Tesla’s Roadster Learns to Fly

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SCI110: Flying cars have been “just around the corner” since The Jetsons. On October 15, 2026, at SpaceX’s rocket test facility in McGregor, Texas, Tesla finally showed its long-delayed second-generation Roadster, and it left the ground.

Caroline Knight walks Lindsay Sant and Lino Saubolle through the car’s nine-year road from its 2017 unveiling, through the “SpaceX option package” and one slipped production date after another, to a livestreamed demo that had the whole panel reaching for words.

Tesla now offers three trims. Performance is a two-seat electric car that uses an underbody suction system to stick to the road. Thrust adds rear-facing cold-gas thrusters for a sprint to 60 in under a second. Rocket gives up the passenger seat for more high-pressure air tanks and carries ten thrusters around the body, built for leaving the ground.

The science is borrowed straight from spaceflight. Cold-gas thrusters release compressed air through a nozzle, the same principle SpaceX uses to steer Falcon 9 boosters, and the air is stored in composite overwrapped pressure vessels like the ones inside the rocket. Caroline explains why keeping ten of them in balance would take a flight computer making constant small corrections, not a driver’s reflexes.

Then the stunts: a claimed 0.81-second run to 60 mph, an upside-down run up a curved ramp held on by suction, a barrel roll off a ramp that Tesla calls the “kickflip,” and a leap clean over a Cybertruck.

The panel also gets to the practical side. Reservations open at a $50,000 deposit for Performance and $250,000 for Thrust, while Rocket is invitation only. Production is slated for 2028, and Elon Musk himself admits safety was not the priority, so the Rocket trim may never see a city street.

Lindsay argues that wild concept cars matter even when they don’t reach your driveway, because they push the rest of the industry off the status quo, and wonders whether compressed air could one day power everyday cars. And he makes a prediction: this Roadster is headed for the air show circuit.

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