Last night, with considerable showmanship, Tesla CEO Elon Musk proudly unveiled the Roadster 2 just nine years after first announcing the car, and made it “fly.” While undeniably impressive, you could also describe the spectacle as Tesla making its long-delayed luxury car “do a big hop” and then, as Buzz Lightyear would say, “fall with style.”
During the reveal in McGregor, Texas, at SpaceX’s rocket development and testing facility, the two-seater Roadster 2 launched itself over the automaker’s entire lineup, shot from 0 to 60 mph in less than a second, and then drove upside down off a high ramp to then flip over mid-air and land back down on the ground, cushioning its rapid descent using on-board thrusters.
All this was pure gold for social clips (though at the time of publication, Tesla’s stock price was down after the event), but how did Tesla make its new EV prototype perform these tricks? Tesla vehicle engineering head Lars Moravy went into detail with auto lifestyle and insurance brand Hagerty before yesterday’s event, explaining how the Roadster 2 works.
Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief designer since 2008, designed the angular exterior. He also helmed the aesthetic of the Cybertruck, Models S, X, 3 and Y, as well as the Semi. Blacked-out windows obscured any view inside the EV, which carried no human driver anyway because, as Musk said, Tesla wanted “to make sure we don’t kill anyone” during the gravity-defying demonstration.
Powertrain and Battery
The Roadster 2 will be rear-wheel drive only, a departure from Tesla’s track record of all-wheel drive EVs. Two motors will deliver over a megawatt of power (1,341 horsepower) and over 1,400 Newton-meters (Nm) of torque, meaning this car will have more torque and power than a three-motor Plaid. But all of that power goes through just the rear wheels.
The car will be light, at “just under 1,700 kilos” (under 2 tons), according to Moravy, not significantly heavier than the original 1,300 kg (1.4 tons) Roadster, despite a larger size.
Tesla claims a range of over 300 miles for the Roadster and hopes to mitigate this distinctly average range by also giving the EV the fastest-charging battery the automaker has ever produced, supposedly capable of zipping from 15 to 80 percent in 10 minutes.
Sucking Fans
At a 2013 auction, Elon Musk bought the iconic “Wet Nellie” Lotus Esprit S1 submarine car from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me for just shy of $1 million. Musk is so taken with his Bond memorabilia that it apparently inspired one of the Roadster 2’s key abilities.
That submarine Bond car has four propellers at its rear, so Tesla decided to ape this with four 20-kilowatt fans on the Roadster 2. Moravy says these fans break the laws of tire physics and dramatically increase the EV’s traction by becoming what Tesla calls the car’s “sucker system.” Four independent replaceable skirts drop down on the sides of the car, allowing the Roadster 2 to stick (or suck) to the road at lower speeds where its aerodynamic wings aren’t yet contributing to downforce. Moravy claims the system can produce over two Gs in a corner when accelerating, even below 50 mph.
This type of aerodynamic manipulation also appears on the McMurtry Spéirling Pure, which uses two high-speed electric fans spinning at up to 23,000 revolutions per minute to actively suck air from underneath the chassis, generating up to 2,000 kg (around 4,400 pounds) of downforce.
This extreme suction lets the Roadster 2 drive up the vertical ramp at the Texas demonstration and hold onto the surface even when upside down.
Rocket-Powered Thrust
So how does the Roadster 2 hover, correct itself, and dampen its fall? That’s thanks to what Tesla calls the car’s “SpaceX system,” referring to Musk’s aerospace company, which helped with this part of the car’s development.
Originally, the Roadster was meant to have a 2+2 cabin. Now it’s a two-seater because behind the seats sits a 200-liter carbon-overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) that holds up to 10,000 PSI to supply the car’s cold gas thrusters, which use expansion of pressurized nitrogen gas to generate thrust, a tech predominantly used for spacecraft stabilization. Cold gas thrusters are the simplest manifestation of a rocket engine.
This combination of suction system and thrusters helps the car hit 0 to 60 mph in supposedly under a second. In this launch mode, Moravy says the rear thrusters produce more than 80 kilonewtons of thrust, which, staggeringly, matches the Dassault Falcon 10X jet. Tesla has seemingly cracked the sub-second race, while the aforementioned McMurtry Spéirling Pure can only manage this feat in a bowel-clenching 1.3 seconds. During this astonishing acceleration, the driver will endure up to 5 Gs.
The Roadster 2’s Performance model will feature the sucker system and no thrusters, so 0 to 60 will take a touch longer at 1.6 seconds and a top speed of 210 mph. The Thrust model gets the whole package and a top speed of 230 mph.
Moravy says the “flight system,” as he calls it in Hagerty’s walkthrough, requires yet another 400-liter cold gas COPV, occupying the space where the passenger seat is, making the car a single-seater and bringing total thrust fuel up to 600 liters. This “flight system” also requires six extra thrusters: one in each corner, plus two at the front to yaw.
Bursting the Balloon
Unlike in space, where cold gas thrusters provide consistent levels of thrust until the last drop of fuel is used, on Earth the “flight system” will lose thrust as the compressed gas depletes. Moravy likens it to blowing up a balloon then letting the air out: “When I open the end of a balloon, all the gas comes out, and at a certain point, it starts tapering off. That same thing will happen here.”
Apparently, refilling the 600-liter nitrogen tanks takes Tesla six to seven hours, but the company is supposedly working on a system to dramatically reduce this to 30 minutes.
The current Roadster 2 prototypes are being used for further development, and production won’t begin until 2028—but remember that Musk previously said Roadster deliveries would begin in 2020, so take this with a very large pinch of salt. That’s without talking about how the Federal Aviation Administration will react to this “flying” car.
Still, for the Tesla faithful, a reservation page is already live where a $5,000 reservation fee secures the Performance variant, with an additional $45,000 due within 10 days. The Thrust is available for an initial $5,000 fee, with a whopping $245,000 due within 10 days.
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