The air's path while a nozzle fires: tank, regulator, manifold, valve, nozzleThe side panel facing you, lifted off to show the inside; taken apart, the rest of the skin, the diffuser and the cabin lift off the air system tooBraided high-pressure lines, and the fill cart's hose to the tailTesla showed the new Roadster on 15 October 2026 in three versions: Performance (two seats, 0–60 mph in under 1.6 s), Thrust (two seats, rear cold-gas thrusters, under 0.9 s) and Rocket (one seat, invite-only, not approved for public roads, under 0.59 s), with over 300 miles of range and over 230 mph, for 2028. This is the Rocket. Tesla's Lars Moravy said its 10 thrusters run on 600 litres of compressed air, held in carbon-overwrapped pressure vessels in "every usable void"; Tesla says they give four to five times the force the tyres can. Everything else here is our estimate: the layout (the tanks drawn hold 573 L), a 300 bar fill, a 40 bar regulator, about 80 kN from all ten nozzles (a reported, unconfirmed figure), and a 1,814 kg car (a "4,000+ lb" figure posted by Marques Brownlee, not Tesla). On those numbers a full tank holds 214 kg of air, of which 160 kg is usable, and lifts the car for about 4.2 s; one Thrust launch spends 6.2 kg. The mode switch is ours, to compare the three versions on one car. The internal layout is an illustration, not Tesla's engineering drawing. In hands-on flight the corner nozzles, fired in diagonal pairs, can also turn the car: on these numbers about 50° on one tank if it is to stop turning before it lands, or 95° if it lands still turning, so a full turn would take several tanks.

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