'Flying Cars Are Real': Tesla's New Roadster Does a Kickflip on SpaceX Thrusters — Nine Years Late

Nine years. That's how long Tesla fans have waited since Elon Musk first showed off a second-generation Roadster in 2017 and promised deliveries by 2020. On Thursday night, at a SpaceX rocket-test site in McGregor, Texas, the wait ended the only way Musk knows how: with a car doing a kickflip.

"Flying cars are real," Musk declared, as the redesigned Roadster — white, angular, all hard edges in the Cybertruck idiom — lifted off the ground on SpaceX cold-gas thrusters, turned in the air, and landed. Then it drove up a curved ramp and kept going, upside down, held to the surface by a suction system. Then it jumped clean over a line of parked vehicles — a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Semi, a Model Y and a Model 3 — twisting as it flew.

Beforehand Musk had warned the crowd things might go wrong "By the way, success is not guaranteed," he said. he said. It worked.

0 to 60 in 0.81 seconds

The Roadster recorded a 0-60mph sprint of 0.81 seconds on the test pad — less than half the time of a Bugatti Chiron — with Musk suggesting it could go quicker still. Top speed: more than 230mph (370km/h). Cornering forces above 2G — Formula 1 territory. Musk claims it will beat every track record ever set.

The hardware behind it is pure SpaceX. The standard "Thrust" model fires pressurised air from four rear nozzles — gas exiting faster than the speed of sound, producing over 80 kilonewtons of thrust, roughly in the territory of fighter-jet engines. An invite-only single-seat "Rocket" version adds thrusters around the body for lift and mid-air rotation. Tesla admits it will never be street-legal.

The upside-down trick comes from what Tesla calls the Multi-Mode Suction System: impellers that pull air from beneath the car, generating downforce even at a standstill. Chief designer Franz von Holzhausen gave it an "aerospace aesthetic" — scissor doors, an active deployable rear wing, seats moulded to the chassis, and steer-by-wire.

Nine years late, right on brand

Let's be honest about the timeline. The Roadster 2.0 was unveiled in November 2017 with a $200,000 base price and a 2020 delivery target. 2020 came and went, as did every year after; even the October 1 date for this event slipped over weather. When the livestream finally began at 7:55pm Central on Thursday, Musk called the car "the best of the last of the human-driven cars" — and, with unusual candour, admitted safety hadn't exactly been the top design priority.

Tesla didn't announce a price this time. Make of that what you will.

The sceptics have a point

Not everyone is doing backflips. Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management, a longtime Tesla investor, called it "an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers" on X. Others noted the timing: Tesla reports third-quarter results in a matter of days, and analysts say those numbers matter far more to the company's future than a halo car. Some watchers read the whole Tesla-SpaceX joint production as Musk softening up the ground for a merger of the two companies he controls — an idea he's floated before.

Musk himself has played down the finances. In 2023 he called the Roadster a "small potato situation" that wouldn't "move the needle in a major way financially." Morningstar's Seth Goldstein takes the longer view: Tesla has no halo car right now, and the Roadster becomes exactly that — the machine that shows what the company's engineers can do when nobody tells them no.

What happens next

Tesla says production begins in 2028. Given the history, treat that date the way you'd treat any Musk timeline: as an aspiration with rocket thrusters strapped to it. The street-legality of the flying hardware is, as USA Today put it, "not immediately clear" — the Rocket version definitely isn't road-approved.

The clips are already everywhere. Tesla's X account posted the stunt footage on Thursday night — "Real life, baby" and "Do a kickflip!" — and "Tesla" was trending in the UK by Friday morning. Whatever you think of Musk or his missed deadlines: nobody else in the car industry puts on shows like this.

Photo: Tesla Roadster prototype, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons (file photo of the earlier prototype, not the 2026 redesign)

Sources

• USA Today — Forget zero to 60. Tesla Roadster flies, flips with SpaceX thrusters (Oct 16, 2026)
• Hypebeast — Tesla Roadster SpaceX Thrusters Flying Car Revealed (Oct 16, 2026)
• The Jerusalem Post (Reuters) — Flying cars: Musk's new Tesla Roadster uses SpaceX thrusters to turn in the air (Oct 16, 2026)
• The Straits Times — Tesla Roadster revealed with SpaceX thrusters for 2028 (Oct 16, 2026)
• DriveSpark — Tesla Roadster Revealed With SpaceX Rocket Thrusters (Oct 16, 2026)