The NEW? Tesla Roadster: They Weren't Even The First To Do It

Okay. Let's watch this one slowly. The car casually rolls toward an inverted ramp. The ramp curves up, and the car keeps going. Steeper. Steeper. Now it's nearing a 180 degree flip, leaning out over the ground, and it's still stuck to the track.

Then it goes up again, lets go at the top, flips in mid-air... and lands on its wheels. Like nothing even happened.

Then it hops a semi truck. Nobody was in it, by the way. Elon Musk said that was, quote, "to make sure we don't kill anyone." Honestly? Fair.

Hi, I'm Nora. That was Tesla's new Roadster, on October fifteenth. In our Short, we asked if it was Rocket League in real life. Today we're slowing it all the way down, to see how each trick actually works. And yes, I got rocket arms for the occasion.

Here's what a lot of people missed. There isn't one Roadster. There are four. A base car, then Performance, Thrust and Rocket. Performance has the fans. Thrust adds jets at the back. Rocket adds even more jets, and it's invite only. So let's play it like a game, and unlock our way up.

LUGNUT: “UNLOCK EVERYTHING.”

Patience, Lugnut. Patience.

Level one: fans. Right now, the air around you is pushing on everything, about ten tonnes on every square meter. That's like six of these cars stacked on one floor tile. And You don't feel it, because it pushes from every side at once.

But suck some air out from under a car, seal the edges with skirts, and the push from above wins. The car gets pressed into the road. And it doesn't take much. A few percent less pressure underneath, and that push beats the car's own weight.

Which is exactly what's happening here. Pause. Gravity's pulling it down, and the air is pushing it into the ramp, harder. Tesla's engineering chief, Lars Moravy, says the fans can pull up to two g. Twice the car's weight, holding it on.

The fans sit at the back, the skirts drop down, and it all runs off the battery. Tesla's patent, granted last year, has two modes. Every skirt down, fully sealed, for the most grip on smooth ground. Or just the side skirts, for speed and bumpy roads.

Quick side quest, because Tesla didn't invent this. Meet the McMurtry Spéirling. A tiny electric race car from England, with two fans in the back, doing the same trick.

McMurtry says those fans make about two thousand kilograms of downforce, even standing still. That's more than double the car's weight. In 2022 it ran up the Goodwood hill in thirty-nine point zero eight seconds. An outright record.

And in 2025, they drove one onto a platform, rotated the whole thing over, and drove it upside down. From a standstill.

LUGNUT: “SO WHY ISN'T EVERY CAR A FAN CAR?”

Good question. Fan cars have a habit of making people mad.

The Chaparral 2J raced with fans in 1970. In 1978, Niki Lauda won the Swedish Grand Prix in Brabham's fan car. Rivals complained it was throwing debris at them, and Brabham pulled it after that one race. McMurtry says that Goodwood run made it the first fan car in official motorsport since.

Even McMurtry's road version only plans to run its fans in track mode. Tesla's is meant for the grocery store.

LUGNUT: “LEVEL 1 COMPLETE.”

Level two: Thrust. A tire can only push as hard as it's pressed against the road. The fans press it harder, so it grips harder. But there's still a limit.

Watch this run. Tesla showed zero to sixty in zero point eight one seconds. Let's count it. Zero... sixty. Done.

LUGNUT: “I BLINKED.”

Everybody blinked. That's more than three g, on average. Space Shuttle launches were held to three. Tesla says its thrusters push four to five times harder than the tires can, and that push doesn't go through the tires at all.

So what's a thruster? Watch my arm. A tank of gas at enormous pressure, a valve, and a nozzle. Open the valve, gas blasts out one way, and I get pushed the other way. No fire. SpaceX does the same thing to flip and steer Falcon 9 boosters on the way down.

Here's the real hardware. Left to right: that big ball is the tank, two hundred liters, wrapped in carbon fiber. On the Thrust version, it replaces the trunk. The pipes split into four nozzles at the back. MotorTrend says the pipes are titanium, and the valve motors appear to come from Tesla's Optimus robot. Apparently, from its ankle.

And every pipe has to be the same length, Moravy says. If the gas reaches one side first, the car twists. So every launch is a tiny race that has to end in a tie.

Level three: Rocket. It swaps the passenger seat for another four hundred liters of tank, so it seats one, and adds six more nozzles on the front and sides. Point them down, the car lifts. Fire them unevenly, it rolls. It's basically a drone, with valves instead of propellers.

Now rewatch that kickflip. That's not a ramp jump. That's the car hopping on its own jets, and steering in the air.

And that huge white cloud when it lands? Nothing's on fire. Gas that expands that fast gets incredibly cold, cold enough to turn the moisture in the air into fog while a real rocket would be a flame.

So why does every flight last only seconds? Napkin math. Cold gas is a weak propellant, about a quarter of the push of a real rocket engine, per kilogram. To hold up even the lightest Roadster, about seventeen hundred kilograms, you'd have to throw out something like thirty kilograms of gas every second. A heavy suitcase. Every. Single. Second. And even six hundred liters at extreme pressure is only a few hundred kilograms. Seconds of hover. Not minutes.

Moravy says the Thrust tank gives about five seconds of boost. Then the refill, from a high-pressure nitrogen supply, takes two to six hours.

LUGNUT: “WORTH IT?”

Ask me in 2028. That's when Tesla says production starts. Although its reservation terms say it can't guarantee when your car will arrive. Or if. And the Rocket? Invite only, and Tesla says it's not approved for public roads.

Before the event, a Smithsonian curator put it well: "We're not talking about sustained flight. We are literally talking about hopping." That's fair. It's not a flying car. It's a car that can hang upside down, launch harder than its tires alone could, and hop a truck, using fans, tanks and nozzles. Ideas that are decades old.

As for my rocket arms, by my math, they'd last about three seconds. Good thing I'm a video game. So what are you going to do with your five seconds of thrust? Tell me in the comments.