It's Solar Shingles All Over Again

Guys it’s 2026 can we please stop falling for his BS.

[image or embed]

— Darragh Mc Kenna (@darraghmckenna.bsky.social) October 16, 2026 at 11:00 AM

Roll Tape!

it appears that Elon Musk's cold thruster sports car was little more than a shell.

Or maybe 2 shells set up for the loop de loop and the car jump separately.

Whether it's the fake self driving demonstrations, the diesel powered charger stations, the non-existent battery swap technology,  or the aforementioned solar shingles. musk has a long history of polishing turds and having it swallowed by an all to credulous media.

Flying cars are right around the corner, if Tesla CEO Elon Musk is to be believed.

Last week, he unveiled the automaker’s long-awaited Roadster by having it drive to the top of a ramp, flipping upside down in the process, then fling itself into the air before using its cold-fuel thrusters to gently land in style. Minutes later, another Roadster did its best Evel-Knievel-with-a-jetpack impression by blowing itself into the air and leaping over a row of six Tesla vehicles, including its Semi Truck cab.

Sure, the Roadster can “fly.” There’s no denying that it was an impressive stunt. But huge questions remain, such as whether regulators will ever deem it road — let alone air — worthy. Another is if the cars used in the stunt will remotely resemble the actual product that’s sold to consumers, if such a thing does ever come to pass.

Tesla says the “Rocket” version of its Roadster is loaded with 600 liters of compressed air, 10 directional cold-gas thruster nozzles, and a huge suction-fan system on the bottom. To make room for it all, Tesla says it removed the passenger seat.

But some observers are wondering if the car is even more stripped down than that, perhaps even lacking a full-sized battery so the engineers could save room and cut down weight. Meanwhile, screenshots of the car’s sparse looking underside taken while it was midair seemed to show it lacking a suction fan, fueling further speculation that Tesla hasn’t figured out to fully combine its capabilities as they’re being presented. The car that stuck upside down to the top of the ramp and then cushioned its landing was, some skeptics allege, equipped with different hardware from the one that leaped into the air to leapfrog the other cars.

Given the numbers supplied by Tesla, 250 kg of air compressed down to 600 liters, which gives an internal pressure of 35.1 MPa (350.5 bar or 5084.5 psi) at 20°C.*

That's a bomb on wheels.  Even if the filament wound pressure vessel is designed to fail gracefully, the rest of the car is shrapnel when something goes wrong.  It's about 3x more pressure than a run of the mill compressed gas tank

Also, given the declared curb weight of 1700 kg, and the low Isp of air or nitrogen cold thrusters, less than 80 under perfect conditions, the thrusters would have an endurance of about 11 seconds.  (It would actually be far less than that, because the temperature of the gas would drop as a result of its rapid expansion.)

Can someone arrest this fraud? 

^*OK, here is how I calculated this. The weight of a mole of gas is 28.97g, so 250 kg of air is 8629.6 moles. The ideal gas equation gives us this PV=nRT, where P = pressure, V= volume (.6 m3), n = 8629.6, and T = 293.13°K (20°C).  Solving the for P gives 3.51 x 107 N/m3 (Pascals).