How Tesla's
"flying" car
gets off the ground

The full narration of the video.

Most flying cars use propellers. This Tesla uses puffs of air. In mid-October, Tesla showed its new Roadster in Texas. Mid-drive, it left the ground and sailed over a row of cars. Most flying cars in China look like giant drones, with big rotors on top, fanning air downward.

This Roadster doesn't have a single rotor. So how does it get off the ground? Picture something simple: you're on a skateboard, and you throw a basketball backward, hard. The ball flies back, and you roll forward. You push the ball, and the ball pushes you.

Now throw downward, nonstop, lots of balls, really fast, and you'd get pushed upward. Tesla isn't throwing balls downward. It's throwing air. Every spare corner of the car is packed with air tanks, and the air inside is squeezed tight.

Open the valves, and air blasts out of ten nozzles under and around the car, pushing it off the ground. Its real name is a cold-gas thruster. Cold, because nothing burns. What comes out is just squeezed air. It's borrowed from rockets. Rockets and spacecraft use little nozzles like these to turn in the sky.

Back to the skateboard: the basketball is the air shooting out, and your throwing arm is the pressure packed in the tank. So can it keep flying? Take a guess: how long did it stay in the air? Just a few seconds. On the skateboard, once you're out of balls, you stop.

The car only carries so much air. When it's gone, the car comes down, and has to refill before the next go. Propellers push air down too. But they push the air around them, which never runs out, so they can keep flying. So it's less flying, and more a really big hop.

It has an even stranger trick: it can hang upside down on a ramp that curls over. Fans under the car pull out the air between the car and the ramp. With less air in between, the air outside presses the car hard against the ramp, so even upside down, it doesn't fall.

It's called a fan car, and race cars tried it more than fifty years ago. At the top of the ramp, the nozzles fire, it turns around in midair, and lands gently. But no one was inside during the demo. Every move was programmed ahead of time.

For the version with air jets, Tesla itself says it's not approved for public roads. Musk says production starts in 2028. In the end, it has no wings. It just keeps throwing air down, and lands when the air runs out.

A balloon you let go of, zipping around the room, works the same way. What else around you sprays one way and moves the other?