How Tesla’s new Roadster drives upside down and jumps a row of Teslas: the fans and cold-gas thrusters explained

At its October 2026 event, Tesla’s new Roadster hung upside down on a ramp, flipped off the top and jumped five Teslas. How the suction fans and cold-gas thrusters work, how long the gas lasts, what the 0.81 second claim means, the three versions and what’s known as of 17 October 2026, with a fan suction calculator.

HanaHow11 minute read
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On the evening of 15 October 2026, at SpaceX’s rocket test site in McGregor, Texas, Tesla showed its new Roadster doing things cars don’t do. One drove up a curved ramp until it was hanging upside down. Another went up again, shot off the top, flipped over and landed on its wheels. Another jumped a row of five Teslas, a Tesla Semi truck among them, rolling right over in mid-air. And Tesla said one did 0 to 60 mph in 0.81 seconds.

It comes down to two things: fans under the car, and thrusters that burn nothing. This guide follows the HanaHow episode: how each works, how long the gas lasts, what the launch figure means, and what’s actually confirmed. It’s what we know as of 17 October 2026, and more could still come out.

The three versions

Tesla is taking reservations for three versions. Its website describes them like this:

  • Performance: “Road ready with seating for two”, with active aerodynamics and the suction fans. No thrusters.
  • Thrust: “Race ready”, adding cold-gas thrusters in the back. Tesla says they take it from 0 to 60 in under 1 second.
  • Rocket: “Air ready with seating for one”, with cold-gas thrusters “positioned around the perimeter of the vehicle”; the reservation page adds “a full flight system”. Tesla’s website says: “Not approved for public road use.”

Musk said on stage that production starts in 2028. Tesla hasn’t published vehicle prices; the reservation amounts are further down.

How it hangs upside down

Racing cars stick to the road with wings, which push down as air flows over them. But wings need speed. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, told Hagerty, the American classic-car insurer and magazine, that the Roadster’s wings can make up to 2 G of downforce at over 200 mph, but that it doesn’t work below about 50 mph. A wing’s downforce grows with the square of the speed, so at 50 mph a wing makes about a sixteenth of what it makes at 200.

So the Roadster adds four fans. Skirts drop to seal the gaps around the floor, and the fans pull air out from underneath, even when the car is standing still. Moravy told Hagerty the four skirts work independently, and the fans are based on the motor from the car’s heat-pump compressor. Tesla’s website calls it a “multi-mode fan and ground sealing system” that gives “enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary”.

It works because of air pressure. Air presses on everything at about 10 tonnes per square metre at sea level. You don’t feel it because it pushes from every side at once. Take some of it away from under the floor, and the air on the other side pushes the car onto the road, or onto the ceiling.

Why 2 G

To hang upside down, that push has to beat the car’s weight, which is 1 G. On stage, Moravy said the fans can pull up to 2 G. He told MotorTrend, the American car magazine, why you’d want the second one: “one G against gravity and then one G to hold the car up”. At exactly 1 G the tyres would carry no weight and have no grip. At 2 G they’re pressed onto the ceiling as hard as they would be onto a normal road, so they can grip.

During the upside-down run, Tesla’s on-screen readout showed about 4,700 kg of downforce, with the car pitched up to 170 degrees. Tesla hasn’t said how big the sealed floor is. Over 3 to 4 square metres, our estimate, the air under the car only needs to be about 11 to 15% lower in pressure than the air around it. Tesla didn’t say what that car weighed either. Moravy gave Hagerty a ballpark of “just under 1,700 kilos”, with final figures still to come; Top Gear says the lightest version will likely be under 1,700 kg.

Tesla’s website marks the upside-down claim with a footnote: “Available with the Rocket trim only”. Moravy told MotorTrend the Performance could do it in theory, adding “we haven’t tried it yet”.

Put in a car’s weight, its floor size and how many G you want, and the calculator works out how much lower the air under the floor has to be.

The car
Air under the floor
10.5% lower
Air pressure under a 3.5 m² floor, against the air around the car at sea level
Pull
3,800 kg
2 G on a 1,900 kg car
Pressure difference
10.6 kPa
106 millibars, or 1,086 kg on every square metre of floor
Upside down, left pressing the tyres on
1,900 kg
The same as its weight on flat ground, so the tyres grip as they would on a normal road

To pull a 1,900 kg car down with 2 G, the fans have to take away 3,800 kg of force. Spread over 3.5 m² of floor, that’s 1,086 kg on every square metre, so the air under the car has to be about 10.5% below the air around it. Upside down, gravity pulls the car off the ceiling with its own weight, which leaves 1,900 kg pressing the tyres on. This assumes the skirts seal perfectly; real cars leak, so the fans have to work harder.

G here means multiples of the car’s own weight. The sum uses standard sea-level air pressure, 101,325 pascals, and standard gravity, and assumes the skirts seal the floor perfectly. Higher up, the air pressure is lower, so the same pull takes a bigger share of it. Tesla hasn’t published the Roadster’s floor area or the weight of the car that drove upside down, so the starting numbers are our estimates.

Fan cars aren’t new

  • Chaparral 2J (1970): a Can-Am racer with two fans at the back, driven by a separate engine, and plastic skirts. It was banned after one season.
  • Brabham BT46B (1978): Gordon Murray’s Formula 1 fan car won its only championship race, the Swedish Grand Prix, with Niki Lauda driving, and was withdrawn straight after. Fan cars were then ruled out.
  • McMurtry Spéirling (2025): the British electric fan car drove upside down on a rotating rig in April 2025.

How the thrusters work

Tesla calls them cold-gas thrusters, and cold means nothing burns. The gas is nitrogen, Moravy told Hagerty, MotorTrend and Top Gear; on stage, Tesla called it air. Moravy told Hagerty, “It just seemed wrong to put fuel into a car”, and that about 80% of air is nitrogen. It’s 78%, which is close enough. By fuel, he means propellant: what gets thrown out of the back.

On the Thrust version, the nitrogen sits in a 200 litre carbon-wrapped tank at up to 10,000 psi, Moravy told Hagerty and Top Gear. That’s nearly 700 times the pressure of the air around you. Open a valve and it rushes out through a nozzle.

Tesla hasn’t said what shape its nozzles are, though Moravy said on stage that the exhaust leaves faster than the speed of sound, so you see what he called Mach diamonds, the bright bands in a supersonic jet. A rocket nozzle narrows to a throat, where the gas reaches the speed of sound, then widens to speed it up even more. Throwing gas out of the back pushes the car forward.

As the gas expands, it gets very cold, so moisture in the air condenses into that white cloud. It’s mostly water, not smoke. Moravy told MotorTrend it’s just nitrogen and condensation, and not toxic.

SpaceX uses the same idea: its Falcon 9 boosters flip themselves round with short puffs of nitrogen, high up where the air is too thin for fins to work.

Over 80 kilonewtons

Moravy put the Roadster’s thrust at over 80 kilonewtons on stage and to Hagerty, and about 80,000 newtons to MotorTrend. That’s about 8 tonnes of push. He told MotorTrend it’s like a single-engine F-16 before the afterburner; he told Hagerty it’s about the same as a typical fighter jet’s single engine.

How long the gas lasts

The catch is how little gas there is. A 200 litre tank at 10,000 psi holds up to about 100 kg of nitrogen, by our maths. How long that lasts at 80 kN depends on how fast the gas leaves, which Tesla hasn’t said:

  • At best, about 710 to 780 m/s for nitrogen at room temperature (710 m/s expanding to normal air pressure, 780 m/s the theoretical limit), 80 kN uses about 100 to 115 kg a second. The tank is gone in under a second.
  • Scott Manley, a space and flight YouTuber, estimated from the demos that the thrusters are much less efficient than that, around 30 seconds of specific impulse, or roughly 300 m/s. Then it’s gone in under half a second.

Moravy told Top Gear one fill lasts “about fiveish seconds”, over the first part of a quarter-mile run. Both fit only if the push averages far below 80 kN: about 15 kN at most over five seconds, by our maths. Moravy told MotorTrend the thrust falls as the pressure does, like a balloon going down, and the valves are worked by actuators, so it could be held back too. Either way, the 80 kN is a peak, not something it holds.

Then the tank is empty. Moravy told Top Gear that fill times are currently “two to six hours”, and Tesla hopes to get them under half an hour. After that, it’s just a car with over a megawatt of power, which will have to do.

How the tank gets filled isn’t settled either. On stage, Musk said the car can recharge its own air tank. Moravy told Top Gear it’s filled from a high-pressure nitrogen system. The two accounts differ.

The Rocket version

The flying version swaps the passenger seat for a 400 litre tank and, Moravy told Hagerty and Top Gear, adds six more nozzles: one at each corner pointing down, and two at the front pointing sideways. Fire the corners and the car lifts. Fire one side harder and it rolls; fire the front or back harder and it pitches. The front pair swing the nose left or right. That’s how one could flip off the top of the ramp and land on its wheels.

On stage, Moravy said the two tanks hold 600 litres in total, with “about 250 kilos of air”, as he put it there. That’s less than 600 litres would hold at 10,000 psi, about 300 kg, so either the tanks run below that pressure or the figures are rounded. At 80 kN, by our maths, 250 kg lasts about two seconds at best, and under one second at the slower exhaust speed.

Even just hovering, you’d count it in seconds. Tesla hasn’t given the Rocket’s weight. If it’s 1,900 to 2,500 kg, our assumption, 250 kg of gas would keep it hovering for at most about 3 to 11 seconds. Twenty seconds of hovering would take about 420 to 1,200 kg of gas, about twice what it carries, or more.

So is it a flying car? John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who host the tech talk show TBPN, weren’t convinced: jumping over traffic for 20 seconds makes it “a jumping car”, not a flying car.

The 0.81 second launch

Tesla said its live run did 0 to 60 mph in 0.81 seconds. That’s an average of more than 3 G. It’s Tesla’s own figure, read out on stage after its only on-screen timer showed an impossible 0.17 seconds, and it hasn’t been independently timed. Moravy told Hagerty the thrusters can do it in 0.55 seconds. Hagerty points out that’s a rollout figure, which leaves out the first foot of the run, so “you might want to add a tenth or two”, and gives the Thrust 0.85 seconds. Moravy told Top Gear about 0.85 to 0.88 seconds.

Scott Manley pointed out that any car can do 0 to 60 in under 3 seconds: drop it off a cliff. Gravity alone takes about 2.7 seconds. We don’t recommend the cliff.

Tyres push a car along by friction, and friction grows the harder they’re pressed into the road. That’s why the fans help with acceleration too: Hagerty reports the Performance version, which has no thrusters, does 0 to 60 in 1.6 seconds. Moravy told Hagerty rubber doesn’t get much above a friction coefficient of one. The Roadster is rear-wheel drive, so only two tyres push.

Getting under one second takes a push that doesn’t go through the tyres. 80 kN out of the back is more than four times the weight of a 1,700 kg car.

What was real

The cars were real, but Musk said they were technically driving themselves for the demo, “to make sure we don’t kill anyone”, as he put it.

On the road: Tesla’s website says the Rocket isn’t approved for public roads. Moravy told Top Gear that the Rocket is for off-road use only, and that Tesla plans to certify the Thrust for the road. Top Gear’s presenter added that you couldn’t fire the thrusters on a public road: a stone they kick up could go through someone’s windscreen. In the UK, Tesla’s website says the Roadster comes in left-hand drive only.

Reservations, prices and dates

To reserve one, Tesla asks for £5,000 or $5,000 up front, which it calls fully refundable, then the rest of the reservation within 10 days:

  • Performance: 50,000 in all (£ or $).
  • Thrust: 250,000 in all, “restricted to one order per customer”.
  • Rocket: invite only.

Tesla first showed a new Roadster, a different design, in November 2017, and said it would be available in 2020. Musk now says production starts in 2028. Tesla’s US reservation agreement says “we cannot guarantee when your vehicle will actually be delivered or if it will be delivered”, and that a reservation isn’t an order. It also says you can cancel for a full refund at any time until you finish configuring your car, once Tesla invites you to.

That’s what we know as of 17 October 2026. More could still come out.

Sources

Read the video transcript

Tesla's new Roadster climbs a curved ramp until it's hanging upside down. Then one goes up again, shoots off the top, flips over and lands on its wheels. Another jumps a row of five Teslas, a Semi truck among them, rolling right over in mid-air. Okay, a car just drove upside down, and another one jumped over five Teslas. Here's how that actually works. This is Tesla's new Roadster, from the car company Elon Musk runs, shown at a test site run by SpaceX, his rocket company. Tesla is taking reservations for three versions, and it all comes down to two things: fans underneath, and thrusters that burn nothing. Start with hanging upside down. Racing cars stick to the road with wings, and wings need speed. Here's Lars Moravy, who runs vehicle engineering at Tesla, telling Hagerty, about the Roadster's wings at over 200 miles an hour. Lars Moravy: we can create, you know, up to two Gs of downforce with this system. But the problem is that doesn't, you know, also work when you're, like, say below 50 or something miles per hour. A wing's downforce grows with the square of its speed, so at 50 miles an hour it makes about a sixteenth of what it makes at 200. So the Roadster adds four fans. Skirts drop to seal the gaps round the floor, and the fans pull air out from underneath, even standing still. Air presses on everything at about 10 tonnes per square metre. Take some away from under the floor, and the air on the other side pushes the car onto the road. Even when the road is the ceiling. To hang upside down, that push has to beat the car's weight, which is 1 G. On stage, Moravy said the fans can pull up to 2. He told MotorTrend, another car magazine, why you'd want the second one. Lars Moravy: 1 G against gravity... and then 1 G to hold the car up. That extra G presses the tyres into the ramp so they can grip. During the run, Tesla's screen read about 4,700 kilos of downforce. Over 3 to 4 square metres of floor, which is our estimate, the air underneath only needs to be about 11 to 15 per cent lower in pressure. A footnote on its website marks the upside-down claim as Rocket only, though Moravy told MotorTrend the Performance could do it in theory. Now the thrusters. Tesla calls them cold-gas thrusters, and cold means nothing burns. Lars Moravy: It just seemed wrong to put fuel into a car. Yeah. So nitrogen seemed like a good fuel. There's a lot, like 80% of the, you know, uh, air is nitrogen, so it didn't seem so bad. 78. Close enough. And by fuel, he means propellant. The nitrogen sits in a carbon-wrapped tank at up to 10,000 psi, nearly 700 times the pressure of the air around you. Open a valve and it rushes out through a nozzle. Tesla hasn't said what shape its nozzles are, but a rocket nozzle narrows to a throat, where the gas reaches the speed of sound, then widens to speed it up even more. Throwing gas out of the back pushes the car forward. And as the gas expands, it gets so cold that moisture in the air turns into that white cloud. It's mostly water, not smoke. Moravy says the Roadster's thrusters make over 80 kilonewtons. That's about 8 tonnes of push, which he compares to a single-engine fighter jet without its afterburner. The catch is how little gas there is. The Thrust version's tank holds 200 litres, up to about 100 kilos of nitrogen. At full thrust, by our maths, that's gone in under a second. Moravy told Top Gear one fill lasts about 5 seconds. That works if the push fades fast as the pressure falls, like a balloon going down. Then it's empty, and for now, refilling takes hours. The flying version, Rocket, swaps the passenger seat for a 400-litre tank and adds six more nozzles: one at each corner pointing down, and two at the front pointing sideways. Fire the corners and the car lifts. Fire one side harder and it rolls; fire the front or back harder and it pitches. The front pair swing the nose left or right. That's how one could flip off the top of the ramp and land on its wheels. But 600 litres, about 250 kilos of gas, lasts only about 2 seconds at full thrust, by our maths. So is it a flying car? Jordi Hays and John Coogan, who host the tech talk show TBPN, weren't convinced. TBPN: Like, if I have a car and I'm in a ton of traffic and I can jump over that traffic for like 20 seconds, that counts as a flying car. No? Uh... That's a jumping car? Yeah, that's a jumping car. I don't think that's a flying car. By our maths, 20 seconds of hovering would take about twice the gas it carries, or more. Then there's the launch. Tesla said its live run did 0 to 60 in 0.81 seconds, an average of more than 3 G. That's Tesla's own figure, read out after its timer first showed an impossible 0.17. Here's the space and flight YouTuber Scott Manley, Scott Manley: All you have to do is drop it off a cliff or from a plane or whatever, right? Gravity 1G takes about 2.7 seconds to go zero to 60. We don't recommend the cliff. Tyres push a car along by friction, and friction grows the harder they're pressed into the road. With its fans pressing down, Hagerty reports the Performance version, which has no thrusters, takes 1.6 seconds. It's rear-wheel drive, so only two tyres push. For this car, getting under 1 second takes a push that doesn't go through the tyres: 80 kilonewtons out of the back. So what was real? The cars were, but Musk said they were technically driving themselves, to make sure we don't kill anyone, as he put it. Tesla's website says the Rocket isn't approved for public roads. Musk says production starts in 2028, but a Roadster was first shown in 2017, for 2020, and Tesla's US reservation terms say it can't guarantee when, or if, your car will be delivered. That's what we know as of 17 October 2026. Our guide has a calculator: put in a car's weight, its floor size and how many G you want, and it works out the suction it needs. That's HanaHow.

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