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On October 15th at the SpaceX Rocket Development and Testing facility in McGregor, Texas, Tesla debuted its second-generation Roadster, staging an elaborate demonstration in which the car drove upside down before righting itself and then “flying” to a safe landing. After the demo—which also featured the car doing barrel rolls, leapfrogging over a line of other Tesla cars and trucks, and accelerating from 0 to 60 in one second—Lars Moravy, Tesla’s VP of vehicle engineering, declared to Elon Musk and the assembled crowd, “flying cars are real.”
But are they? As Woody from Toy Story would say, what we all witnessed was more like “falling with style.” Needless to say, we had some feelings about this so-called “flying car.” We also wanted to get to the questions we think people should be asking anytime one of our billionaire overlords suggest that some new invention or technological advance is going to change the world or improve humanity: What problem is this trying to solve and who benefits?
Buy our bestselling new book, Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, published by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
And don’t miss our upcoming live shows, including our return to Hunter College on November 6th with special guest Janette Sadik-Khan. Check out the full schedule at LifeAfterCars.com.