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.
Uh what? Rodney Mullen invented the kickflip
Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/LC97wdQOmfI
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...
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.
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.
Watch Ford v Ferrari for an idea of what auto companies are willing to invest for bragging rights.
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.
1. Why don't they show a driver entering or exiting? 2. How much do that particular "car" weigh?
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.
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."
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.
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...
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.
Here's an RC car that can drive on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
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...
Example RC toy car that drives on the ceiling: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uR_mNcRlNsA
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.
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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.
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.
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...
It would encourage me to sell, if I had, seeing this nonsense.
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.
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.
If that is what they have done. That may just be a large drone looking like a car.
>This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.
Neat car though.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-079-introduction-to-convex-opt...
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZpQZSBTi7k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2c-B3y7yGQ
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).
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.
Looks like 4 seconds or so.
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%.
Optimus is coming, the huge factory in Austin is being built now.
Late? Always. But coming.
Two outta three ain’t bad.
Cybercab is operating already on the roads? They're building the factory for mass producing them right now.
Optimus robot is still in development.
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.
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.
- 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'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.
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.
The Tumbler? Oh, you wouldn't be interested in that.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine the engineer hours wasted on this gimmick, while he is losing market share everywhere.
- 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.
Hahah, the failure modes are going to be exciting.
And too bad it's associated with a Nazi shitheel. That takes a lot of the joy out of this.
My primary scepticism is how much the prototype weighs, and whether it can still jump with 2 passengers + 1000kg of batteries inside.
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.
How delusional are people? The emperor is not wearing clothes y'all.
Also "Beyond The Limits of Physics"... would any actual engineers at Tesla/SpaceX agree with that marketing statement?
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.
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.
* The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition On Earth - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQbHMgK2rw
hmmmm. spacex-tesla merger signalling?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Dunno. Looks like it jumps. Fying seems to require some degree of control over direction but I'm just a gravity-impaired bidep.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It appears like they always did a barrel-roll because the car is simply not stable after take-off...
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.
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.
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"
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 of credulity do the rest. Stock price goes up.
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...
It must be incredibly difficult to keep the car stable while mid-air at low speeds, I suspect it wouldn't look that "elegant"...
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...
You’d want something that smoothly hovers rather than a launch then catch with boosters.
Was there a second jump without a roll?
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.
this site just toast
Also a massive feat of engineering, congrats to their team.
The car clearly does not have enough momentum to go on the ramp all the way upside-down, yet it miraculously does not fall.