We were promised flying cars. Peter Thiel’s old line, that we wanted flying cars and got 140 characters instead, has hung over Silicon Valley for fifteen years, and on Thursday night Elon Musk tried to answer it.
On a SpaceX rocket range outside Waco, Texas, a white Tesla Roadster with nobody inside drove up a towering curved wall, hung from the top of it upside down, let go, and rolled itself upright on jets of cold gas before touching down on all four wheels.
Then it did it again, over a parked Cybertruck, a Model Y, a Model 3 and a Semi, with a flip at the top! Guests had been handed earplugs at check-in. Musk opened by saying he needed a live crowd so nobody would assume the footage was made with AI, which tells you something about 2026.
It is the most Jetsons thing anyone has staged in front of an audience. It is also not quite flying. And the car underneath turns out to be more interesting than the stunt.
A wedge, revived
Strip away the smoke and Tesla’s design chief, Franz von Holzhausen, has drawn something we did not expect from the company that gave us the Cybertruck: a proper supercar wedge. The 2017 Roadster prototype was soft and rounded, a 2+2 with a removable glass roof. This one is a strict two-seater with a flat, folded nose, a dark glass canopy and headlights that pop down instead of up.
Its family tree is easy to read. Marcello Gandini’s Lancia Stratos Zero and Lamborghini Countach, Giorgetto Giugiaro’s Lotus Esprit, all those 1970s doorstops drawn with a ruler. The Esprit isn’t a guess, either. Musk bought the white one that turned into a submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me at auction in 2013, and it sat on display at the event.
In the studio photos Tesla released after the show, the car is lit like sculpture, and it holds up. The doors lift straight up like a pair of wings. The tail is a single blade of red light over a row of round nozzles. The cabin is two white seats, a yoke and one screen, about as calm as anything Tesla has made. Our favorite detail is the smallest one: the plate on the back just says RDSTR.
How a car hangs from a ceiling
Two tricks do the work. The first is suction. Fans under the car and skirts along its sides pull it toward the road with up to twice its own weight, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, said on stage. That’s enough to stick to a wall, and in theory enough to corner like a race car. It’s an old idea, too. Brabham won a Formula One race with a fan car in 1978, and it was withdrawn almost immediately.
From the Moss & Fog Shop
The second trick is the one that made the crowd scream. Cold gas thrusters, the same family of hardware SpaceX uses to steer its rockets, blast compressed gas out of nozzles around the body. Nothing burns. Hagerty, which got a walkthrough from Moravy, describes a 200-liter tank behind the seats and, on the version that flies, a second 400-liter tank where the passenger seat would be. Four thrusters at the back push the car forward. Six more, at the corners and the sides, lift it and spin it. It is, more or less, a very loud air horn pointed at the ground.
Here is the whole show, straight from Tesla.
A short history of almost flying
The flying car is older than most of the cars on the road. Here is how close we have come.
The flying car, 1917 to now
- 1917 Glenn Curtiss shows his Autoplane in New York, an aluminum car body under triplane wings. It makes a few short hops and never truly flies.
- 1949 Moulton Taylor’s Aerocar folds its wings into a trailer you tow behind you. It earns civil certification in 1956. Only six are ever built.
- 1962 The Jetsons gives George a bubble-topped car that folds into a briefcase, and sets the bar for everything that follows.
- 1982 Syd Mead’s Spinner in Blade Runner makes the flying car look wet, worn and ordinary, which is somehow more convincing.
- 1989 Back to the Future Part II sends a flying DeLorean into a 2015 full of hovering traffic. We are now eleven years late.
- 2026 A white Tesla wedge hangs from a ceiling, leaps a Semi and lands on its wheels. Nobody is inside, and it stays in the air for seconds.
Now, the doubts
We love a gee-whiz moment as much as anyone, and this was one. But a few of the claims deserve a squint.
The claims, and what we actually know
Tesla says It flies.
What we know It hops, and falls with real control, for a few seconds at a time on a closed SpaceX test site. Tesla hasn’t said how long it can stay up.
Tesla says 0 to 60 mph in 0.55 seconds.
What we know That’s the invite-only flying version, measured with rollout, the drag-strip habit of not counting the first foot. The run timed on stage did 0.81 seconds, by Tesla’s own clock.
Tesla says No special fuel. It refills itself.
What we know Musk calls it compressed air, while Hagerty’s walkthrough describes nitrogen. Nobody has said how long a refill takes between flights.
Tesla says Production in 2028.
What we know This Roadster was first promised for 2020. The demo alone slipped from April Fools’ Day to late April, then summer, then October 1, then Thursday.
Tesla says This is the car you’ll drive.
What we know Every stunt was remote controlled with nobody aboard, and Musk himself called it “not necessarily a safety-optimized car.” No regulator has said a word about a road car with jets.
So is it a flying car? Not by any definition an aviation regulator would recognize. It is a car that can briefly refuse to stay on the ground, which is closer to what Buzz Lightyear called falling with style.
And still. We have shared a lot of flying car renderings over the years, and most of them never left a hard drive. This one left the ground, upside down, in front of a crowd in earplugs. We’d like to see it parked outside a grocery store before we believe the rest. But for a few seconds on Thursday night, the future looked the way it did in the cartoons.
Want the specs, every video of the stunts and Hagerty’s half-hour engineering walkthrough?
Our sister site Electric Future has the full rundown.
And if the wedge has you feeling nostalgic, start with our guide to retrofuturism, the wildly optimistic world of Googie, or the desert apocalypse Roadster a concept artist imagined back in 2020.
Sources: Tesla’s livestream and official images; Hagerty; live coverage from Engadget and Shacknews.
