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Tech billionaire Elon Musk gave Tesla fans an up-close look at the electric vehicle maker’s latest and perhaps most ambitious project on Thursday night – the long-awaited Tesla Roadster.
“We need an audience to prove that it’s not AI or SI,” Musk told the crowd at the livestreamed event. “So, you guys can tell people that you saw it with your eyes. Because what you see with your eyes, you will not believe.”
In a dramatic demonstration, the Roadster – Tesla’s only manually driven car – then drove up a towering, curved ramp, going upside down before launching off the end, flipping in mid-air, and landing safely back on the ground as the audience cheered.
“Well, it worked,” Musk said.
According to Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, who was presenting alongside Musk, the Roadster uses a “fan suction system” on the underside of the vehicle that he said can “pull up to 2 Gs in order to make the car go upside down.”
“Then we borrowed some technology from SpaceX to do the rest,” he said.
Musk added that the Roadster has “altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket.”
“It can do rolls, it can do crazy gymnastics,” he said, whilst joking that it was “not necessarily a safety optimised car.”
A second demonstration then put that claim to the test, with the car driving up to a row of other Tesla vehicles before firing into the air and doing a “kickflip” over them.
Another display showed the Roadster accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in under one second.
Tesla’s website shows the company is now taking reservation orders for the car, with three variants available – Performance, Thrust, and Rocket. The Rocket version is listed as invite only.
The Roadster has a range of more than 300 miles and a top speed of over 230 mph (Rocket version), per Tesla.