Tesla's New Roadster In-Depth Analysis: What Is Musk Hiding Behind the Flight Demo?

A "Crazy" Demo: From Wall-Climbing to Flight

The event opened with the reveal of the redesigned Roadster. The new car's sharply angular styling is inspired by the Lamborghini Murcielago given a "cyber" reinterpretation: triangular elements, slim light bars, upward-opening doors, plus a huge movable rear wing and what look like exhaust pipes at the rear — all hinting that this is no ordinary EV.

The demo then hit its climax: the car drove slowly up a vertical wall, hung upside down 60 feet in the air, and generated over 4,000 kg of downforce; on a second run up a ramp, the whole car went airborne, flipped, and kept driving after landing on its tires. The blogger points out that this was actually a pre-programmed autonomous driving demo, similar to Boston Dynamics' robot performances — "an extreme showcase of engineering capability, but not a scenario you could reproduce in daily life."

These images raised plenty of questions: Is it legal? Why is it needed? But Tesla did not address them at the event.

The Overlooked Truth: Four Versions and Hardcore Specs

The day after the event, videos from Motor Trend, Hagerty, and Top Gear, along with updates to Tesla's official website, gradually revealed the full product picture. It turns out the Roadster comes in four versions: Base, Performance, Thruster, and Rocket.

The Performance version features a fan system that uses a low-pressure zone underneath to generate downforce, similar to the design of the McMurtry Speirling. This technology gives the car enormous grip even at low speeds, enabling a 0-100 km/h time of 1.6 seconds. The blogger questions its street legality: "The fans will suck up road debris and shoot it backward; following behind, you could get hit by debris."

The Thruster version adds cold gas thrusters: four exhaust pipes at the rear connect to a 200-liter carbon-fiber-wrapped pressure tank storing over 100 kg of nitrogen at 10,000 PSI. This brings 0-60 mph acceleration to under 1 second, but thrust lasts only 3-5 seconds, and refilling takes 6-7 hours. The blogger expresses safety concerns: "A 10,000 PSI compressed gas tank sits right behind the driver's head — how do crash test standards handle that?"

The Rocket version goes further: six directional thrusters, a 400-liter tank, enabling jumps and flips, and 0-60 in just 0.6 seconds. This version is explicitly not street-legal and is invitation-only.

The blogger also dug out other highlights from the videos: a full carbon-fiber body, weight under 1,700 kg, rear-wheel drive, dual motors with 1,300 hp, 500 kW supercharging (15-80% in just 10 minutes), 25-30 minutes of full-power track output, active aerodynamics, steer-by-wire/brake-by-wire, and more. "These are the engineering details that are truly exciting, but the event gave them only a few seconds."

About the McMurtry Speirling

The McMurtry Speirling mentioned in the article is a British-built all-electric single-seater race car that set a 39.08-second record at the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed hill climb. Its core weapon is precisely the fan system: two large fans under the floor extract air to create a low-pressure zone, "sucking" the car onto the road surface. This solution generates downforce independent of speed, hence extremely strong grip in low-speed corners, but the fans ingest road debris and shoot it backward at high speed — one reason it is difficult to make street-legal. The fan concept in Tesla's Performance Roadster is similar, and can be seen as an attempt to transplant extreme track technology to a road car.

About Cold Gas Thrusters

A cold gas thruster is a device that produces thrust not by combustion but solely by the expansion and ejection of high-pressure gas, commonly used for spacecraft attitude control. Its characteristics are simple structure and extremely fast response, but limited thrust and short duration — exactly why the Thruster version Roadster in the article can only sustain thrust for 3-5 seconds. 10,000 PSI is about 690 atmospheres, placing extremely high demands on tank materials (carbon-fiber wrapping) and valve seals; if a collision causes depressurization, the high-pressure gas itself can also be dangerous. In addition, nitrogen is an inert gas and not flammable, but it displaces oxygen, and a large leak in a confined space poses a suffocation risk — this is also at the core of the safety questions.

Marketing Gimmick or Engineering Show?

The blogger believes the fan system has real track value, and the thrusters may have potential in straight-line acceleration or emergency braking, but "the jumps and flips are pure distractions, unrelated to real performance." He cites Hagerty host Henry Catchpole's view: Tesla realized that "just being fast in a straight line" no longer attracts people, so it pivoted to the dream of a "flying car," because that generates more headlines.

More critically, the Roadster originally slated for 2020 has been completely abandoned, and the new Roadster is promised for 2028 delivery. The blogger pulled out his own reservation agreement, whose Article 4 explicitly states "delivery time cannot be guaranteed." "Nine years, and this car has never existed, because it has zero impact on Tesla's financial statements." He notes that Tesla recently discontinued the Model S/X, concentrating resources on Model 3/Y and robot projects — "the Roadster was never a priority."

Ultimately, the blogger's verdict: the Base and Performance versions may reach production, but the Thruster and Rocket versions are almost certainly never going to be sold publicly. "This event was a successful engineering exercise and marketing event, but about the product itself, we still know nothing."

About Steer-by-Wire / Brake-by-Wire

By-wire systems eliminate the mechanical connections between steering wheel and wheels, and between brake pedal and calipers, replacing them with sensors that capture driver intent and electrical signals that drive actuators. The advantages are flexible layout, software-tunable feel, and easier integration with autonomous driving systems; the cost is that they must meet stringent functional safety redundancy requirements (such as dual power supplies and dual communication links), otherwise a single point of failure could cause steering or braking failure. Among production cars today, brake-by-wire is fairly common (e.g., Bosch iBooster), while fully steer-by-wire is still rarely used on road cars due to regulatory and safety concerns — a technical point in the Roadster specs that is worth attention but was not elaborated.

Conclusion: A Carefully Designed "Magic Trick"

Tesla once again grabbed headlines with an unprecedented performance, but after the noise dies down, core questions about the Roadster's delivery timeline, regulatory certification, and safety standards remain unresolved. For car enthusiasts, the fan and thruster technologies showcase the engineering team's imagination; for consumers, it may be better to remember the old warning: if a promise sounds too good to be true, it is probably just magic.