The new Tesla Roadster can’t quite fly, but it can accelerate to 60 miles per hour in under a second with boosters, drive upside down, and spin through corkscrews in the air — at least under the conditions of the prototype unveiling at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, Thursday night.
“We need an audience to prove that it’s not AI or AI,” Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the audience (referring to the White House’s preferred language, “super intelligence”).
Tesla began taking deposits for the Roadster nearly a decade ago, and it launched a cherry-red, first-generation Roadster with a mannequin named Starman into space on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in a 2018 publicity stunt. A 2019 demo for the Cybertruck resulted in Tesla’s design chief shattering two of its supposedly unbreakable “Armor Glass” windows, and Cybertrucks subsequently became something of a byword for jerkwads, selling worse than the famous Ford Edsel. So it’s safe to say that this discovery was make-or-break.
This prototype is a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX and uses what Musk described as an “advanced ultra-high pressure air tank” to power SpaceX’s cold gas thrusters. The demo took place far from the actual stage for safety reasons. Musk told attendees, “Success is not guaranteed… But if it doesn’t work, we’re at a safe distance.”
Incredibly enough, it worked. Tesla showed off the prototype Roadster, which launched head first from the top of a semi-circular ramp before guiding itself through a corkscrew maneuver. Later in the demo video, Musk jumped the Roadster over the entire Tesla vehicle fleet monster truck style, again with a corkscrew.
“The car has, obviously, attitude control struts and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket, and it can roll,” Musk told the audience.
“This will actually be the only manually driven car that Tesla makes in the long term,” he said at another point.
The roadster pulls off its upside-down drive with suction fans, which Musk said generate more than 2 Gs of cornering grip. Musk admitted that there aren’t many people who want to drive upside down, but claimed that the “downforce of the car means you take care of it incredibly well.” Combined with its acceleration, he promised it would “shatter every track record that has ever existed.”
The SpaceX cold-gas thrusters are exceedingly loud, judging from the live stream, where Musk activated them for only a few seconds near the audience.
Tesla also played a clip of the Roadster accelerating to 60 miles per hour in one second, then a live test where it reached the same acceleration in 0.81 seconds. Musk said the SpaceX thrusters deliver 80 kilonewtons of thrust (an unusual metric for cars, to be sure) and use compressed air, so they don’t need separate fuel.
That’s probably a more practical feature, even if the thunderous boosters and back blast of compressed air are likely to be annoying for anyone to be around.
Musk joked during the demo that the upper limit of acceleration is probably somewhere around when G-forces cause retinal detachment, so let’s hope it’s a bit lower than that.
As a final trick, Tesla showed the prototype roadster, which launches itself directly into the air for a corkscrew from the ground.
None of these tricks, to the palpable relief of Musk and others on stage, resulted in a SpaceX-style explosion. The roadster comes in three configurations (Performance, Thrust, and Rocket), only the last of which has thrusters that allow movement on a vertical axis.
It’s unclear what practical purpose the car’s ability to corkscrew serves—it’s probably not legal to use it in the first place, and it’s hard to think of any real-world driving scenario where pulling off this maneuver isn’t likely to end up with the Roadster’s cabin full of puke, blood, or worse.
According to MotorTrend, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has a rule that classifies any vehicle that is “Any Inch Off the Ground” as an aircraft, and imposed airspace restrictions around the McGregor test facility before the original October 1 date. That suggests the Roadster falls under FAA rules that restrict the use of these features to pre-approved areas away from traffic; Tesla has a long history of conflicts with its primary safety regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The new roadster will enter production in 2028, according to Musk and crew. They made a point to assure the audience that it’s a real timeline, not an estimate, but that’s about the only other concrete information besides the spectacle.
Tesla didn’t offer any additional data, such as a spec sheet or price. His originally promised specifications for this new generation of roadster, from 2017, include 0-60 miles per hour in 1.9 seconds or less, a top speed of 250 miles per hour, and a driving range of 620 miles.