Elon Musk tips Tesla Roadster 2 'wings' and drive-by-wire yoke wheel

Recently, Elon Musk made the bold claim that the upcoming Tesla Roadster 2 edition will have a 0-60 mph acceleration in under a second.

This raised a few eyebrows among regular sports car fans and automotive industry insiders alike. Needless to say, they cite the laws of physics down to traction and drag to argue that a sub-second acceleration on a vehicle with wheels can only be done via something like cold air thrusters.

The CEO of electric supercar maker Rimac, who Porsche has put in charge of Bugatti as well, explained precisely how Tesla may have done it:

It is possible with thrusters. We did the simulation. The problem is that you release the air in 2-3 seconds, and then you have a lot of dead weight that you are carrying around (tanks, compressors, valves, nozzles, etc.). Same with fans – they just give you more grip, but you need something like 30.000 Nm on the wheels to accelerate below 1 sec 0-100 km/h, which means you need massive motors, inverters, gearboxes, driveshafts, etc. Plus, the car has to be super light as otherwise you can’t create a lot of excess downforce with the fans as the tires would be overloaded very fast with any kind of car with "normal supercar" weight, especially electric. And then again you are carrying the weight with you when you are not doing 0-100 km/h. So thrusters are really the only way to go. But it brings a lot of downsides as well.

During his ill-fated interview with Don Lemon that got the former CNN host's talk show dumped from his X platform, Elon Musk seemingly confirms the thruster avenue in a roundabout way.

In addition to waxing poetic that the Roadster 2 will be unlike any car anyone has ever done or will do in the foreseeable future, he answered some concrete questions about it. "Totally Jetsons vibe," he quipped about the 2025 Roadster when asked if it will be a "flying car."

The only way Tesla could beat the "once in a decade" concept of its unique Cybertruck pickup was to do a partnership with SpaceX on a vehicle, and apparently that's precisely what it did with the Roadster 2.

Roadster 2 acceleration with SpaceX thrusters

"It's gonna be really cool and have some rocket technology in it," confirmed Elon, saying that the Roadster 2 "does not have big wings, because big wings would be unwieldy on the road." Discounting the typical exuberant language of Tesla's CEO, cold air thrusters would fit that explanation. Elon jokingly added that the Roadster 2 would not have propellers and still has wheels.

Back in 2019, Elon Musk sort of explained how it will work. "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," he said, but the Roadster 2 project was put on the backburner because of the Cybertruck and the Model 2 it needed to develop first.

Another parallel with flying objects would be the new Roadster's drive-by-wire steering yoke of the type that modern commercial jets use. Tesla introduced drive-by-wire steering with the Cybertruck and, together with its new 48V low-voltage architecture, may intend to make these advanced technologies standard on its future vehicles, even on the mass market Model 2.

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