Flying Cars: The City the Tesla Roadster Is Heralding
Flying cars now have a prototype: the Tesla Roadster hops on SpaceX cold gas. The city science fiction imagined, and what is still missing before it takes off.
LA CIENCIA DEL BUCLE
Jose M. Aldasoro
10/17/20266 min read
On 15 October, at SpaceX's rocket test site in McGregor, Texas, a Tesla Roadster drove up a ramp, hung upside down, let go, rolled in mid-air and landed on all four wheels. Sixty-four years after The Jetsons parked their flying bubble on television, science fiction finally has a prototype to show.
The interesting question is not whether that car flies. It is what kind of city would be born the day flying became normal.
The Roadster does not fly: it hops
The new Roadster's "rockets" have no flame. They are cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX: a tank of air compressed to very high pressure, emptied through a set of nozzles. Gas goes one way and the car goes the other; it is Newton's third law without combustion. It is the same family of thrusters the Falcon 9 first stage uses to orient itself and flip over before flying home.
Tesla showed three versions. The Performance has no thrusters and clings to the tarmac with suction fans. The Thrust adds rear nozzles for acceleration. The Rocket, single-seat and invitation-only, spreads ten nozzles around the body and carries a 600-litre tank. There is no price, production is announced for 2028, and Tesla itself admits the Rocket is not approved for public roads.
And here is the catch. Cold gas is one of the least efficient propulsion systems there is: rockets use it for small corrections because it is simple and reliable, not because it performs. When the tank is empty, the flight is over. What we saw were short, controlled bursts, not a car that takes off and leaves.
In my novels, every new technology leaves a file behind. If you want to read the one ZEUS tried to erase, the case file I share with my subscribers is here.
The physics fiction skips
Hovering is expensive. To stay still in the air, a vehicle has to push down, without rest, as much air as it weighs, and the energy required grows the smaller the surface it pushes with. That is why a helicopter carries an eleven-metre rotor rather than four fans the size of a wheel.
Let us run the numbers for a hypothetical two-tonne car hovering by pushing air through four square metres of propellers. According to momentum theory, the one used to size rotors, it would need about 880 kilowatts, almost 1,200 horsepower, just to avoid falling, and that is the ideal case, with no losses. With an eleven-metre rotor, the same weight asks for about 180 kilowatts: five times less. The compact flying car fiction has been drawing for decades is, above all, an energy problem.
And there is another detail almost no film shows: all that air has to go somewhere. The jet holding the car up lands on the pavement, with its noise, its dust and whatever happens to be underneath.
Three cities science fiction has already tried out
The Jetsons (1962) imagined the flying car as a middle-class appliance: a bubble that folded down to fit in a briefcase. It was the future without conflict, the family that commutes to the office through the air the way it now commutes along the motorway.
Blade Runner (1982) turned it upside down. In its Los Angeles of 2019, the spinners designed by Syd Mead cross a sky that belongs to whoever is in charge, while down below people live under the rain and the neon. Flying is not a right: it is a position.
The Fifth Element (1997) took the idea to its most prosaic conclusion. The New York of 2263 has stacked layers of aerial motorways, flying taxis and traffic jams in the air. The dream has come true and turned into routine.
Three futures: the democratic one, the privileged one and the gridlocked one. Science fiction has already tested them all on paper. What the Roadster heralds is that we will soon test them on the tarmac, or just above it.
The vertical city
If flying ever becomes cheap, altitude becomes social class. Up top, clean traffic and views; down below, the shadow, the noise and the air coming down from everyone else. The street would become the city's basement.
There is a second, quieter change. According to Kelley Blue Book's report, the stunt Roadster was remotely operated and the figure in the seat was a prop. The flying car of the future is unlikely to be driven by a person: it will be an autonomous vehicle inside a network of calculated routes. And a city with a programmed sky is a city where whoever writes the program decides who goes up, which way and how high.
In a city like that, escaping changes shape too. Turning a corner and ducking into an alley is no longer enough: the pursuer may be overhead, and the whole sky is a map.
Takion City already lives there
I wrote that city in The Loop. In Takion City, under a sky forever stained red, altitude is already social class. A private flying vehicle with its own onboard artificial intelligence is the fastest way to cross it, but not everyone can afford one. The middle classes drive surface cars along endless motorways; the lowest ride the metro. In the darkest alleys, a tangle of cables strung between the buildings barely lets the light through. And above it all, in orbit, floats Olympus, the city-station of the elite.
When two city police patrols take off after Julia Alonso, the chase is not fought on the tarmac but in the air: between megablocks, billboards and neon, sirens wailing and red and blue lights bouncing off the alleys. Julia drops to a low skim, a few metres off the ground, convinced the police will not dare follow her that close to people. She is wrong. Below, pedestrians duck as the craft pass overhead. I am not going to tell you how she gets out of it. I will only say that the scene is the vertical city in its purest form: in an aerial chase, the risk is paid by whoever stays on the street.
For sixty years science fiction drew flying cars without asking who would be left underneath. The Roadster has shown that you can hop. The hard part starts now: deciding who has a right to the sky. Which floor of that city would you live on?
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© 2026 Jose M. Aldasoro