Nine years after it was first shown, the second-generation Tesla Roadster has finally been revealed, and it can fly. At an event at SpaceX’s rocket test site in McGregor, Texas, Tesla showed the two-seater driving up a curved wall until it was hanging upside down, flipping over a line-up of parked Tesla vehicles and hovering on jets of compressed air from thrusters borrowed from SpaceX.
Before the main event, guests at the 4,000-acre site got what design chief Franz von Holzhausen called a “little pre-show”: a static fire of a SpaceX Raptor rocket engine.
“You’re going to see the results of what happens when you have a collaboration with the world’s best car company and the world’s best rocket company,” said Elon Musk, who also explained why the stunts were performed in front of a live crowd. “We need an audience to prove that it’s not AI,” he said.
He also warned that “success is not guaranteed.” “It’ll probably work. But if it doesn’t work, we’re at a safe distance,” he said.
The car wasn’t driven by a person during the demos, though. “It is technically autonomous for this demo to make sure we don’t kill anyone,” Musk said. In customer hands it will be the opposite: Tesla says that in the long run, the Roadster will be the only manually driven car it makes.
VIDEO: Up the wall and off the top
The first demo started with the car at the foot of a tall ramp that curves up past vertical and over the top. On-screen telemetry tracked it as it drove up, reaching a pitch of 170 degrees, which is very nearly upside down, about 21 metres off the ground. At that point, the downforce readout showed 4,700 kg.
It then let go from the top and dropped, with its thrusters firing to slow it down before landing in a cloud of vapour. The G-force readout jumped to 3.3 G at about 6.5 metres off the ground as the thrusters braked the fall.
“A friend of mine, Peter Thiel, once said that the future promised us flying cars, but instead we got 140 characters,” Musk said before the run. Afterwards, he added: “Well, not anymore.”
How it sticks to the wall
The trick behind the wall climb is a fan suction system on the underside of the car, which Musk said “can pull up to two Gs in order to make the car go upside down.” The fans sit in the rear diffuser area, and like the Brabham BT46B fan car of 1978, they suck air out from under the car to pin it to the surface.
It looks a lot like what Tesla described in a patent granted in August 2025, which we covered when the reveal was announced. Titled Adaptive Vehicle Aerodynamics for Downforce (US 12,377,920), it describes fans mounted in the car’s airflow pathways working with deployable skirts that seal the underbody, sucking the car onto the road for maximum downforce at low speeds. Tesla didn’t say on stage whether the production car uses skirts.
“This car could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch,” Musk said. “It could suck a tennis ball through a hose pipe.”
VIDEO: Fans on, aero modes explained
It’s useful on a track, too. According to Tesla’s Lars Moravy, the traction a car gets from its tyres alone is typically about 1.26 G, while the fan system lets the Roadster corner at more than 2 G. Musk claimed that between the acceleration and the cornering, “it’s going to crush every track record that has ever existed.”
The fan system has two modes. At low speeds, it sucks the car down for traction when it’s needed. At high speeds, the front and rear parts of the suction system open up to create even more airflow underneath the car.
VIDEO: Tesla Track Mode video
The body changes shape too. On stage, Moravy talked about a high-downforce mode and a low-drag mode, and Tesla’s own video above also shows a Road Mode, with the rear wing folded away. The wing has variable pitch, so it can adjust downforce on the fly, and the car will do this automatically based on what it calculates it needs around a track.
How it flies
VIDEO: X-ray chassis, thrusters firing
Tesla’s own video above gives a closer look at the hardware, from an X-ray view of the chassis to a thruster firing and an overhead shot of the 0-96 km/h run.
As for the thrusters, Musk said the car has “attitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear,” so “it can basically fly like a rocket.” It can do rolls and “crazy gymnastics,” he said, adding that this is “not necessarily a safety-optimised car.”
There’s no combustion involved. The thrusters run on compressed air, stored in two carbon overwrapped pressure vessels (COPVs), the same kind of tank SpaceX uses on its rockets. Moravy said the two tanks have a combined capacity of 600 litres and hold about 250 kg of air, with ten nozzles doing the work.
That number has some history. When Musk first announced the SpaceX option back in 2018, he promised “10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around [the] car” to “improve acceleration, top speed, braking and cornering.”
Tesla didn’t give a storage pressure on stage, but the track screen in its official interior photos shows a “Thruster” readout of 5,500 psi, or about 380 bar. That fits the tank figures, as squeezing 250 kg of air into 600 litres makes it about 340 times denser than air at sea level.
The four main thrusters sit in the rear diffuser. According to Tesla, the exhaust leaves them faster than the speed of sound, which is why you can see Mach diamonds in the plume, the bright, banded pattern of shock waves you get from supersonic exhaust. Tesla says the system produces over 80 kN of thrust. That’s enough force to hold up more than 8,000 kg against gravity.
During the flight demos, the telemetry graphic also showed thrusters at all four corners of the car firing downwards to control the landings.
The car doesn’t need special propellant, either. “The car can recharge its air tank,” Musk said. “That literally is just going to puff itself up and be able to do these manoeuvres whenever you’d like.” Tesla didn’t say how the tanks are refilled or how long it takes, or how much flying a full tank is good for.
The kickflip
Before the second, longer flight, the team revealed a Starman mannequin in the driver’s seat, a nod to the original Roadster that SpaceX launched into space in 2018. Tesla was quick to point out that it is “not a real human”.
VIDEO: Kickflip over the Tesla line-up
The Roadster then drove at a line-up of parked Tesla vehicles, including a Semi and a Cybercab. It launched over them while spinning in mid-air, the telemetry putting it at about seven metres off the ground, and landed on the other side. Tesla calls this one the kickflip.
“This will be an actual car that’s on the roads,” Musk said afterwards. “I’m not sure it’s necessarily legal in all jurisdictions, but there will be such a car that someone can own.”
That’s a change from what was being said before the event, when US reports suggested the car would not be street-legal, and that Tesla was considering offering it through a Ferrari-style track programme for select customers instead.
The car itself
VIDEO: Design details up close
Tesla’s design video above shows the details up close, including the gold-ringed thruster nozzles and the white seats.
Von Holzhausen said that because the team knew the car was going to fly, it looked to aircraft such as the SR-71 Blackbird for inspiration, as well as to “cars that transform.” The result is a clean, low two-seater with upward-opening doors, a full-width light bar at the front and a full-width tail light at the rear.
VIDEO: On-stage walkaround
Weight was a priority, so the seats are moulded into the chassis. The steering is by-wire, with a yoke instead of a wheel, and the brakes and throttle are by-wire too.
Tesla’s official photos fill in a few more details. The tyres are Pirelli P Zero Trofeo RS, marked “Elect”, Pirelli’s label for tyres developed for EVs.
The track screen next to the yoke has a “Dynamics” menu listing the front wing, rear wing, vent hood, barge boards and aero load, plus a fan setting called “Max Grip”, which suggests the active aero goes beyond the rear wing.
0-96 km/h in 0.81 seconds, for now
VIDEO: 0-96 km/h in 0.81s
Musk had set a target of 0-60 mph (0-96 km/h) in under one second. Tesla first played a recorded test run showing a one-second time, and then did a live run on the launch pad with the rear thrusters firing. “We didn’t have a whole lot of room out on the pad, so we had to cut it short,” the team said, but the time came back at 0.81 seconds.
By our maths, getting to 96 km/h in 0.81 seconds means averaging about 3.4 G, and the car covers only around 11 metres doing it. That’s nearly three times the 1.26 G that Moravy said tyres alone typically manage.
Musk said the production car will be quicker still. “It’s like Newton’s formula, F equals MA, as A equals F over M,” he said. “As you increase force and decrease mass, you get more acceleration.” The limit, he joked, is “don’t detach the retina of the human in the car.”
Tesla calls the Roadster the world’s quickest production car from 0-96 km/h, and says it will cover half a mile (800 metres) in the time other cars take to do a quarter mile (400 metres). Top speed is over 370 km/h (230 mph), “hopefully” more. Musk wants it to crack half the speed of sound, which is over 600 km/h.
There’s more to come. Tesla plans follow-up demos, including a jump over Idaho’s Snake River Canyon, which Evel Knievel famously tried and failed to clear in 1974. “Let’s give it another shot,” Musk said.
Then came the line “Where we’re going, you don’t need tyres” from the stage, finishing a Back to the Future joke that Tesla started in its teaser image, which had faint hidden text reading “where we’re going…”
VIDEO: The final mid-air flip
The night ended with one last stunt: the Roadster launched itself into the air beside a tall red tower, flipped and landed before driving off.
When can you get one?
Tesla says production will begin in 2028. “Actually. For real,” came the follow-up from the stage, a nod to the car’s history.
Reservations are already open in Malaysia, on Tesla’s Malaysian website, and there are three versions. The Performance is “road ready” with seating for two, active aero and the multi-mode suction system. The Thrust, listed as limited, adds the acceleration thrusters.
The Rocket is the one with a “full flight system”, but it seats just one and is available by invitation only. So if you want the Roadster that flies, you’ll need to be asked.
Reserving one takes a fully refundable RM21,000 deposit upfront, with the balance due within 10 days: RM182,000 for the Performance and RM988,000 for the Thrust. That’s RM203,000 and RM1,009,000 in total, and Tesla says a reservation can be cancelled if the balance isn’t paid in time.
The Roadster name carries weight at Tesla. Von Holzhausen pointed out that it has been 20 years since Musk first showed the original Roadster, a proof of concept that showed EVs could be real cars that were fun to drive and could go the distance. “The Roadster is the reason I came to Tesla,” Moravy said.
The Roadster was unveiled as a prototype in November 2017 with production promised for 2020, and the reveal of the production car alone was pushed back several times, most recently from October 1 to October 15 due to bad weather.
No battery capacity, range or power figures were given at the event.
Compare that with 2017, when the prototype was billed with 0-97 km/h in 1.9 seconds, a 402 km/h top speed and 998 km of range from a 200 kWh battery. The new car is more than twice as quick off the line, but its quoted top speed of “over 370 km/h” is actually lower than the 2017 claim, and range didn’t come up at all.
GALLERY: Tesla Roadster, official images
GALLERY: Tesla Roadster reveal, livestream stills
