Every great leap forward has its scoffers. They stand on the sidelines with their arms folded, demanding to know who could possibly need such a thing, and history keeps proving them wrong. The scoffers are back, and this time their target is a car that climbs walls and flies.
Tesla unveiled its redesigned second-generation Roadster Thursday night at an event outside Waco, Texas, and the car does things no car has ever done. Using thrusters built by SpaceX, it climbs, flips, and flies. It's a stunning display of what entrepreneurs can build when they're free to put their talent and money behind big ideas.
In the first demonstration, high-powered fans and thrusters carried the Roadster up a specially built inverted ramp. The car clung to the surface at a 90-degree angle, hung completely upside down, and came back down. Then it drove up again, launched off the top while inverted, flipped over, and landed on the pavement.
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The Roadster also jumped a lineup of Tesla's own vehicles, clearing a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Tesla Semi, a Model Y, and a Model 3 while rolling in midair before touching down. It lifted itself off the ground from a parked position, flipped, and settled back down. And it went from 0 to 60 mph in one second.
If you missed the Tesla Roadster demo, here are the highlights. https://t.co/okusb1n1oH
— Matt Margolis (@mattmargolis) October 16, 2026
Let's be honest: This is not a practical car for nearly anybody. I've experienced the rapid acceleration in a Tesla before, and it's not for me. I have no desire to go ultra-fast. I would never get one, and I wouldn't even want to personally experience what this Roadster can do.
But, man, was it cool to watch.
Plenty of people are mocking it for its lack of practicality, ridiculing a car loaded with features no one realistically needs. They're missing the point. The future gets made by people who push the rest of us to think beyond the here and now.
Many people were skeptical of the light bulb, automobile, the airplane, the microwave, and the internet, too. Roughly 27 years ago, I used to wonder who needed access to their email on a cellphone. Look how that turned out. When I was a kid, Back to the Future Part II made many of us long for a future with flying cars. I don't think we're ready for that yet, but my Tesla can drive itself, and that feels like the future to me.
Musk is the country's leading innovator, and pushing boundaries has been his mission for a long time. In a December 2010 interview with the San Jose Business Journal, he described the kind of person he wanted building his companies.
"That person knows he is really going to push the envelope and create something that has never been done before," Musk said. "We are going to invent great things."
That mindset runs straight through Tesla's Master Plan Part IV, released in September 2025, which touts the company's "desire to push beyond what is considered achievable" and promises to show people that "what they once thought was impossible is indeed possible."
Why? Because “innovation removes constraints.”
For centuries, humanity's primary mode of transportation was the horse. Then, over the last fifty-plus years, cars with internal combustion engines powered by fossil fuels became the standard and expected transportation method. The idea that batteries could be produced affordably and at a scale large enough to pivot the transportation industry away from fossil fuels seemed a fool’s errand—until Tesla led the way forward.
He's backed those words with results. At SpaceX, Musk made space travel cheaper by making boosters reusable and rockets more efficient. Over and over, he's helping us see what is possible.
I know many people just want to dunk on Tesla because of Musk. That doesn't change the fact that he is changing the world and expanding what we can believe is possible.
And he gave us a flying car before California could produce its high-speed rail.
