Tesla’s new Roadster is not only a very fast electric car. With a particular piece of technology it can leave the ground and hang in the air — and since the demonstration, the argument about it has been running everywhere, Bangladesh included.
The numbers first
Top speed above 230mph. Nought to 60mph in under a second. A suction system that Tesla says lets the car drive upside down. And the part everyone is discussing: rocket thrusters, up to ten of them on a “rocket” version that will not be sold openly — production starts in 2028 and that version goes only to selected buyers.
At the demonstration the Roadster was turned upside down and righted, then leapt over a row of parked cars. It impressed the audience and raised immediate questions about whether the technology is safe near other vehicles and people.
How it actually leaves the ground
The thrusters are fed from carbon fibre overwrapped pressure vessels — COPVs — tanks holding air at very high pressure. Release that air fast through a nozzle and you get force in the opposite direction. Point the nozzles down and the car goes up.
These are cold-gas thrusters. The “cold” does not mean the air is chilled; it distinguishes them from conventional rockets, which burn fuel to make their thrust. Nothing is combusted here. SpaceX has used the same kind of thruster for years, including to bring Falcon 9 boosters back to Earth safely.
Which is the honest way to describe what was shown: a car with a tank of compressed air and some well-aimed nozzles. That is a real and difficult engineering achievement. It is not flight.
The number Tesla has not given
Tesla has published no detail on how long the Roadster can stay airborne. The demonstration showed it jump, hold its balance in mid-air and land. Whether it can do anything beyond those manoeuvres for any length of time is unclear — and a compressed-air system has a hard limit that an engine does not, because when the tank is empty the thrust stops until it is refilled.
So the image being circulated — a car lifting over a traffic jam and continuing to its destination — does not look realistic on what has been shown.
Read it from Dhaka
The flying-car idea lands differently in a city that loses hours a day to congestion, and it is worth being clear about why it is not an answer here. A vehicle sold in 2028 to selected buyers is a halo product, not transport policy. Even if it could hover for a useful period, the constraint in Dhaka is not that cars cannot climb; it is that there are more vehicles than road, and adding a third dimension for a handful of them changes nothing for anyone else.
There is also the question the critics are already asking, which matters more on a crowded street than an empty test pad: these thrusters work by firing high-pressure air downward and outward. A car doing that in a queue of rickshaws and pedestrians is a different proposition from one doing it in front of an invited audience.
