Tesla’s Flying Futurity

On Friday 16 October 2026 I was asked on BBC Radio 4’s The World at One what to make of Tesla’s flying Roadster demonstration. This essay expands on what I said.

The Cirque du Soleil of Cars

My first reaction on watching it was that this was the Cirque du Soleil of cars. Automotive acrobatics, an Alton Towers version of motoring: extraordinary to watch, and not necessarily how most of us want to get to work.

The distinction I keep returning to is this though.

There is a difference between a car that can fly and a flying car.

The Roadster did become airborne, and the engineering is interesting; it would be silly to pretend otherwise. But nobody was inside the demonstration car, and what we watched was a controlled stunt rather than a realistic passenger journey from A to B. If the purpose was to create a spectacular event that everyone would talk about, Tesla has succeeded. It made Radio 4’s lunchtime news, after all.

Visibility, though, isn’t viability. A genuine flying-car category would need safety certification and reliable flight, air-traffic management and places to take off and land, regulation that accounts for noise and weather, insurance, affordability and, above all, public confidence. So yes, we have seen a car that can leave the ground. Whether we have seen the future of flying cars is another matter, and I’m not convinced.

A future from the past

There’s a famous line associated with Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” I wonder whether the Roadster is partly an attempt to make good on that old promise.

What struck me most was how retro-futuristic the whole aesthetic felt. It is the post-war, mid-century, Jetsons vision, in which one spectacular machine stands for technological progress. In a funny way, the future has already moved on from that image. The flying car we once imagined has been broken down into several different technologies and services, each doing a more specific job.

In Dubai, Joby Aviation is developing electric air taxis, eVTOL aircraft that take off and land vertically, for defined passenger routes. In November 2025 a piloted Joby aircraft made a 17-minute flight between two locations in the city. That is a far more concrete transport proposition, even if widespread routine service is still being developed.

In China, EHang has a pilotless, passenger-carrying electric aircraft, the EH216-S. In 2025 operators received permission to offer paid services at designated sites, mostly for sightseeing and short trips. Here it is the autonomous strand of the flying-car dream that is moving forward.

In the United States, BETA Technologies took part in a 2026 test of medical-organ transport by electric aircraft, using a genetically modified pig heart in a test package. It is not a regular organ-delivery service yet, but it points to a quite different reason to put new aircraft into the sky.

Beyond all of these, drones are already separating the movement of goods and sensors from the movement of people. Who could forget Manna Drones in Ireland whose most popular daily delivery is a latte.

The future seldom arrives in quite the form we first imagined it.

Transport or entertainment?

The next question is who actually wants this. If you are wealthy and want an exhilarating, high-performance experience, it may be enormously attractive. As an expensive halo car, a piece of engineering theatre and a brand-building spectacle, it may make perfect sense.

Most people, however, don’t want their commute or their trip to the supermarket to feel like a theme-park ride. We want to get where we’re going safely, comfortably and at a price we can afford. I can’t imagine many of us want to be performing aerial acrobatics on the school run.

It is also fascinating that Tesla’s broader business is increasingly about taking the driver out of everyday transport, through autonomous cars and robotaxis, while this Roadster celebrates the ultimate human driving experience. That isn’t necessarily a contradiction, since one may be practical mobility and the other luxury performance. But it is revealing.

So I wonder whether what we have seen is less the future of transport than the future of entertainment, satisfying an elite appetite for thrills rather than creating a useful mainstream category of aerial travel. From a brand point of view there is a further question. Will this be remembered as the beginning of a useful form of transport, or simply as a remarkable Friday headline? The stunt hasn’t put a flying car in anyone’s garage, but it has certainly put one in their imagination.

Big Futurity and the feeling of Too Much Future

I have a term for this kind of thing: Big Futurity. We are familiar with Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Agriculture. Big Futurity is the large-scale manufacture and mass circulation of visions of the future by powerful companies, institutions and governments, sustained by money, media attention and policy thinking.

That doesn’t mean it is oppressive, or that anyone is forcing a flying Roadster on us. It is subtler than that. Spectacles like this help establish an image of what the future supposedly looks like. Once a picture has been repeated often enough, with enough corporate and institutional authority behind it, it begins to feel inevitable, sometimes well before there is a practical product. Other visions of aerial mobility, electric air taxis included, can be Big Futurity too. What matters is not whether the technology is inherently good or bad, but who gets to shape the vision, whose needs it serves and how much say the public has.

Sometimes, I think, the public response is what I call Too Much Future. People see one dramatic techno-future after another and think: very clever, but is that really a future I want? Is that how I imagined living? I might happily take an efficient short air-taxi journey in Dubai. I don’t particularly want a Cirque du Soleil performance between home and work.

So beyond whether we can build it, the questions are who it is for, what it actually improves, and whether people want to live in the future being advertised to them.

Tesla may have demonstrated a car that can fly. I’m not persuaded it has demonstrated the future of flying cars. And we ought to be as interested in who gets to imagine tomorrow as in who gets to engineer it.