Elon Musk's Flying Car vs the Laws of Physics

Transcript

How does a car hang upside down at a SpaceX test site, then fly off the end and land on its wheels? Elon Musk calls it a flying car. This is what it really did, and what the laws of physics say about it. Flying, or just hopping? Why a rocket site, and not a road? And what about the people who paid 250,000 dollars to reserve one in 2017?

It is a Thursday night in McGregor, Texas, in the United States, at a test site where SpaceX fires its rockets. There is music, smoke, a hiss of machinery and a countdown, the full Elon Musk show. Musk walks out wearing a silver belt buckle with the Tesla logo on it. A crowd of fans and investors cheers.

In front of them sits a white sports car. The car has no driver. Musk explains why: it is to make sure nobody gets killed. Then he warns them: “Success is not guaranteed.” It will probably work, he adds, but if it doesn’t, everyone is at a safe distance. Electrek reports that guests hundreds of feet away had to wear earplugs. What kind of car needs earplugs?

The Roadster rolls onto a ramp that curls up like a toy race track. It climbs until it is driving upside down, held to the track by suction from underneath. For a moment, it just hangs there. Then it drops off the end, spins over in mid-air and lands on its wheels, using jets of air.

Later, the same jets throw it over a line of Teslas: a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Semi, a Model Y and a Model 3. It twists in the air on the way over. The move is called a kickflip. Musk calls what they built better than any James Bond car. And there, on display, is his own Lotus Esprit, the car from a Bond film.

Then comes the test about speed. Jets fire out of the back, and after some trouble with the timer, Tesla says the car reached 60 miles per hour in 0.81 seconds. “This will be the actual car that’s on the roads,” Musk says. So why show it here, at a rocket test site, and not on a road?

Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt called it the most insane product demo he had ever seen. He said he was still asking himself how it wasn’t AI. Musk had made the same point on stage: he wanted an audience there to prove it was not AI. A car that seems to fly, almost nine years after Tesla first showed it. But not everyone was cheering. Marques Brownlee, a YouTuber who had reserved two of these cars, listed the claims: flips, half the speed of sound, shipping in 2028. “This is a prank, right?”

Rewind to November 2017. Tesla is showing off its electric Semi truck when, at the very end, it surprises the crowd with one more car. It is the new Roadster, a modern take on the very first car Tesla ever sold. That first Roadster, built on a Lotus Elise chassis, had helped change how the world saw electric cars. The new one was billed as the car that would give gasoline cars a hard-core smackdown. It was meant to be small, low and built for speed, not comfort: a car to beat gasoline cars around a track.

The numbers on Tesla’s own page were made for headlines. Zero to 60 miles per hour in 1.9 seconds. A range of 620 miles on a single charge. And it still had room for passengers in the back.

The top speed was listed at more than 250 miles per hour. Tesla called it the first supercar to set every performance record and still seat four. The Autopian called them incredible specs for the time. But the most important line on the page was not about speed.

It was the price. The Roadster would start at 200,000 dollars. To get in line, a buyer put down a reservation of 50,000 dollars. That is a quarter of the price, handed over years before any car could be delivered. And that was the cheap way in.

For the most eager buyers, Tesla offered the Founders Series. There were a thousand places, and the reservation was the full price: 250,000 dollars, paid up front. Not a small deposit. The full price of a car that was still only a prototype.

Do the sum. A thousand cars at that price comes to as much as 250 million dollars, if every place was taken. Tesla held that money, and the buyers held a place in a queue. So what exactly had they bought?

The next year, Musk raised the stakes again. He wrote that a SpaceX option package would put about ten small rocket thrusters around the car. They would make it faster off the line, faster at the top, and better at braking and cornering. And then came the line about flying. Maybe, he wrote, they would even allow a Tesla to fly. Buyers were told to expect their cars in 2020. That date, like the five that followed it, would never hold.

Electrek, a news site that covers Tesla closely, kept the list. The first delay came in the summer of 2020. Production slipped a year. Then it slipped another year, and then another. By Electrek’s count, that is at least six production delays and seven unveil dates.

In the spring of 2023, Musk said production would hopefully start the next year. “This is not a commitment,” he added. It wasn’t. The next year, he said the design goals had been radically increased. But what was Tesla actually building behind closed doors?

Late last year, Musk told Joe Rogan’s podcast he wanted to reveal the car before that year was out. A week later, at the shareholder meeting where he was awarded a pay package worth 1 trillion dollars, he moved it to April Fools’ Day. That date, he joked, gave him some deniability. “Like, I could say I was just kidding,” he said.

April passed, and so did the summer. A date in October was set, then called off because of the weather.

In August, the tech news site The Information reported what had been happening inside. Years earlier, two teams in Tesla’s design studio had worked on two different cars. One studied a Roadster built on the Model S Plaid’s structure and parts; the other started from scratch around an ultralight carbon fibre tub, the way top performance cars are built. Musk picked the tub and told staff to do it correctly or not at all, one person said. Tesla hired engineers from Italy, including Stefan Nothdurfter, a former head of body engineering at Lamborghini, who has since left.

Meanwhile, the buyers waited. Electrek says Musk jokes about his long-suffering reservation holders at shareholder meetings. Marques Brownlee decided to get his money back. There was no cancel button for the Roadster, he said, only a phone number and an email address. When he finally got through, he says, after days of voicemail, there was a long pause, and then: “A Roadster?” By his account, it took weeks, and two separate payments, before all of that reservation money came back. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said publicly that he had cancelled too.

And the flying car was shrinking. “We started off thinking we were almost making an aircraft,” one person said. They ended up, the same person said, with something closer to hovering.

On stage, Tesla’s vehicle engineering chief, Lars Moravy, gave the numbers. Electrek explains the first trick: fans underneath the car pull the air out from below, so the air around it presses the car onto the track. That is how it hangs upside down. Then, Moravy said, the thrusters take over, fed by 600 litres of compressed air. Tesla says every usable space in the car is packed with pressure vessels. TechCrunch notes they are the same type of vessel that has been at the root of multiple SpaceX rocket explosions. “It literally is just going to puff itself up,” Musk said, and do these moves whenever you like.

Remember those earplugs? Months before the show, The Information reported that the thrusters were loud enough to damage the hearing of anyone standing close. It also reported that a driver most likely could not drive the car while they fire. The stunt was planned for a rocket test site, the report said, with nobody inside and spectators kept far back.

Then came the other side of the argument. An Electrek analysis walked through the stunts, one by one. Its verdict on the jump: a party trick. Thrusters that push a car upward make its tyres grip less, not more, so the jump does nothing for driving. The rear thrusters are a different story. They push the car forward even when the tyres cannot push any harder, which, Electrek says, lets it essentially break the physics limits every other car has.

But the analysis also found loose ends. Tesla’s display claimed 4,700 kilograms of downforce, for a car Electrek put at under 1,700 kilograms. The writer called that number surprisingly large. In slow motion, the rear thrusters were firing before the car even started to move.

Then there is the range. The new Roadster claims over 300 miles, about half of what Tesla first promised. Electrek had warned before the show that a cold gas thruster gets only a few bursts per tank, and adds weight and cost. So what is all that hardware really for?

And does it fly? Roger Connor, the curator for vertical flight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, gave CNN his answer before the show began. A machine that is both a car and an aircraft, he said, will be a poor aircraft, a poor car, and expensive. “We’re not talking about sustained flight,” he said. “We are literally talking about hopping.” If the Roadster only hops, who decides what it is: a car, or an aircraft?

After the show, CBS News put a simple question to the US Department of Transportation. Who oversees a car that flies, hovers or otherwise defies gravity? The answer was not readily clear. A senior official doubted the car would really take off, and admitted there was no clear answer.

Tesla’s own website had already drawn a line. The flying model, it says, is not approved for public road use. The version with the full flight system, called Rocket, is by invitation only. The car buyers can reserve online, CBS reported, is a version that does not fly at all. The Information had reported that the limited edition Tesla planned to demo would not be street legal, and could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. The report said Tesla had discussed selling it to a handful of superfans, on the model of Ferrari’s program for track-only cars driven under supervision. So who, exactly, is this flying car for?

The road safety regulator, NHTSA, sent CBS a statement. It normally leaves safety certification to the carmaker itself. But its warning was pointed. “While the vehicle may appear to defy the laws of physics,” it said, the maker must make sure it does not defy federal safety standards. It added that it would keep watching, and would not hesitate to act to protect drivers.

Investors read the night differently. Tesla’s shares were up 5 percent before the market opened the next morning. Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management called it an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers. Analyst Dan Ives wrote that the Roadster would not move the needle on sales or revenue, and should not be counted on for growth. Josh Gilbert, an analyst at the trading platform eToro, said margins and cash flow in the coming quarterly results would weigh far more with investors than anything shown at the reveal. Musk himself had once called the car a small potato situation.

There was one more agency to ask. A car that leaves the ground would seem to be a job for the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates aircraft. Its reply to CBS was one sentence. “The Tesla vehicle does not meet the FAA definition of an aircraft.”

Tesla is not the first to chase this dream. The American aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss showed the first flying car prototype in 1917. More than a century later, CBS noted, technical and regulatory problems have kept the whole flying car business from getting off the ground. So who is closest?

In San Mateo, California, in the United States, a start-up called Alef says it has started building its Model A by hand. Each early car takes several months of hand work. CNN reported that Alef’s car lifts off on eight propellers and weighs just 254 pounds, carrying a single person who must weigh less than the car. Alef says that is the price of being an ultralight: no pilot’s licence is needed, but it may fly only in daylight and away from crowded areas.

Alef says it has 3,500 pre-orders, worth a billion dollars. Only a few early customers will get the first cars, in California and Hong Kong. And when it announced production, the company gave no delivery date for them.

Alef says its idea was first sketched on a napkin at a cafe in Palo Alto in 2015. They thought it would take about six months to build one. “Boy, was this an underestimate,” the company says now.

Before Tesla’s show, Alef’s chief executive, Jim Dukhovny, told CNN he would not be surprised if the Roadster got off the ground. “It absolutely is 100% feasible,” he said. The hardest part, he said, is the moment a vehicle turns from rising straight up to moving forward, without losing lift. Tesla’s show did not include any long-range flight at all.

In China, Xpeng’s flying car company, Aridge, is going bigger. It says its Land Aircraft Carrier, a road vehicle that carries a small aircraft, has 7,000 pre-orders. Its factory in Guangzhou is built to turn out an aircraft every half hour at full capacity. It plans to start deliveries this year.

And Tesla? Musk says production starts in 2028, and he still has not named a price. Tesla really did lift a car off the ground. But the curator expected hopping, the FAA says it does not meet its definition of an aircraft, and Musk himself warned the stunt might fail. As for the people who paid all those years ago and did not cancel, they are still waiting. Tesla has still not delivered a single one of the new Roadsters.

So, did Elon Musk build a flying car? So far, he has built a car that leaves the ground for a moment, not one shown to fly any distance. Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein put it plainly: the Roadster will be Tesla’s new halo car. And Musk has said safety is not the main goal: if safety is your number one goal, he said, do not buy the Roadster.

Next, he says, Tesla may try to jump the Snake River Canyon, where Evel Knievel once tried to cross in a rocket. Electrek’s writer, who holds two referral-award Roadster reservations, wanted something boring instead: a production car, a real price, and a straight answer for the people who reserved one years ago.