A car that sucks itself onto the ceiling of a ramp, fires rocket thrusters to launch, and hops clean off the ground sounds like a cartoon. Tesla shot it anyway. The new onboard demo footage puts you in the seat while the Roadster runs through its party tricks, and every trick has hardware behind it.
Watch the clip first.
The clip runs about 34 seconds, shot from the car’s exterior Tesla Vision cameras, so the view stays locked to the body while the ground drops, spins, and comes back. The sequence runs in the order the tricks land: the launch, the kickflip over the lineup, then the flight shots.
Trick one: the car that glues itself down
The Roadster carries powered suction: fans and an underbody seal that generate downforce even at a standstill. Tesla demonstrates it on the inverted ramp, where the car holds on while the surface turns upside down. Track Mode drops the ride height, and the inverted capability belongs to the Rocket configuration. Musk’s review of the run, delivered at the reveal, was refreshingly compact for such a complicated exercise: “Well, it worked.”
Trick two: the rear thrusters
The launch runs on cold-gas thrusters. With the thrusters firing, the launch demonstration’s reported result was about 0.81 seconds to 60 mph. Under one second. The thruster pack is optional equipment on the planned lineup.
Trick three: the kickflip
The Rocket configuration mounts thrusters around the perimeter, aimed for movement in more than one direction, and the new footage is shot from the car while it runs the headliner: a full barrel roll over a lineup of Tesla’s own vehicles, a Model 3, Model Y, Cybercab, Cybertruck, and Semi parked underneath. Tesla’s vehicle-engineering chief Lars Moravy dubbed the roll the kickflip, and Musk added that Tony Hawk would be proud. The roll ran uncrewed. That version is single-seat, invitation only, and not approved for public roads. At that point it stops being a car with tricks and becomes a ground-based aircraft that happens to have a steering yoke.
The straight-faced tech under the clown act
Under the spectacle sits serious hardware: a fixed seat position, magnesium, titanium, and carbon fiber doing the weight work, steer-by-wire through a yoke, hidden headlights, and a full-width taillight. The cabin runs Ultrawhite with gray microsuede. The design team leaned all the way into the space theme, Ano White paint and gold-tinted glazing that reads like a spacesuit visor.
Musk called it better than any James Bond car, and the comparison undersells the hardware. Production timing is the open question, and it stays open. Our delivery piece tracks that side. Bond needed Q to build his gadgets in. This one brings its own rockets.
