In a scene that felt like a mix of Mad Max, Top Gun, and a late-night YouTube rabbit hole, Elon Musk finally pulled back the curtain on the next-generation Tesla Roadster Thursday night outside Waco, Texas. The electric supercar, a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX, didn’t just drive. It launched itself off a towering ramp, flipped in midair, and stuck the landing like it had been practicing for the Olympics.
The nighttime demonstration, streamed live, showed the angular, low-slung Roadster climbing a massive curved ramp at speed. Thanks to a fan-based suction system underneath the car that can generate up to two Gs of force, it stuck to the surface even as the ramp went nearly vertical and inverted. At the top, the car launched, rotated in the air using cold-gas thrusters, and gently set itself back down on the pavement. Later in the sequence, it jumped over a lineup of other Teslas, including a Cybertruck and Semi, while performing what Tesla’s engineering chief called a “kick flip.”
Musk, never one for understatement, described the result of the Tesla-SpaceX team-up as better than any James Bond car. “It can basically fly like a rocket,” he said. “It could do rolls. It could do crazy gymnastics. Whatever you want, really.” He also offered the clarifying caveat that “this is not necessarily a safety-optimized car,” which is corporate-speak for “we turned the fun dial past 11 and kept going.”
The thrusters run on compressed air stored in onboard tanks — roughly 600 liters holding about 250 kilograms of air, fed through around 10 nozzles. No exotic rocket fuel, just high-pressure air that can be recompressed while the car is driving. Combined with the suction fans for downforce, the system is intended to deliver acceleration, cornering, and short bursts of flight that ordinary cars simply cannot match. Tesla claims the car hit 0-60 mph in 0.81 seconds during testing at the event.
The Roadster has been the longest-running “coming soon” in the auto industry. First shown as a prototype in 2017 with a promised 2020 production date, it has slipped repeatedly. Musk now says production begins in 2028. Three versions are planned: a road-focused Performance model with the suction system, a Thrust model adding rear thrusters for sub-one-second acceleration, and an invite-only Rocket trim with more thrusters for full aerial maneuvers. Reservations require a hefty deposit; SpaceX did not announce exact pricing.
The demonstration took place at a SpaceX facility in Texas, fitting for a car that borrows rocket-adjacent technology. Whether any of the thruster features will be street-legal, or how often an owner would actually use them on public roads, remains an open question. For now, the video speaks for itself: a car that drives upside down, launches off a ramp, flips, and lands on its wheels is the kind of over-the-top engineering flex that either makes you roll your eyes or immediately start calculating how many overtime shifts it would take to afford one.
Musk has spent years promising that combining the best car company with the best rocket company would produce something unprecedented. On Thursday night in Texas, the Roadster delivered the spectacle. Whether it delivers the car in 2028 is the next chapter. Until then, the internet has the footage, and it’s every bit as wild as it sounds.
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