---
title: "The Car That Left the Road: Musk’s Roadster Flies, and the Faithful and the Doubters Divide"
description: "At a SpaceX facility in Texas, Tesla’s long-delayed sports car launched off a ramp and flipped in midair; production is promised for 2028"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-16T16:57:31Z
modified: 2026-10-16T18:31:22Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-car-that-left-the-road-musk-s-roadster-flies-and-the-fai-3ca53b
language: en
tags: ["tesla", "spacex", "flying-car", "musk", "roadster", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# The Car That Left the Road: Musk’s Roadster Flies, and the Faithful and the Doubters Divide

*At a SpaceX facility in Texas, Tesla’s long-delayed sports car launched off a ramp and flipped in midair; production is promised for 2028*

By Jan Sokol · October 16, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-car-that-left-the-road-musk-s-roadster-flies-and-the-fai-3ca53b

## In brief

- Tesla’s new Roadster drove up a curved ramp, flew off upside down, flipped 180 degrees and landed on its wheels at a Texas SpaceX site
- The car uses underside suction fans and 10 thruster nozzles fed by ultra high-pressure air tanks; Musk promises production in 2028
- Tesla is taking $5,000 reservations for a non-flying version; the road-legality and regulator for the flying model remain unresolved
- Sam Altman congratulated Musk despite their feud, while Marques Brownlee asked whether the claims were a prank
- Analysts say the car will not move revenue but serves as an engineering showcase and recruiting tool; the earnings report lands October 21

On Thursday night, at a SpaceX test facility in Texas, on a stage shared by the world’s best-known car company and the world’s best-known rocket company, an automobile deliberately left the earth. Tesla’s new Roadster climbed a great curved ramp until it hung upside down, launched off the end, rolled 180 degrees in midair, and came down on its wheels, aided by thrusters firing beneath the chassis. “Well, it worked,” Elon Musk told the livestreamed audience. “Flying cars are real.”

The machine, [as Euronews described the evening](https://euronews.com/2026/10/16/well-it-worked-elon-musk-unveils-new-tesla-roadster-that-can-fly), is a marriage of disciplines. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, said a “fan suction system” on the underside can “pull up to 2 Gs in order to make the car go upside down.” “Then we borrowed some technology from SpaceX to do the rest,” he said. Musk added that the car carries “altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket,” and joked it was “not necessarily a safety optimised car.” A second demonstration fired the car over a row of parked Teslas in what observers called a kickflip; a third, recorded, showed it reaching 60 mph in 0.81 seconds.

No one was inside during the stunts. The car flew driverless, Musk told the crowd, “to make sure we don’t kill anyone.” And the showman built his own trapdoor into the evening: “Success is not guaranteed,” he said. “I mean that. It’ll probably work, but if it doesn’t work, we’re at a safe distance,” [CNN reported](https://cnn.com/2026/10/15/business/tesla-unveils-what-it-says-is-a-flying-car). The car runs on 10 nozzles fed by what Musk called “ultra high-pressure air tanks,” and the reveal was staged before fans precisely because, as he put it, “we need an audience to prove that it’s not AI or SI. So you guys can tell people you saw it with your eyes, because what you see with your eyes, you will not believe.”

![A red sports car with blue rocket exhaust flies off a steep curved road against a bright blue sky as five silhouetted spectators watch.](https://rews.cc/img/924c3c9920331cbe292334c9e73c7c327186b94e.webp)

## The price of wonder

Production, Musk said, begins in 2028, a date seasoned observers will pencil lightly, given Tesla’s history of promised years. Prices were not announced. Tesla’s website is taking $5,000 deposits for a non-flying Roadster and lists three variants, Performance, Thrust and Rocket, with the Rocket’s “full flight system” offered by invitation only. The site notes the flying model is not approved for public road use; claimed range exceeds 300 miles, with a top speed over 230 mph for the Rocket. Asked about legality, Musk was candid in his way: “I’m not sure it’s necessarily legal in all jurisdictions.” Street legal? “Yeah, depends on your street.”

Washington, for once, agrees with him. A senior US Transportation Department official [expressed skepticism to CBS News](https://cbsnews.com/news/tesla-roadster-debut-elon-musk-flying-cars-are-real/) that the vehicle can actually take off, while conceding there was no clear answer on who would oversee it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which normally supervises cars but delegates safety certification to automakers, did not respond. The Federal Aviation Administration said the vehicle does not meet its definition of an aircraft. A car that is not a plane, hopping through a gap in the statute books: the flying car has been around since Glenn Curtiss built a prototype in 1917, and regulation has never caught it.

![A red car floats between two tall, partially open cream-colored books with dark pages against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/8cacba164f9e4360e4df3e5c62586546c87df445.webp)

## Awe, and the audit of awe

The technology world answered in its native liturgy, the X post, [Business Insider collected the reactions](https://www.businessinsider.com/reactions-elon-musk-roadster-flying-car-2026-10). Angel investor Jason Calacanis saw “science fiction” made real and wondered: “what if it could keep you in the air for five minutes? Or ten? Or 30?” David Marcus, the former PayPal president, thanked Musk for “bringing back an age of wonder and excitement to humanity.” Even Sam Altman, who reserved an earlier Roadster, waited 7.5 years, cancelled and feuded publicly with Musk, set the quarrel down for a day: “Wow the new roadster looks quite amazing, good job @elonmusk.”

Others kept their feet on the ground. John Carmack, Meta’s former VR chief, noted the demo “involved a non trivial chance of embarrassing failure” and declared himself a baseline-model man: “At this point in my life, rocket bunny hops are out of my comfort zone.” Marques Brownlee was blunter about claims that a 4,000-pound car does flips and 380 mph: “This is a prank, right?” Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang asked the question the evening left hanging: “wait who the hell was driving the tesla.” Analyst Gene Munster called it “an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers,” and a signal of Musk’s ambition to fuse Tesla and SpaceX, a theme this column [pursued in its own account of the reveal](https://rews.cc/a/tesla-s-new-roadster-claims-0-8-seconds-to-60-mph-with-help--89412b).

![A hand holds a small yellow car while another hand examines it with a magnifying glass against a blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/f5d8a77959c80bfd5554edf2e0b0a6b5741301c1.webp)

Dan Ives of Yorkville Ives, a longtime Tesla bull, supplied the cold arithmetic. “The Roadster will not move the volume or revenue needle, with production likely limited, and investors should not model it as a growth driver,” he wrote. “What it does is restore the brand halo at the top of the market and put a spotlight on the engineering stack a week before the FY3Q26 print on October 21st.” The car, in his reading, is an advertisement for the merger of propulsion and pressure-vessel hardware built at the rocket company now riding on a Tesla product.

The aerodynamicists are colder still. Roger Conner, curator for vertical flight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told CNN that aircraft hate weight while cars need bumpers and crumple zones: “Inevitably, something that is a hybrid between the two is going to be a poor performing aircraft and a poor performing vehicle, and also quite expensive.” Jim Dukhovny, whose California startup Alef has lifted a 254-pound, one-seat prototype on eight propellers, agreed the trick was feasible and pointed to the true wall: the transition from rising to flying forward. “We’re not talking about sustained flight,” Conner said. “We are literally talking about hopping.”

Perhaps the hopping is enough. As [Ben Shimkus argued in Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-roadster-reveal-flying-elon-musk-2026-10), the spectacle does tangible work even if the car never sees a public road: it tells Wall Street, and every young engineer choosing an employer, that Tesla builds what others cannot. Musk has used the stage this way before. At a 2019 Neuralink event he said the “main reason for doing this presentation is recruiting,” and before Tesla’s 2021 AI Day he posted that “convincing the best AI talent to join Tesla is the sole goal.” A car that lands on its wheels, upside-down ramp behind it, is a job posting written in fire.

## Sources

- [Elon Musk's flying Roadster stuns the tech world](https://www.businessinsider.com/reactions-elon-musk-roadster-flying-car-2026-10) — Business Insider
- [Elon Musk unveils Tesla Roadster that can leave the road entirely](https://cbsnews.com/news/tesla-roadster-debut-elon-musk-flying-cars-are-real/) — cbsnews.com
- ['Well, it worked': Elon Musk unveils new Tesla Roadster that can fly](https://euronews.com/2026/10/16/well-it-worked-elon-musk-unveils-new-tesla-roadster-that-can-fly) — euronews.com
- [Tesla unveils what it says is a flying car](https://cnn.com/2026/10/15/business/tesla-unveils-what-it-says-is-a-flying-car) — cnn.com
- [Tesla s flying Roadster is a weapon in the talent wars](https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-roadster-reveal-flying-elon-musk-2026-10) — Business Insider