We have watched the replay six times now, and our jaws are still somewhere on the floor. Tonight, at SpaceX’s rocket test site in McGregor, Texas, a white Tesla Roadster with nobody inside drove up a towering curved ramp, clung to it upside down, peeled off into the night sky, rolled itself upright with jets of compressed air and set down on its wheels like a lander touching the moon. Then it did it again, over a line of parked Teslas, with a flip!
So yes, the Roadster flew. Kind of. For a few seconds. Remote controlled. We have a lot of questions, and we will get to them. But first, watch this.
Nine years after it was first promised, the Roadster finally showed up, upside down and airborne. Here is what Tesla showed and what it actually told us.
Read the tagsOnstage means we watched it happen on Tesla’s own livestream, timed and staged by Tesla, with no independent check. Tesla claim means Tesla said it, here or to Hagerty. Nothing here has been tested by anyone outside the company.
The whole show
Tesla streamed the event from a stage at the SpaceX site, with guests handed earplugs at check-in because the thrusters are that loud. Elon Musk opened by saying they needed a live audience so nobody would think the footage was made with AI, which tells you everything about the year we are living in. Here is the full replay, straight from Tesla.
Up the wall, off the ceiling
The first stunt was the one nobody could quite process in real time. The Roadster crept up a giant half-pipe, stopped dead when it was pointing straight at the sky, and kept going until it was hanging upside down.
That part is suction: Tesla’s engineering VP, Lars Moravy, said fans in the car can pull it down with up to 2 G, twice its own weight. Then it let go, fell off the top inverted, and a ring of nozzles fired to roll it over and slow its fall. It landed on all four wheels. We gasped. Out loud.
Want to see it from the crowd? People in the stands caught it from every angle, and the reactions are half the fun.
Then it jumped the whole lineup
Musk promised that was not the last thing we would see, and it wasn’t. The second run sent the Roadster at a row of parked Teslas, a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Model Y, a Model 3 and the very tall Semi. Jets underneath launched it clear over all of them, side jets spun it through a flip at the top, and the bottom jets caught it again on the way down. It looked like a skateboard trick done by a sports car. It looked, honestly, a little bit fake, which is presumably why the crowd was there.
Meet the car
Tesla has now released its first official photos, and in the studio, away from the smoke and the ramp, the Roadster is gorgeous! It is a strict two-seater now, not the 2+2 shown in 2017, and Franz von Holzhausen’s design reads like a classic supercar wedge, with headlights that pop down instead of up. Every version gets two motors and more than a megawatt between them: 1,341 horsepower and 1,033 lb-ft, according to Hagerty. And here is the twist nobody expected: the Roadster is rear-wheel drive.
How it works, as far as Tesla said
The thrusters are cold gas jets, the same family of hardware SpaceX uses to steer its rockets. Tesla says every spare cavity in the car is packed with carbon-fiber-wrapped pressure tanks, and that more stored gas means more flight time. Musk says owners won’t need any special propellant because the car refills its own tanks. Hagerty, which got the engineering walkthrough, puts real numbers on it: a 200-liter tank of compressed nitrogen behind the seats feeds the rear thrusters, and the flying version swaps the passenger seat for a second, 400-liter tank.
The car underneath is new, too. The 2017 design is gone, replaced by a sharp, wedgy white two-seater that looks a lot like the Lotus Esprit from The Spy Who Loved Me, a car Musk owns and parked at the event. It has steer-by-wire, a rear wing that adjusts itself and, Tesla says, a top speed of at least 235 mph, with Musk hinting at much more.
Tesla’s site, updated as the show ended, lists three versions:
- Performance: fans and side skirts for huge downforce even at low speed, but no thrusters. You reserve it with $5,000 now and $45,000 more within 10 days, Engadget reports.
- Thrust: adds four cold gas thrusters at the rear, fed by the 200-liter tank, for 0 to 60 mph in 0.85 seconds, per Hagerty. A $250,000 deposit to reserve.
- Rocket: adds the 400-liter tank and six more thrusters, one at each corner and two on the sides, for lift and rotation. Tesla claims 0.55 seconds to 60, a rollout figure that flatters it. Invite only. This is the one doing barrel rolls.
The engineer explains it
Want the deep version? Hagerty’s Henry Catchpole sat down with Lars Moravy, Tesla’s VP of vehicle engineering, for half an hour on how the Roadster actually does all this: the thrusters and tanks, the suction fans, the tires, the battery, the robot actuators and the yoke cabin. It is the clearest explanation we have seen yet, and well worth your coffee break.
OK, but why?
Here is where we put the earplugs down. Nobody needs a car that can hop over a Semi, and to his credit, Musk more or less said so, pitching the suction as the real-world payoff for cornering grip. He also said, unprompted, that this is “not necessarily a safety-optimized car.” We believe him.
Everything we saw tonight was a remote-run stunt car on a closed SpaceX site, timed by Tesla, in front of an invited crowd. We don’t know how long the air tanks take to refill between flights, how many seconds of flight a full charge buys, what happens when a jet fails mid-roll, or which regulator would ever let a customer do this on a public road. We haven’t seen a price. And this is a car that was supposed to be in driveways in 2020. Its demo alone slid from April Fools’ Day to late April, to the summer, to October 1 and finally to tonight, after high winds pushed it back two weeks.
To quote the toy spaceman, that’s not flying, that’s falling with style. Which is still a very, very cool thing for a car to do! We have covered rockets strapped to EVs before, and we have rolled our eyes at Roadster delays plenty. Tonight was the first time it felt like the future we were promised as kids. Now build it.
What we are still verifying
Range, battery size and the full price still have not been announced, so the 2017 promises (620 miles, a 200 kWh pack, $200,000) remain the only numbers on record, and we would not lean on them. The 0.81-second run was timed by Tesla on its own stage, and the 0.55-second Rocket figure includes rollout. Tesla and Musk describe the propellant as compressed air, while Hagerty’s walkthrough calls it nitrogen, and we will update this when Tesla is specific. When the production Roadster gets real range and charging numbers, it goes into our EV Range Chart, and we will update this story.
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Tesla’s livestream and posts of October 15, 2026, Tesla’s Roadster page and official images; Hagerty’s engineering walkthrough with Lars Moravy; reporting by Engadget, InsideEVs, Shacknews, Yahoo Finance and Electrek. Images and event video courtesy of Tesla; walkthrough video by Hagerty.
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