Tesla's Flying Roadster Is Really About SpaceX

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It's been almost a decade since Tesla debuted the Roadster, their flagship car. And last week on Thursday, Elon Musk finally showed us the car. I watched a Tesla Roadster car drive up a ramp, turn upside down while stationary, staying stuck to the ramp, launch itself off said ramp, fly through the air, and then land perfectly into cruise control without a single dent or bit of damage on the car. Now, I understand what I just described to you sounds like AI, but it is anything but AI. And it uses some really neat physics tricks that I'm going to get into, but I realized it is the perfect combination of SpaceX and Tesla engineering that is going to propel, pun intended, cars, manufacturing, and automobiles into the future. We are actually getting flying cars. But it also told me another story, and the rumour is going, that Tesla and SpaceX might actually merge by the end of the year, forming what is going to be the fifth largest company in the entire world. I'm still in Japan. It's my final day. I've got my kimono on, but I'm excited to get into it and back to the regular schedule starting on tomorrow's episode. So all of this and more on today's episode of In the Loop brought to you by Qualcomm.

OK, so first we have to watch this video. There's jets of air propelling itself out of the car. It's spinning the car onto its front. It's landing it perfectly. There's a loud whirring noise when you listen to this video of air suction and you're wondering what on earth is going on. And then you're thinking, is this video sped up or slowed down? How on earth is a car able to stay stuck to the wall? Well, there's actually three neat physics tricks happening here, which combine SpaceX's engineering with that of Tesla's, which has produced a new type of car, which can only be classified as a flying car. And this wasn't the only neat trick that they showed us at the pre-launch event for the Roadster. I watched this car fly over trucks and cars. I watched it go from nought to 60 mile per hour in nought point eight one seconds, which is the fastest of any road car ever. And it basically got me questioning everything that I know about cars and what they're about to become. So I wanted to understand the first trick, which is how on earth did they get a car to stick to the wall, because what you're seeing on your screen is in real time. And so no way could a normal car stay stuck to the wall, it would have fallen and crashed to the ground. Well, this car is equipped with an immense fan suction system. So it's embedded on the underbelly of the car, and it is sucking out all the air from underneath the car. And what this does is it creates an immense downwards force or downwards pressure, pushing the car onto any surface that it is driving on. Now, the power of this force is up to 4,700 kgs, which is around 4.7 tons. That is a lot of force, 2 Gs worth of force. And so therefore, when the car is upside down or perpendicular to the ground, it's still enough to stick it to whatever surface that it's riding on, in this case, the ramp. And so that's what effectively is happening underneath the car that causes it to maintain traction. You might be wondering, what is the physical or practical reality of this? Well, you can imagine if the car is moving at high speeds and you don't want it to barrel roll, or if you want it to have the best traction or safety when you are turning the steering wheel, this gives you that added traction. Now, the second trick that you saw were these jet streams that were shooting out the car at weird times to try and stabilize its direction and help it land beautifully after it propelled itself off of the ramp. What I'm showing you on your screen now is something that Tesla is calling their thruster. But this thruster isn't like any typical thruster that you would see on a rocket or that of any other car. It contains highly pressurized, compressed gas in this spherical shape that you're seeing on your screen right now.

And this gas is basically released and it expands super aggressively or very quickly in milliseconds, such that it creates this immense force that can push the car in multiple different directions. Now, the car itself is fitted out to the max with these thrusters. They have about 10 of them. And coincidentally, these are the same thrusters that SpaceX used on the Falcon 9 So the spherical storage tank that you're seeing right at the end of this thruster basically is the container for this highly compressed gas. It's usually a mixture of nitrogen and oxygen. The cool thing about this is there's zero fuel or petroleum involved anywhere. It is just gas. And then you have an electric valve, which basically opens at a given point or time due to various different sensors and allows the gas to release and expand. And then Newton's law of motion applies here, where if it pushes a car in a certain direction or forces enough gas in one particular direction, it can push the car or stabilize the car in a particular different way.