Name: Tesla Roadster
Brand: Tesla

For most of the Roadster’s long delay, Lars Moravy was the Tesla executive who had to keep saying the car existed. Tesla’s head of vehicle engineering told a podcast it was real, said he had worked on it that week, and promised it would come out. At SpaceX‘s rocket test site in central Texas he finally stood beside it as it climbed a curved wall until it hung almost upside down, then dropped, flipped and landed on its wheels.

Most coverage has treated the reveal as a stunt show: the flight, the kickflip over a row of parked Teslas, the sprint. The mechanism Moravy described on stage is the bigger story. The new Roadster no longer gets its performance mainly from its tires. It gets it from air, sucked out from under the car by fans and fired out of nozzles from pressurized tanks. That change explains the spectacle, and it also explains what the car gave up.

The man who kept saying it was real

Moravy’s version of the story starts in February 2025, on the Ride The Lightning podcast. Asked whether the Roadster was still alive, he said: “Oh, it is definitely real. We’re working with SpaceX on that now.” Then he described the idea that the car turned into: “Cold gas thrusters are super cool, and they add a certain level of breaking the laws of motor physics.” He added: “I promise you it will come out. I last worked on it this past Tuesday.” He gave no date, and Drive Tesla’s headline that day read “no launch date in sight.”

By July 2025, at the X Takeover fan event, he was describing a reset. “We spent a lot of time in the last few years rethinking what we did, and why we did it, and what would make an awesome and exciting last best driver’s car,” he said, and added that Tesla had shown Elon Musk “some cool demos” and “he got a little excited.” Carscoops called the Roadster “somewhat of a running joke in the automotive world.” Musk admitted at the reveal that he had doubts of his own: when he suggested the idea to the team, he said, “I thought, ‘Am I crazy?’”

In Texas, Moravy put the program in personal terms. “The Roadster is the reason I came to Tesla,” he said, according to Paul Tan’s Automotive News.

The limit moved from the tires to the tanks

The numbers he gave explain the physics. According to Paul Tan’s account, Moravy said tires alone give a car about 1.26 G of grip, and the Roadster’s fan system lets it corner at more than 2 G. TechCrunch and Paul Tan both report his description of the thrust side: ten nozzles fed by about 600 liters of compressed air, which Paul Tan puts at roughly 250 kilograms of air in two carbon-fiber pressure vessels. Tesla’s own posts claim the thruster system produces four to five times the force the tires can.

The ramp was the fans’ demonstration. Paul Tan reports the car reached a pitch of 170 degrees about 21 meters up, with telemetry showing 4,700 kilograms of downforce, before the thrusters slowed its fall. The sprint was the tanks’ demonstration: a recorded run of one second, then a live run on the pad clocked at 0.81 seconds to 60 mph, a figure Yahoo Finance also reported.

Electrek’s Fred Lambert, who is still owed two Founders Series Roadsters from Tesla’s old referral program, called the engineering real but “nothing entirely new.” Suction cars go back to the Brabham BT46B Formula 1 car in 1978, as Paul Tan notes. Tesla’s addition is the stored gas, with electric actuators making the micro-adjustments that keep the car stable in flight.

What the air cost

The trade shows in the spec sheet. In 2017 Tesla promised 620 miles of range, more than 250 mph and four seats. The new car claims over 300 miles, which Reuters notes is less than half the original promise, and more than 230 mph. It seats two at most, and the flying version seats one. Tesla says every usable void in the car is packed with carbon-fiber overwrapped pressure vessels, the same type of tank TechCrunch notes was behind several SpaceX rocket explosions.

The demo also needs its footnotes. Nobody was driving. “It is technically autonomous for this demo to make sure we don’t kill anyone,” Musk said, and during the kickflip a Starman mannequin sat in the driver’s seat, which Tesla stressed was “not a real human.” The configuration built for flight, the Rocket, is invite-only and not approved for public roads. The Thrust version adds rear thrusters only and takes a $250,000 reservation. The Performance version, reserved with $50,000, has the fans but no thrusters, and claims 0 to 60 in under 1.6 seconds.

Tesla gave no price. Musk said production starts in 2028. The event took place on October 15 at SpaceX’s McGregor site, two weeks after weather forced Tesla to cancel the October 1 date, and six days before Tesla reports its third-quarter results. Gene Munster of Deepwater called it “an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers.” Musk had said earlier that he was “not sure it moves the needle massively from a revenue standpoint.”

Moravy kept his promise: the car came out, and it does break the old rules of motor physics. What he has not said is the number that will matter to anyone who buys a thruster car. Tesla says the Roadster can refill its own tank, but it gave no refill time and no figure for how much flight a full tank buys. The Roadsters that fly will carry their limit in a tank, and Tesla has not said how many flips fit inside one.

Tags: Elon Musk, SpaceX, electric cars, Lars Moravy, Tesla Roadster