The Tesla Roadster has been shown again but this time it’s completely different.

The electric vehicle game has been about one-upmanship in the most absurd ways possible and now Tesla wants to take it to a new level with their Roadster. To be clear, this is not the same Roadster that the company promised back in 2017. That model never went into production. 9 years later, the company has essentially scrapped all plans for it and has instead come up with a flying car.

The NEW new Tesla Roadster was presented at SpaceX’s rocket test facility in Texas. It’s being touted as the company’s ‘Last Driver’s Car’ before moving to a fully autonomous drive future. As the venue suggests, the Roadster features technology incorporated from Musk’s SpaceX.

In terms of looks, there is a touch of the Cybertruck here in its angular lines, but the Roadster takes on a more 80s inspired aesthetic with inspiration taken from the SR-71 Blackbird. Inside there are just 2 seats and these are molded directly into the vehicle’s chassis to save weight. The steering is a complete steer-by-wire affair.

The real ‘sauce’ of the Roadster is its SpaceX derived active fan suction system. This is found under the car (a little like Gordon Murray’s T.50) and can pull 2Gs of downforce. Practically speaking, it allows the Cyberster to ‘break physics’ by sticking the vehicle on the road during extreme cornering speeds. Tesla even demonstrated its abilities by driving the Roadster up a wall and upside down. The active fan suction system switches between High Downforce Mode and Low Drag Mode depending on what’s needed. At low speeds, the fan seals and sucks the chassis to the ground for more traction. When driven fast, ducts open at the front and rear to create extreme ground-effect airflow beneath the vehicle. The rear wing has a variable active pitch feature to adjust downforce based on demand.

Inside the Roadster, there are two composite overwrapped pressure vessels with 600L of air store at ultra high pressure. It refills these tanks automatically over time. There are 10 thruster nozzles and the team demonstrated these by dropping the car off a ramp and having it float back down to earth. It can do a bunch of other aerial manouvers too, outdoing BYD’s suspension gimmicks by essentially making the car itself fly.

Because of these thrusters, the Roadster can effectively go from 0-60mph (around 0-100km/h) in under 1 second. The demonstration showed it breaking the century sprint in just 0.81 seconds in the prototype model. A top speed of 230mph or 370km/h is expected.

Tesla says that they aim for a 2028 production date… when have we heard that before.

Anyway, from my perspective, this Roadster preview has some positives and negatives. On the positive side, I don’t think I’ve seen such a leap forward in performance vehicles before in my lifetime. In the last few years it feels as if performance vehicles have been engineered to be ‘stores of value’ for the ultra rich or throwbacks to the good old days, often some combination of the two. It doesn’t feel like the needle has been moved forward since the Bugatti Veyron to be honest. To see an actual demonstration of tech that isn’t iterative is exciting.

That being said, I also think it’s worth tempering expectations. There’s no way any of this fits within the legal limits. Tesla couldn’t even get a very normal Roadster into production in time, they’re infamous for missing deadlines, so this could just be another publicity stunt to keep the brand back in the public conversation.