Probably be its too dangerous to put a human being in this car 🤷‍♂️ would have made a great entry for Elon

I'm not gonna say these are particularly practical but it seems to me like they could work:

1. Actual controlled flight - Car accelerates without thrusters, gets up to speed, then adjusts the aero so downforce tapers off and it starts to generate lift. Active aero and thrusters stabilize it once it leaves the ground. Basically this but stabilized by active aero and thrusters. In this scenario, thrusters don't need to launch the car against gravity or break its fall, so I think it could sustain this for a good amount of time. It might even be able to do it indefinitely if the thrusters can continuously recharge as they simultaneously make small adjustments. I would expect that this could only be straight-line flight near the ground but it could maybe control pitch/roll/yaw to some extent. This would be real flight because the car itself would be generating lift. Obviously this would be super illegal and dangerous, I'm just saying it seems like it would be possible.

2. Vertical wall ascent - The first demo they showed required a custom-built ramp that the car could smoothly drive up. I don't think a ramp is strictly necessary, though. Imagine if the car drove up to a wall and then yeeted itself into the air, repositioning itself so it was pointing up at the sky, and then hovering briefly while slowly maneuvering itself against the wall. At that point, the fan would kick in and create suction to keep the car in place like in the demo. Now the thrusters are no longer needed and the car is planted firmly on the wall. The car can then drive up the wall while the thrusters recharge. Once it has traversed up the wall, it can do the whole maneuver in reverse to dismount and land back on a horizontal surface. Essentially, the car would be able to scale a skyscraper in this way. Again, obviously super illegal and dangerous but it seems technically possible.

I think both of the ideas above would be possible to pull off under full manual control. It would be similar to playing Elite: Dangerous with flight assist off if anyone is familiar with that game. Manual control makes it even more unsafe, but the driver of the rocket augmented version is basically a test pilot anyway and it would be cool to see a stunt driver like Ken Block (RIP) in full control and showing off the craziest things that the car can do. Also, manual control of the thrusters would be in keeping with their "Last Best Driver's Car" tagline for the car.

Not discounting the roadster engineering by any means, what Tesla and SpaceX accomplished is unbelievable. But I can't help but wish that they had put all at time and money into a Model S refresh that I could buy :(

Posted on X

Model S75D owner with FSD pre-purchased (HW3 and MCU2 Intel upgrades) from Switzerland. Got this message from Tesla (in app) today. Not sure how I feel about the “Basic” qualifier there, having bought a car that was fully capable of driving itself (I think Tesla called it “Autopilot” back then) almost 10 years ago.

Not allowed to ask questions apparently, but I’m just curious if the “Basic” qualifier is due to my “legacy hardware” with seemingly no upgrade path at the moment.

The first thing I thought of when seeing the front unveiled, was it reminded me of the Lamborghini Reventon.

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0-60 in 1 second. See a gap in traffic 4 cars ahead of you ..fly over and land in the gap. Will FSD do that for you..

Craziness aside, they avoided the question of range and price. I doubt the $200k price tag from years ago is realistic.

The compressed air used in the flying Tesla, which theoretically could be catastrophic.
If anything collides with the Tesla hard enough to impact a compressed air tank, it could cause a pneumatic burst (or pneumatic overpressure explosion). So if this thing ever becomes street legal anywhere, which let’s be honest it’s not gonna be. But if it gets on any roads and collides into another object it could cause an explosion of equivalence to 3.5-7 kg of TNT, causing a 30 metres-100 metres Kabloom, making it lethal almost Definitely resulting in death if in the car at the time of collision.

So this is a hyper fast car that can do a barrel roll off a wall like spider man. That’s insane but why

lol.