CNN - Tesla CEO Elon Musk Thursday unveiled a car that he said will be able to fly, a feature long relegated to science fiction and Saturday morning cartoons.
At a product reveal at a Texas test facility belonging to SpaceX, Musk’s other public company, he showed off Tesla’s new Roadster, a two-person sports car that not only could go from 0 to 60 mph in record time of less than a second, but he said used suction underneath the car to climb up a steep ramp and hang upside down before spinning off the ramp, flipping in the air and using air jets to land.
The car did not have an actual driver during the demonstration, which was done “to make sure we don’t kill anyone,” Musk told the crowd.
“Success is not guaranteed,” he said. “I mean that. It’ll probably work, but if it doesn’t work, we’re at a safe distance.”
Later in Thursday’s demonstration, the Roadster used the same jets to leap over a line of Tesla’s existing models parked side-by-side, and then used the jets off the back of the car to accelerate to 60 mph in that record time.
But even with the success of the staged event, whether the car will actually be able to live up to the promise and provide owners with the ability to both fly rather than just hop, while also being able to drive very fast on roads, remains to be proven.
The car uses 10 nozzles and what Musk described as “ultra high-pressure air tanks” to propel itself, both in the air, and to accelerate quickly when on the ground. He described the technology as “the results of what happens when you have a collaboration with the world’s best car company and the world’s best rocket company.”
He said the car will go into production in 2028, although throughout Tesla’s history, Musk has made promises about when things would be accomplish, only to miss that timeline by a number of years.
Musk told an enthusiastic crowd of Tesla fans “we need an audience to prove that it’s not AI or SI. So you guys can tell people you saw it with your eyes, because what you see with your eyes, you will not believe.”
And whether the car is able to truly fly is very difficult to say, despite Thursday night’s demonstration. It certainly didn’t have any demonstration of long-range flight.
In recent years, there have been many advancements in electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, known as eVTOL’s. While there are some working models, there are still many engineering roadblocks to road-worthy cars that can truly fly.
“Aircraft are extremely sensitive to weight, whereas with ground vehicles you want them to have bumpers and crumple zones and all that,” Roger Conner, curator for vertical flight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told CNN Thursday before the event. “Inevitably, something that is a hybrid between the two is going to be a poor performing aircraft and a poor performing vehicle, and also quite expensive.”
One car that is in development, made by California start-up Alef, has been able to get airborne using eight propellers, four in the front and four in the back. But the vehicle weighs 254 pounds, a small fraction of the weight of a Tesla Roadster. It can also only carry one person which must weigh less than the vehicle itself.
Ahead of Tesla’s demonstration, Alef CEO Jim Dukhovny told CNN that he wouldn’t be surprised if Tesla was able to get its Roadster off the ground during the event. But that doesn’t mean it can truly “fly.”
“It absolutely is 100% feasible,” he said. “That being said, the hardest part on all eVTOLs, and for us, it’s a transition from (rising) vertical to (moving) forward. It needs to be extremely careful, making sure you do not lose lift, and making sure it’s very stable.”
Conner also expressed doubt that any street legal car like a Roadster would be able to fly anywhere an owner might want it to go.
“We’re not talking about sustained flight,” he said. “We are literally talking about hopping.”