This is just performative and dumb. Drop a modern car 10’ onto concrete and then inspect it for road worthiness, it will likely fail.
Making a car fly with absolutely no requirement to make it road safe is simple. Any company could do this, hell this demo could have been done with a few oxygen cylinders from welding shops and a cheap tack welded shell. Making it able to pass safety requirements, take off, LAND in non-static testing scenarios, and maintain roadworthy status though? Lemme see that.
Those are monopropellant RCS thrusters like they have been used in space travel for decades. They use compressed gases (here compressed air, nitrogen in space) as fuel. So this isn't burning but it brings extra air into a fire of burning metal (=making it burn even hotter and faster). Also they used a pressure of 10k psi which would rip apart any car with its driver when exploding from a structural failure, like one caused by a crash.
The whole concept of thrusters will of course never be road legal. In this case, they must be producing about 10 kN each. If you are walking, bicycling or whatever next to it, you also get that 10kN in your face. Kinda like as if a fireman sprays you point blank, but with 10x more force.
Imagine the first time thrusters fail to fire at the same time and you yeet your car into a 6g barrel roll in afternoon traffic. https://giphy.com/gifs/ZQMVKzoTLdNBu
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u/MintyFresh771 6h ago
This is just performative and dumb. Drop a modern car 10’ onto concrete and then inspect it for road worthiness, it will likely fail.
Making a car fly with absolutely no requirement to make it road safe is simple. Any company could do this, hell this demo could have been done with a few oxygen cylinders from welding shops and a cheap tack welded shell. Making it able to pass safety requirements, take off, LAND in non-static testing scenarios, and maintain roadworthy status though? Lemme see that.