Arthur C. Clarke wrote that in 1962, and it has been quoted into meaninglessness since. But on Thursday night in Texas, a car drove up a wall, refused to fall off, and then flew through the air before landing.
At SpaceX’s rocket test site at McGregor, outside Waco, Tesla built a curved ramp and sent a white coupe nobody had seen before up the inside of it. The car went beyond vertical and stayed there, upside down, held to the surface by a sucking sound so audible you could hear it in the live-streamed event. It came back down, went up again, left the ramp, rotated itself level in mid-air, and landed on the pavement. Then it jumped a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Model Y, a Model 3, and a Tesla Semi Truck, rolling on the way over (the Semi stands more than 13 feet tall).
Nobody was driving the car. Rather, the figure in the seat was a Starman mannequin, the dummy SpaceX launched in the original Roadster in 2018, and the car drove up the ramp itself. Elon Musk called it “technically autonomous” for the demo, to make sure nobody got killed. The car itself does have a steering wheel, and is very much made to be driven by humans. The crowd stood several hundred yards back, because the thrusters at full output can damage hearing.
The company wants to run it at Snake River Canyon next, where Evel Knievel’s steam rocket came down in the gorge in 1974 under a parachute that opened too soon. “Let’s give it another shot,” Musk said.
Tesla first showed its second-generation Roadster in November 2017 and promised deliveries in 2020. Nobody at McGregor was still thinking about 2020.
Ten nozzles and 600 liters of air
What Tesla rolled out is a low two-seat wedge with upward-opening doors, a full-width light bar at each end, and seats molded into the chassis to save weight. Franz von Holzhausen—chief designer at Tesla—cited the SR-71 Blackbird aircraft as an inspiration. The rear diffuser is left open, so you can see the fans and the ten gold-ringed thruster nozzles sitting in it.