Tesla filed for a patent which looks like it could be the promised “SpaceX package” which it will supposedly include on its oft-delayed next-gen Roadster. But will the system let the Roadster “fly,” as CEO Elon Musk has promised?

In 2017, at Tesla’s Semi unveiling, Tesla pulled one of its few-ever Jobsian “one more thing”s and unveiled the next-gen Tesla Roadster, which caught everyone by surprise.

The idea, at the time, was for the Roadster to provide a “hard-core smack down to gasoline powered cars,” and our speculative technical analysis of the announced specs suggested that this could certainly be the case. The car was slated for a 2020 release.

However, 8 years later, you may have noticed that you have not seen a next-gen Tesla Roadster on the road yet. So we will have to wait to see if all those promised statistics will bear out, or if it’s all just smoke and mirrors.

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Other than a few spottings of Franz von Holzhausen taking the Roadster prototype out in public or a model parked at the Petersen museum, all we’ve ever heard about the car is that it’s “in development” or “close to finalized“, over and over and over again. Heck, even Tesla seems to forget about it sometimes.

But today, we got the first positive verification of progress on a probable Tesla Roadster performance improvement that we’ve seen in a long time – or maybe ever.

It comes in the form of a patent filed with the US patent office which seems to show something somewhat similar to the “SpaceX package” that CEO Elon Musk has referred to repeatedly, claiming that the car will use “cold gas thrusters” to “fly.”

How Musk described Tesla’s “SpaceX package”

The point of the SpaceX package was always to add additional performance that is not attainable by traction alone.

Currently, a lot of electric cars have so much torque that they are “traction-limited,” which is to say, their tires cannot possibly accelerate them in any direction any faster than they currently do. You can add more power or bigger brakes, but it doesn’t matter, the limiting factor is the tires (and the weight…).

So you have to find other creative ways to get more performance. Lots of cars do this with aerodynamic surfaces like wings/spoilers to add downforce, which pushes the car to the ground so the tires can work a little harder. But there are limits to how much downforce you can add, and what speeds it works at.

This is where the SpaceX package would come in – it would presumably add additional thrust in a given direction, adding acceleration in whichever direction you choose.

The way that Musk has described it in the past, using “cold gas thrusters,” made it seem like there would be thrusters strategically placed around the vehicle to provide either forward or lateral acceleration, or deceleration in order to help the car stop.

However, Musk also described the car as being able to “fly,” which makes no sense whatsoever.

As mentioned above, downforce is an effective way to get more performance out of a vehicle when you are otherwise traction-limited. But flying would take upforce, not downforce, and that’s not a term anyone uses because it’s totally useless for any performance benefit and there’s absolutely no reason anyone would ever want to do that to a car – unless you’re trying to play a trick on Mark Webber or something.

(Yes, I’m aware of the jumping Yangwang U9. That’s a demo of active suspension, which does add performance benefit, and using that system to “jump” doesn’t add any unnecessary weight or complexity to the active suspension system, unlike downward-pointed thrusters which would be wholly unnecessary beyond providing a demo).

Thankfully, someone who knows how physics works showed up and reason has prevailed, and it looks like the system, as proposed, doesn’t do any of that nonsense Elon Musk was talking about. Instead, it does what it should have done all along – it acts as a “fan car,” a concept that has existed in automotive circles since the early 1970s.

Tesla’s actual patent shows old “fan car” tech, with a twist

There have been several “fan cars” or “ground effect cars” in the past, which operate with powerful fans to blow air out from underneath the vehicle, combined with side skirts underneath the car to reduce the amount of air that can replace it. This creates a low-pressure vacuum effect, and “sucks” the car to the ground (more accurately, ambient air pressure from above pushes the car to the ground, physics teachers please do not email me about how nothing sucks in physics).

Tesla’s patent shows a design that looks very similar to concepts that we’ve seen before in the automotive realm, but with some new tech applied. Have a look:

It has the fans and the side skirts, just as one would expect. And it shows the rough design of what the system might look like – a hexagonal-ish shape underneath the vehicle, with fans presumably at the rear of the vehicle to exhaust air to create the vacuum effect.

Tesla goes on to say that these skirts and fans could be controlled automatically by vehicle systems in order to offer different performance benefits in different situations. This is where we start to see the new tech – like adding the modern concept of active aerodynamics to the concept of fan cars.

Rather than deploying the skirts the same way in all modes, there could be different modes for a prepared track surface which is known to be high quality and flat, or for a more uneven road surface where you might not be able to create as secure of a seal with the maximum-downforce configuration.

This is an issue with fan cars – they only work on the right kind of surface. If air leaks in to the vacuum region under the vehicle, you can’t really create as much negative pressure as you’d like. That’s why the side skirts are necessary, but of course that doesn’t work if there are potholes, unsecured manhole covers, and the like.

Tesla also says the system could have different configurations for low- and high-speed operations, adjust the skirts based on vehicle weight transfer, or potentially detect upcoming road conditions and modify configuration based on what the car sees ahead. And mention of deploying the skirts based on GPS position lends itself to the idea that Tesla could create specific settings to optimize performance for track use, or even individual corners on tracks.

Is this the “SpaceX Package,”or something else?

Tesla has said for years that the Roadster would have a “SpaceX package” to increase the performance even further than the specs it mentioned in the original unveiling event. This was meant to use expertise from SpaceX, another company Musk runs, and whose primary facility is sited on the same Hawthorne, CA property as Tesla’s Design Studio.

At least one of the designers listed on Tesla’s “fan car” patent, David Lemire, worked at both Tesla and SpaceX in the past, before leaving and then returning to Tesla as a senior engineer on Tesla’s “new programs” team.

However, there is no mention in the document of “fly,” “flight,” “thruster,” “rocket” or “lift.” Nothing like the “cold gas thrusters” package that Musk has spent years telling us will make the car fly – and in fact, the exact opposite, as this will suck the car to the ground, not make it fly at all.

This could mean that Tesla has another idea in mind which will use thrusters, and will be applied in addition to this “fan car” idea.

Theoretically, adding lateral thrusters around the car could still add a performance benefit over and above the fan car idea, so these could be used in tandem, though it would add a lot of complexity to the vehicle. But these may or may not be worth the added weight – and they definitely wouldn’t be worth the weight if they’re directed in such a way to make the car able to “fly.”

Or it could be that the “fan car” patent will be applied to cars like the Model S Plaid, which has set racing records, and Tesla has another trick up its sleeve for the Roadster.

Or… this is what the SpaceX package was all along, and Musk was just running his mouth about the car flying. Which would be the best option, to be honest, because it’s dumb to pretend that flight would add any performance benefits to a sportscar.

Regardless, the fan car idea is an actual interesting performance idea, and it would actually work, unlike some of the previous public statements made by Tesla’s CEO. So it’s nice to see some sort of progress that could be applied to a performance car, after so many years of waiting.

But… does it matter anymore?

With so many performance EVs, does this matter?

The problem is that in the intervening 8 years since the Roadster was first introduced, some other electric cars with truly wild specs have already hit the road, and have delivered the “hard core smack down” that Tesla promised.

We’ve got the Rimac Nevera R, a 2,078hp electric car that can hit 300km/h (186mph) a full 3.5 seconds faster than a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. We’ve got the Lotus Evija X, which set the third-fastest Nurburgring lap ever, only beaten by two one-off, track-only, purpose-built racecars (one of which is a hybrid, the other is electric).

And in the realm of actual consumer-available vehicles, we have the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra – made by a smartphone company, mind you – with 1,548hp and record-setting performance of its own.

So anybody who tells you these days that EVs aren’t fast is just… embarrassingly wrong. They’ve had their head in the sand for at least 19 years. It’s honestly a bit boring at this point.

So, what’s left for Tesla to do? The smack down has been delivered, and delivered by many other companies, startups and otherwise. I mean, heck, we’ve got a company that went from making phones to beating Porsche on its home track in the course of less than three years worth of development. Everyone is aware of how easy it is to beat complex, inefficient gas engines at this point.

A fan car seems like it could be a worthy addition to this menagerie, another way to deliver the smack down, as none of the above EVs have leveraged this particular type of active aerodynamics for a performance benefit, so Tesla could have something unique here….. oh, wait.

It turns out that someone else has done an electric fan car already. The McMurtry Spierling already has this idea, and it’s an absolute beast. It’s already the fastest car ever at Goodwood thanks to the 2,000kg of downforce that it makes with the huge fans underneath the roughly 1,000kg vehicle, even at 0mph where traditional aerodynamic surfaces provide no benefit whatsoever.

And if it seems interesting that one of those numbers is bigger than the other, well, yes, McMurtry has done that too – it briefly drove the car upside down just to show off how much downforce its fans can make, which we would say might qualify as “the most epic demo ever.”

That said, the Spierling is just one application of the idea, and it’s not like more cars can’t try something similar.

Also, it looks like Tesla’s solution would add a lot of adaptibility that McMurtry’s doesn’t have. Not only is the Spierling a purpose-built, track-focused single-seat racecar whereas the Roadster would be a regular roadgoing sportscar, but also Tesla’s flexible solution described in the patent would allow travel on less track-prepped terrain.

This would make the concept of a fan car much more practical for real life – as long as you’re not somewhere where you wouldn’t want to spray high-velocity pebbles out of the back of your vehicle. Maybe there’s a reason nobody has done this on a consumer vehicle yet (that said, Tesla includes a filter to stop the spray of dust and pebbles in the patent).

But in terms of real-life applications, there is also the consideration of driver skill. Drivers of performance vehicles get used to their car’s limits and learn where those limits are. But with a presumably enormous amount of adjustable downforce, those limits could change drastically based on road conditions.

We could see this being a dangerous situation if drivers think they’re in max-downforce mode but aren’t, and suddenly find mid-turn that the car is a lot less capable than they thought it was. So we’ll have to see if this mode is track-only or what.

For now, the main question is whether Tesla will ever make this thing, given that it’s already five years late. Any takers?

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