Where’s My Flying Car? Tesla’s Roadster Has Learned to Backflip

After decades of complaints about the missing flying car, Tesla has finally demonstrated something approaching one. At an event in Texas on 15 October 2026, its new Roadster drove upside down along a ramp using a suction system, then used thrusters developed with SpaceX to turn in mid-air and jump over other vehicles. The result looked less like an everyday transport solution than an audition for a science-fiction stunt show. It was also undeniably impressive.

Image: Tesla Roadster. Official promotional material from Tesla.

The next-generation Roadster was first unveiled in 2017, when deliveries were expected to begin in 2020. Tesla now says production will start in 2028, and the airborne manoeuvres remain a prototype demonstration rather than an approved way to travel to work. After years of waiting, humanity has acquired a car capable of aerial gymnastics, but not necessarily one that can take its owner to the supermarket.

Perhaps we should have been more specific about what we wanted. The whole spectacle invites a second look at the flying-car complaint, and at our habit of imagining the future by making familiar machines more spectacular. Sometimes the technologies that change everyday life most profoundly do not improve an existing activity at all. They change the reason we need to do it.

We Wanted Flying Cars. We Got 140 Characters.

In 2011, the venture-capital firm Founders Fund helped turn disappointment with the future into a Silicon Valley slogan. Its manifesto, What Happened to the Future?, was associated with a line that became far better known than most of its arguments:

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

The reference was to Twitter's original message limit. A civilisation that had built nuclear reactors, supersonic aircraft and rockets capable of reaching the Moon seemed increasingly preoccupied with discovering new ways to share photographs of lunch. It was a good joke, and the slogan quickly travelled beyond the manifesto.

The actual Founders Fund argument was more substantial. It acknowledged the extraordinary achievements of computing and communications, but questioned why venture investment had become so concentrated in digital services while ambitious work in transportation, energy, medicine and other parts of the physical economy seemed comparatively neglected. The issue was not that the internet had achieved nothing. It was whether progress in one field had distracted from what remained difficult elsewhere.

That criticism still has force. Better software has not automatically made housing cheap, railways easy to build or electricity infrastructure quick to replace. The physical world comes with land, materials, regulation, construction crews and inconveniently long project schedules. Even so, fifteen years later we have reusable boosters for orbital launches, conversational AI that can write code and analyse documents, and now a sports car that can perform an airborne turn. Apparently the flying-car complaint can survive even the arrival of a flying car.

Its persistence may have something to do with the choice of symbol. A flying car looks like progress. Whether it would improve ordinary transportation is a different question.

We Had Flying Cars in 1950. What Went Wrong?

Inventors did not spend the twentieth century simply failing to imagine how a car might fly. In 1950, the Fulton Airphibian became the first roadable aircraft to receive certification from the American Civil Aviation Administration. Designed by Robert Fulton Jr., it could fly to an airport, have its wings, tail and propeller detached, and continue along ordinary roads. It was ingenious, although removing a substantial part of your vehicle before leaving the airport rather spoiled the image of an effortless futuristic commute.

The Airphibian was a technical success and a commercial failure. Several were built, flown and driven, but the compromises involved in making a machine both aircraft and automobile proved difficult to justify. Cars must cope with potholes, parking damage and owners whose approach to maintenance is occasionally optimistic. Aircraft need flight controls, lifting surfaces, rigorous inspections and very little tolerance for mechanical failure. Combining their requirements produces extra weight, complexity and expense. A car that flies may be less practical than a car and less efficient than a plane.

Suppose engineers overcame those compromises and flying cars became genuinely affordable. We would still have to decide what to do with all the drivers. Today's rush-hour traffic is frustrating but relatively predictable: vehicles move slowly, horns sound, and somebody invariably tries to gain thirty seconds by changing lanes six times. Introduce a vertical dimension and the possibilities become more interesting. Instead of being cut off at a junction, you could find somebody descending across your flight path. Parking disputes might extend to rooftops. Every neighbourhood would acquire an enthusiast practising take-offs early on Sunday mornings.

Aviation already manages the risks of three-dimensional travel through licensing, air traffic control, established procedures and demanding maintenance requirements. Extending that system to millions of privately operated flying cars would be an immense undertaking. It might also defeat the appeal of the original fantasy, in which you simply leave your driveway and rise serenely above the traffic. The Airphibian illustrated a problem that still applies: demonstrating that a machine can perform two jobs does not establish that combining them is a good way to do either.

The Future We Didn't Know How to Imagine

Consider The Jetsons, the animated television series that began in 1962. Its families travelled in flying cars, lived in futuristic buildings and relied on robots for household chores. Yet for all its fantastic machinery, the society underneath remained recognisably suburban. People still needed to commute, meals still needed preparing and the domestic routine was largely familiar. The machines had become more spectacular; the reasons for using them had barely changed.

That is not a failure peculiar to television writers. A flying car is easy to picture because we know what a car is and why people use one. It is much harder to imagine a technological change that alters the activity itself. Video calls allow some meetings to happen without anybody travelling. Digital distribution means a journey to buy music, films or software is often unnecessary. Online shopping has moved countless individual trips into organised delivery networks, with its own costs and traffic. Remote working does not eliminate commuting for everyone, but where it works, avoiding the journey can be more valuable than completing it in half the time.

The smartphone is less visually theatrical than a flying car, but it absorbed the functions of a camera, map, telephone, music player and a considerable part of the local library. Its influence came partly from replacing devices and trips that had once seemed indispensable. We expected some machines to become better versions of themselves. Instead, entire categories of routine activity changed around them.

Artificial intelligence has produced a similarly awkward surprise. The familiar automation fantasy involved robots taking over physical chores while people concentrated on intellectual work. Instead, software has become increasingly capable at writing, programming and analysing information while building a robot that can reliably clean an unfamiliar kitchen remains a formidable challenge. The tasks we intuitively classified as more intelligent were not necessarily the hardest to automate.

My review of Martin Rees's On the Future explored this uneven pace of technological progress. Software can spread to millions of users rapidly, though it still depends on physical infrastructure. Power stations, railways and housing cannot be distributed by releasing a new version. That difference is a genuine obstacle to progress in the physical economy, rather than proof that all the impressive things happening on screens are somehow trivial.

The flying car remains an oddly revealing benchmark because it combines a conspicuous technical challenge with an uncertain practical benefit. We can be disappointed by slow improvements to transportation without assuming that individual aircraft parked outside every house would be a sensible answer.

Be Careful What You Wish For

There may well be useful forms of airborne transport between private cars and conventional aircraft. Electric vertical take-off and landing vehicles, or eVTOLs, are being developed for air-taxi services and specialised journeys. The US Federal Aviation Administration has established rules for powered-lift aircraft, including their operation and pilot qualifications. Its expectation is that early services will resemble regulated helicopter operations, using existing aviation infrastructure where possible, rather than millions of commuters navigating the skies independently.

Whether these services become affordable or widespread will depend on costs, noise, safety and where passengers can actually take off and land. Tesla's Roadster is pursuing something altogether different: the spectacle of finding out what an extremely powerful sports car can do when aerospace engineering joins the project. There is value in experimentation, and no requirement that every outrageous machine immediately justify itself as public transport. Sometimes an engineering stunt deserves applause simply for being difficult.

Still, after decades of asking where our flying cars were, there is something fitting about the answer. We finally have a prototype that can perform the sort of aerial trick that would have delighted an audience in the 1960s. It fulfils the visual promise of the future almost perfectly, while leaving the practical problem largely untouched.

Now Tesla has demonstrated that a car can perform an airborne turn. It is extraordinary, absurd and probably not much use for getting to work. And when it lands, the traffic jam will still be there.