Watch: Thanks to Elon, Real Flying Cars Have Arrived – Tesla Roadster Unveiling Shows off Flying Car Anyone Can Buy

If you have enough cash, you can get yourself a flying car soon, all thanks to Elon Musk and Tesla.

On Thursday night, Tesla introduced the Tesla Roadster EV at SpaceX’s Texas test facility. Considering the car had been in gestation since 2017, it needed to impress people bigly to get any attention.

Impress bigly it did. The new Roadster — now with a much more Lotus Esprit-inspired wedge shape — can do 0-60 in less than a second.

It can also stick to the road like nothing else — and it can even fly. And yes, I get that this sounds like ridiculousness, but seeing is believing.

Musk made sure everyone could see.

Real life, baby https://t.co/3QEqn18wig

— Tesla (@Tesla) October 16, 2026

There’s something you don’t see every day, unless you’re Marty McFly.

This isn’t just a one-off, apparently, but instead the result of an air tank inside the car that allows it to vector the blast.

“It’s going to be pretty wild that you can have a rocket car,” Musk said at the unveiling.

“The car has attitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket. It could do rolls. It could do crazy gymnastics. Whatever you want, really.”

Musk noted the new Roadster “is not necessarily a safety-optimized car, but it takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10.”

“This will be an actual car that’s on the roads,” he said, before joking: “I’m not sure it’s necessarily legal in all jurisdictions.”

I’m not sure you’re going to be able to do this everywhere:

ELON MUSK: “It’s going to be pretty wild that you can have a rocket car. The car has attitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket. It could do rolls. It could do crazy gymnastics. Whatever you want, really.

This is not necessarily a safety-optimized car, but it takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10.
This will be an actual car that’s on the roads. I’m not sure it’s necessarily legal in all jurisdictions.

The car can recharge its air tank, so it’s not like you need special propellant or anything like that. It literally is just going to pop itself up and be able to do these maneuvers whenever you’d like.”

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) October 16, 2026

Tesla being led by Elon Musk and CNN being CNN, of course they had to note the bleeding obvious: This isn’t going to be for everyone, and not really sustained flight:

But even with the success of the staged event, whether the car will actually be able to live up to the promise and provide owners with the ability to both fly rather than just hop, while also being able to drive very fast on roads, remains to be proven. …

And whether the car is able to truly fly is very difficult to say, despite Thursday night’s demonstration. It certainly didn’t have any demonstration of long-range flight.

In recent years, there have been many advancements in electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft, known as eVTOL’s. While there are some working models, there are still many engineering roadblocks to road-worthy cars that can truly fly.

“Aircraft are extremely sensitive to weight, whereas with ground vehicles you want them to have bumpers and crumple zones and all that,” Roger Connor, curator for vertical flight at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, told CNN Thursday before the event. “Inevitably, something that is a hybrid between the two is going to be a poor performing aircraft and a poor performing vehicle, and also quite expensive.”

It’s not an aircraft, obviously; it’s a car that can do levitation for a short while — which is pretty amazing, in and of itself. It’s obviously going to be quite expensive, and if you don’t know that, you probably need to bone up on your automotive shopping skills. (Ferrari doesn’t make a bargain-basement econobox, for instance.)

This is amazing stuff — the stuff that happens when you dream big. The Roadster amply demonstrated that its ability to handle the air on the underside and side of the car means, more importantly for sports car enthusiasts, that this thing can create downforce as well as lift. In addition to going fast in a straight line, it’s also going to be able to go quickly around corners.

It’s what happens when you dream. Elon and Tesla continue to do that, while the rest of the automotive milieu stagnates.

In America, anyone with brains, passion, and hard work can still change the world. There’s a reason Elon’s here and not in South Africa. And there’s a reason other countries simply don’t change the world like the United States does.

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