Tesla's 'Flying Car' Demo Lands Between Awe and Doubt

Why This Topic Landed in Japan

Elon Musk and Tesla always draw eyeballs, and this time the "flying car" label plus demo footage that seemed to defy physics did the rest. Tesla showed a top-spec new Roadster using SpaceX cold-gas thrusters to levitate, jump and right itself in mid-air before landing. In Japan the clip spread as a "flying car," with viewers comparing the motion to the video game Rocket League, the Landmaster from Star Fox, and the DeLorean from Back to the Future. "Flying car" overstates it, though: this is a rocket attitude-control stunt, not a general eVTOL or a road-legal flying vehicle, and the Rocket spec is not approved for public roads, with mass production, price and everyday use all unsettled. There is no basis for treating the footage as CG or a fake.

Key Reaction Themes

• Awe and game or film callbacks (most common) — The clearest reaction was amazement at a car levitating and righting itself without propellers, with comparisons to Rocket League, Star Fox's Landmaster and the DeLorean.
• Doubt about what's real — Many wondered which parts were genuine, floated CG or special-effects trickery, and questioned whether rockets alone could pull off the maneuvers.
• Practicality, safety and price — Others asked where you'd ever use it, warned about being blown over, worried about energy and crashes, and guessed a 100–200 million yen price tag.
• A thread of self-criticism — A minority rated it above the Osaka Expo's flying-car concept, while a few turned it into lament that Japan had fallen behind technologically or sneers too readily.

What Japanese Netizens Are Saying

Tesla's new Roadster flight demo

Tesla shows a new Roadster levitating, jumping and flipping with SpaceX cold-gas thrusters, billed as a "flying car."

Comments:

• "Is a flying DeLorean becoming real?"
• "This isn't it."
• "A rip-off of the Landmaster."
• "It's probably not AI, but which parts are real? My guess is it's done with special-effects camera techniques."
• "Why is it stuck to the road in the first place? That alone is unnatural, and it makes me doubt whether it's really pulling off these maneuvers on rockets alone."
• "They can't even make a car that drives properly on the ground — I'd be too scared to ride it."
• "Well, I can't see a device powerful enough to make downforce that keeps it fine even upside down ever making it into a production car cost-wise; even if they sold it, it'd be in the 100–200 million yen range. The attitude control is probably provided by SpaceX, but a car doesn't really need it, and the G-forces would send the driver flying, right? So this one is a performance-only special edition — less about wanting to sell it as is and more a showcase of their engineering."
• "If one flew right next to you, you'd get more than just blown over."
• "This isn't meant to fly on constant thrust, right? It'd run out of energy fast — is it braking tech for when an accident happens?"
• "Who'd have thought they'd use rocket-landing control tech for something like this."
• "You can't see around you — if someone did this on the road, I'd be the one crashing."
• "In what situation do you even use this?"
• "But it's expensive, isn't it?"
• "With flying cars in general, the moment the lift function fails you're done for, so you need double or triple fail-over. That means more parts and a bulkier build, which for now is unavoidable."
• "Not bad — this is different from knock-offs like the Expo's 'flying car' (a multicopter)."
• "Japanese people just sneer when they see something like this. That's why Japan's manufacturing declined."