Tesla Roadster is going to be able to hover over the ground, says Elon Musk

Elon Musk has been making some crazy claims about the next generation Tesla Roadster, but now he is topping them off with a claim that it will actually be able to hover over the ground.

When first unveiling the vehicle, Musk claimed a list of insanely impressive specs for the new Roadster, including 0-60 mph in 1.9 sec, 620-mile of range, and more.

Musk has been teasing those specs as the “base specs” and other versions could be even crazier.

Later,  he even said that Tesla will offer a ‘SpaceX package’ that will include cold air thrusters.

At first, the CEO said that these thrusters, which basically amount to small rocket engines, will “dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking and cornering”, but he also said that it would “maybe even allow a Tesla to fly.”

Now in response to a GIF of a flying car hovering over the ground on Twitter, Musk said that “the new Roadster will actually do something like this”:

2022 pic.twitter.com/wj7c4TiGwc

— Richie Hill (@Richie_Hill_) January 8, 2019

At first, people thought that Musk was joking about the “SpaceX package” for the new Roadster, but it turns out that it’s something that he seriously wants Tesla to bring to market.

Again, this all sounds like a joke, but Musk has said some crazy things on Twitter that have actually panned out to be true and he rarely jokes about features on Tesla vehicles.

Musk confirmed that he is not joking:

I’m not. Will use SpaceX cold gas thruster system with ultra high pressure air in a composite over-wrapped pressure vessel in place of the 2 rear seats.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2019

Tesla is trying to bring the vehicle to market by 2020 and make it the quickest and fastest production car on the market – and it just happens to be all-electric.

The automaker is currently taking reservations for the $200,000 base version with an expensive $50,000 deposit and for the $250,000 Founders Series for an even more insane $250,000 deposit.

We haven’t seen the next-gen Tesla Roadster prototype for a while.

In September, it made its car show debut at the Grand Basel car show, but they were only displaying a design shell.

The last time we saw the working Roadster prototype was when Tesla brought it to the Art Center College of Design to inspire young car designers a few months ago.

Electrek’s Take

Well, that’s just crazy.

To be fair, he said “something like” this, but anything even remotely close to this still means that we are talking about the vehicle at least lifting off the ground, which again is crazy.

Musk is generally not kidding when it comes to new Tesla features – unless we are talking about the timing of the release of said features.

To be honest, I don’t care much about those kinds of features apparently enabled by the “SpaceX package”.

I don’t mind them either as long as they don’t really delay the release of the new Roadster.

If Tesla delivers on the rest of the specs, the car will already be crazy enough to take away the “halo effect” away from gas-powered cars, which is apparently Elon’s goal with the new Roadster.

Not sure if we need all the rest.