Opinion
Somebody cue The Jetsons theme song, please. Ready? Let’s go:
“Meet Elon Musk! His boy, X Æ A-Xii/Transgender daughter Vivian/Shivon Zilis, his wife (except they’re not married, although he calls her his partner and she is the mother of four of his 14 children, but not the one birthed by influencer Ashley St. Clair last year, who Elon says he’s not sure he fathered but is nonetheless paying for anyway).
The writers of The Jetsons might’ve been ahead of their time when they had old George whizzing around the sky in a flying saucer-car, but they couldn’t possibly have foreseen that the trillionaire who would bring that vision to life had a backstory that wouldn’t fit neatly into a 90-minute intro, much less a 90-second one.
Like Musk, Hollywood has long been obsessed with flying vehicles in all their blockbusting, turbo-thrusting glory. Think Dr Emmett Brown’s DeLorean Time Machine in Back to the Future. Or Bond villain Scaramanga’s AMC Matador. Or whatever the hell Danny Zuko was driving when he and Sandy inexplicably took flight and started ploughing through the clouds at the end of Grease.
Fortunately for film producers untroubled by the laws of physics, the need for engineering accuracy or anything approaching boring old automotive reality was neatly sidestepped with a small fire in the tailpipe and painted racing stripes down the sides of whatever they were purporting to send into the air that day. All show and no go, as the maxim would have it.
By contrast, the Tesla Roadster unveiled at Musk’s SpaceX facility in McGregor, Texas, on Thursday, was precisely the reverse. Internally, it was all explosive aerospace cold-gas thruster technology. Externally, it looked a little bit Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s wet dream. (Musk said he invited the live crowd to prove it wasn’t AI, but I can’t be sure that wasn’t an AI version of him saying that.)
Meanwhile, the sudden prospect of flying cars becoming An Actual Thing sent the internet into overdrive. There was tricked-up footage of a hatchback taking flight to avoid a pothole – Musk must have had Sydney roads in mind when he designed it. Another depicting an SUV embedded in an overhead road sign. A redesigned McDonalds drive-thru with regular cars at ground level and a flying Tesla lane above. But my fave was a cow soaring through the air above the words: “F--- this s---, I’m out”. (“I prefer ground beef”, came the swift response.)
Then there were those who took the opposite tack, seizing the opportunity to spoil the party and dazzle everyone with science: “Vertical rocket thrust has been around for decades, but continually using thrust to hold a two-tonne vehicle against Earth’s gravity is incredibly inefficient. Sure, it can get more efficient … but you can’t engineer away the fundamental problem that a small car has to carry and continuously expend a huge amount of weighty propellant for it to lift in a matter of seconds,” read one typical X post, which has been edited here for clarity and also because it’s a giant buzzkill.
Part of the problem is that cheering for Elon Musk wizardry is a bit like breathlessly extolling the virtues of a Michael Jackson album. Were both guys once seen as visionaries in their fields? Absolutely. Does anyone want them (or indeed, their ghost) at their next dinner party? Probably not.
Wowsers aside, millions of motorists stuck in daily gridlock greeted the concept of escaping to a highway in the sky with unbridled excitement, such that “How much does a Tesla flying car cost?” was one of the top three “people also ask” questions on an associated Google search by Saturday.(The answer, incidentally, is upwards of $200,000, and production isn’t scheduled to start until 2028.)
Until then, it’s death by a thousand nervous breakdown-inducing drives, replete with horn-blowing imbeciles, lane-cutting scumbags and the occasional suicidal Uber Eats rider taking the opportunity to update his socials while overtaking a turning cement truck. And when you do finally get to wherever you’re going, there’s the consolation of knowing that the first Tesla Roadster will be flying off the assembly line long before you locate a parking spot.
It’s enough to make you yearn for simpler times. When the roads were quieter, Elon Musk was a twinkle (or possibly a small, annoying bug) in someone’s eye, and George Jetson got every green light on the flight home from work.
Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.
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