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Tech billionaire Elon Musk on Thursday evening gave Tesla fans an up-close look at the electric vehicle maker’s newest and perhaps most ambitious project: the highly anticipated Tesla Roadster.
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“We need an audience to prove that this is not AI or SI,” Musk told the crowd during the livestreamed event. “So you can tell people that you saw it with your eyes. Because what you see with your eyes, you won’t believe it.”
In a spectacular display, the Roadster – Tesla’s only manually driven car – then drove up a towering curved ramp, flipping over before taking off from the end, flipping through the air and landing safely on the ground to applause from the audience.
“Well, it worked,” Musk said.
According to Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of automotive engineering, who was presenting alongside Musk, the Roadster uses a “fan vacuum system” under the vehicle that he says can “pull up to 2 G’s in order to drive the car upside down.”
“Then we borrowed technology from SpaceX to do the rest,” he said.
Musk added that the Roadster is equipped with “altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, which allows it to fly like a rocket.”
“It can do rollovers, it can do crazy gymnastics,” he said, while joking that it was “not necessarily a safety-optimized car.”
A second demonstration then put this claim to the test, with the car driving towards a row of other Tesla vehicles before shooting into the air and performing a “kickflip” above them.
Another screen showed the Roadster accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in less than a second.
Tesla’s website shows that the company is now taking reservation orders for the car, with three variants available: Performance, Thrust and Rocket. The Rocket version is listed by invitation only.
The Roadster has a range of over 300 miles and a top speed of over 230 mph (Rocket version), per Tesla.
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