Tesla has unveiled a new "flying" version of its Roadster electric vehicle (EV) that uses SpaceX tech to pull off seemingly impressive airborne acrobatics.

During a filmed demonstration at the SpaceX rocket testing facility in Texas Thursday (Oct. 15), the second-generation Tesla Roadster was shown accelerating up a curved ramp before launching itself into the air, performing a 180-degree barrel roll and touching back down to Earth.

In another stunt, the vehicle leapt over a row of parked Teslas. For safety reasons, the vehicle was operated remotely in both instances.

"Turns out, the future does have flying cars," Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on X following the demonstration.

The Roadster's airborne capabilities are made possible by a system of cold-gas thrusters developed using technology from Musk's aerospace company, SpaceX. These thrusters release bursts of high-pressure gas to generate thrust, allowing the vehicle to accelerate rapidly and, according to Tesla, become airborne for short periods.

The new Roadster will come in three variants: Performance, Thrust and Rocket. Only the Rocket is capable of flight. The Performance model is a two-seater equipped with a suction system that's designed to improve traction and handling (or drive up inverted ramps, as in Tesla's demo), while the Thrust model adds rear-mounted thrusters that Tesla claims can propel the vehicle from 0 to 60 mph (97 km/h) in under a second.

The highest-end model, Rocket, features SpaceX cold-gas thrusters positioned around the vehicle to enable short bursts of flight and in-air control. This single-seat model will be available by invitation only, according to Tesla.

On the company's website, Tesla representatives explicitly stated that the Rocket isn't approved for use on public roads and that availability depends on regional regulations. During the reveal, Musk told the audience that the Rocket "is not necessarily a safety-optimized car."

Tesla hasn't disclosed how far or for how long its EV can remain airborne, nor is it the first company to develop a hybrid road-air vehicle. There is also skepticism from outside viewers on whether the demonstration could be replicated outside of controlled scenarios.

Artificial intelligence (AI) scientist Yann LeCun ‪— a professor of data science, computer science, neural science and electrical engineering at New York University ‪— described the demonstration on X as a "marketing stunt" and questioned whether the vehicle would work in practice.

"Even assuming that 50% of the mass of the car is the compressed air, that gives you less than 10s of useful thrust (with thrust-to-weight ratio larger than 1.0). Probably more like 5 seconds, actually," he posted on the social media platform. "So the car must be an empty, lightweight shell containing big compressed air tanks. Cute demo, but totally impractical. But of course, you knew that."

He likened it to SpaceShipOne, which debuted in 2004 as the first privately funded spacecraft and made three record-setting flights before being retired.

California-based Alef Aeronautics, which is developing its own flying EVs, marked Tesla's unveiling by releasing footage of its vehicle flying over an earlier Roadster model. Alef representatives said the demonstration marked its 1,000th logged flight.

"Welcome Tesla to the flying car race, we've been here alone for eleven years," Alef CEO Jim Dukhovny said in a statement emailed to Live Science. "Having competition is a good thing, especially from such a major company as Tesla."

Unlike Tesla's compressed-gas tech, Alef's vehicle uses electric propellers for vertical takeoff and landing, with a rotating cabin and body designed to support forward flight.

Production of the new Roadster is scheduled for 2028, but Tesla doesn't have the best track record of meeting its deadlines. The company has delayed production of its Optimus humanoid robot a few times since first unveiling the machine in 2021, for example, with an initial start in 2023, before being pushed back. Only in recent months has production begun to scale to a few hundred units per week.

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A new 4,300-mile (7,000-kilometer) undersea fiber cable will shuttle data between the U.S. and France at breakneck speeds of up to 1 million gigabits per second (Gbps) — enough to move around 125 terabytes of data every second, or roughly 25,000 HD movies, each 5 gigabytes large. The cable, called Petal, will be funded and operated by Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta.

When it comes online in 2029, the ocean-spanning cable will be the first to deliver petabit capacity — double the capacity of existing subsea cables of this length — across transoceanic distances, Meta representatives said in a statement. That's enough to allow 75% of the world's population to stream music at once.

Petal will also be the first commercial subsea cable system to use multi-core fiber technology, according to the statement. Whereas conventional fiber strands typically contain a single core, each of Petal's fiber strands will contain two cores that carry optical signals in opposite directions, allowing a single strand to provide the capacity that would conventionally require a pair of single-core fibers.

Each fiber strand is roughly as thick as a human hair, measuring just 125 micrometers in diameter. Petal will contain 24 pairs of dual-core fibers, giving it 96 individual fiber cores in total and enabling it to carry as much data as 48 conventional fiber pairs, Meta engineers said.

Japanese technology company NEC will be responsible for the overall design and construction of Petal, while Sumitomo Electric will provide the fiber itself.

"Achieving petabit-per-second capacity across a transoceanic submarine system represents a major technological milestone in the history of global telecommunications," Eduardo Mateo, chief strategy officer of the Submarine Networks Division at NEC, said in the statement.

Bedrock of the internet

Subsea cables are among the most critical layers of internet infrastructure, carrying around 99% of the world's internet traffic, according to the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations ​agency for digital technologies.

Installing thousands of miles of fragile glass cable on the ocean floor is an engineering feat in itself. Equally challenging is ensuring that these cables can carry the tiny pulses of infrared light that transport fiber-optic data across such huge distances without impacting performance.

This is typically achieved through repeaters — amplifiers installed at regular intervals along the cable that use lasers to boost the optical signals.

A 4,300-mile subsea cable typically needs about 100 of these repeaters to amplify the signals along its length, Meta representatives said.

Petal will incorporate something called "fan-in/fan-out" technology. As each two-core fiber strand enters a repeater, an optical interface routes the signal from each core into a separate single-core fiber strand so that each can be amplified independently. The amplified signals are then routed back into the two cores of the dual-core fiber before continuing along the cable.

Combined with its dual-core fiber, this feat of signal engineering will enable Petal to double its data-carrying capacity without requiring a proportional increase in power, Meta representatives said.

Petal is one of many subsea cable investments by Meta in recent years, including Marea in 2018, Amitie in 2023 and Anjana in 2025. Marea, the company's first transatlantic fiber instalment, supports 192 Tbps, meaning Petal will offer more than five times that capacity.