Is the Tesla Roadster One Giant Leap for Cars or Just a Giant Publicity Stunt?

Chances are up around 99.973 percent that if you are even tangentially interested in cars, you’re aware of Tesla’s proposed new Roadster. I’ll presume those odds are way better than half of that number when it comes to whether you witnessed footage of the October 15 aerobatic Roadster demo, staged at night, dramatically lit, at a SpaceX facility near Waco, Texas. Do these automotive “flights” represent one giant leap for automobile-kind, or are they just another shameless stunt to own a news cycle and hopefully juice the company’s stock price in advance of a possible merger between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla?

Well, in the days following the stunt, the stock price didn’t quite soar—as this is written, it was up about 6.5 percent—but let’s dig into the science and try to ascertain whether anything we think we saw that night is likely to materially impact the future of automobility as any of us will experience it.

Breaking Into the Oughts

Have you noticed that all the quickest credible, unbiased third-party vehicle acceleration tests to 60 mph (or to 100 kph, as the Europeans do) stubbornly begin with a “1”? That’s because motors and engines connected to wheels have run up against tire traction limits. Miracles of tire engineering were required to get us into the 1s, but the force a tire can transmit is defined as F = µ x W, where µ is the tire’s coefficient of friction and W is the weight pressing it (or sucking, as we’re about to discuss) to the pavement.

Artificially Adding W

The production-intent prototype Tesla Roadster’s entry Performance model works to juice that W component by deploying sucker fans and air skirts around the underbody. Tesla’s downforce-system patents describe this as a flexible skirt connected via compliant suspension to a ground-contact seal of a different (potentially sacrificial, replaceable) material. The four fans providing suction can be seen at the car’s rear end.

Tesla claims this system provides sufficient downforce to counteract gravity, as the company demonstrated by driving a Roadster up a vertical wall and transitioning to an upside down horizontal one. Engineering boss Lars Moravy has attributed a 2.0 g lateral grip performance largely to this system. Of course, the Roadster is rear-wheel drive, so doubling the W on two rear tires may not add as much propulsive grip as powering the front tires would have.

Thrust, the Final Frontier

The four fans on the rear-drive Roadster won’t get the 60-mph time below a second; even the wild 2,200-pound, 1,000-hp McMurtry Spéirling fan car runs in the 1.4–1.5-second range. Nope, to get a Tesla Roadster (stated target weight of 3,750 pounds) up to 60 mph in the claimed 0.8 second will require about 3.42 g. The best-case scenario sees the suction-loaded rear tires providing perhaps 2.64 g. Tesla proposes to provide the rest via thrust, in emissions-free Tesla form: using cold gas thrusters borrowed from SpaceX.

Explaining CGT & COPV

This is a subset of rocketry SpaceX uses to fine-tune a rocket’s attitude and trajectory in space. High-pressure (10,000 psi) nitrogen is vented via pipes and special nozzles that create exhaust-momentum flow thrust. Gas particles escape at supersonic speed, and thanks to Newton’s F = m x a physics, their tiny mass times their huge acceleration results in a sizable reactionary thrust force. The company claimed it equaled 80 kilonewtons (kN, or 18,000 pounds) of force.

That nitrogen is stored in composite over-wrapped pressure vessel(s), or COPVs for short. These are metal cylinders capped by near hemispherical ends that are wrapped meticulously in a series of continuous composite fibers (e.g., carbon fiber or Kevlar). Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been using these for years, and in early 2026 it purchased COPV supplier Hexagon Masterworks Inc.

Is It Safe?

You might reasonably fret about a 10,000-psi tank behind your head rupturing to catastrophic effect, especially since similar pressure vessels have been identified as the root cause of several SpaceX “rapid unscheduled disassembly” events. Most of those involved either higher pressures or more dangerous gases. A properly designed and constructed COPV can be robust, but it can add a dash of that OceanGate Titanic submersible danger to lure the fabulously wealthy.

The proposed Roadster Thrust edition will get a 200-liter COPV consuming the space between the battery and the roof behind the seats. Equal-length titanium pipes lead back to a pair of Inconel splitter pipes feeding four titanium cold-gas thruster nozzles that point out the back of the car.

How Quick and How Fast?

Our math suggests that if the wheels get their full share of the 1MW (1,341 hp) of claimed electric-motor output (is there surplus battery energy to run the sucker fans?), then the thrusters need only contribute about 11 kN-seconds of thrust. That should be doable with a well-timed 0.14-second impulse of thrust coming on around 30 mph. This thrust strategy might also provide a more comfortable ramp-up in overall g-forces for the driver.

Furthermore, such a run might only consume 15–22 kg of the 100-plus kg the COPV should be able to hold, meaning one COPV tankful might support multiple runs.

As for top speed: While Tesla executives have claimed “230-plus mph,” Musk quipped Mach 0.5 (368 mph at something around 9,500 feet above sea level) is possible. Thrust will help a lot in reaching either number quickly, but don’t count on seeing any official speed records, as Tesla Roadsters employing thrust would likely be forced into the Unlimited official land speed class, where the record stands at 763.035 mph.

About that “Flying”

The proposed Tesla Roadster Rocket variant ditches the passenger seat to accommodate a second 400-liter COPV that feeds four downward-facing CGTs (one behind each wheel) and two lateral-facing ones positioned in front for yaw control. At the stated target weight, presuming the 400-liter COPV sends all of its gas straight down, our math suggests the available pressurized gas could elevate the Roadster to a 10-foot altitude, hold it, and safely land again in no more than about 7 seconds. During that time, the rear thrusters, drawing from the 200-liter COPV, could also move the car forward, but if said motion calls for any yaw thrust, that comes out of the hover-time budget.

I don’t know about you, but I expect a “flight” to land me somewhere farther away than a pro quarterback could throw a pigskin. The FAA seems to agree, telling Wired magazine it doesn’t recognize the Tesla Roadster as an aircraft.

But … All Those Aerobatics!

Tesla’s driverless stunt-demo vehicles almost certainly weighed vastly less than 3,750 pounds. Conducting the hyped-up demo in the dark may have concealed other failsafe systems ensuring that particular demo vehicle clung tight to the inverted ramp. I don’t know, but it’s certainly realistic and responsible to consider.

Refilling Those COPV Tanks

Initially, recharging the nitrogen tanks will be done from an external nitrogen source. Commercial boosters can raise bottled nitrogen supplied at 300–3,000 psi to 10,000 psi, but this is said to take two to six hours for the 200-liter tank, and six to seven hours for the full Rocket system. At the reveal, Musk implied the car might be able to replenish its own supply, but that strikes us as a stretch goal. Separating oxygen and moisture from air then compressing it to 10,000 psi would add a lot of mass and complexity. We’d guess Tesla may market a pricey home nitrogen separator/compressor device for this.

Bottom Line

So no, I don’t see the Tesla Roadster altering the future automotive/transportation landscape one iota in this regard. I seriously doubt any global government regulatory agency will homologate any vehicle purporting to deliver meaningful thrust. You can, however, expect to read news stories of eccentric zillionaires landing these things hard on their ranches, possibly with lethal effects. And I doubt these stories will alter the stock price much, either.