On October 15, 2026, the car company Tesla showed a new sports car called the Roadster. It could hop over trucks, flip in the air, and drive upside down. How? By pushing air!
This is Rio, and this is Zip, Rio's little race car. Zip can blast air too. Let's find out how it works!
👆 Tap the glowing circles. Tap 📖 Read to me to hear the story. Press Next ▶ to keep reading, or jump straight to the game.
What is inside Zip? Strong tanks full of squeezed air. When you squeeze lots of air into a small tank, the air really, really wants to rush out!
A balloon is the same. Blow it up and let it go. Whoosh! It zooms all around the room. 👆 Tap the balloon!
🫙 Tesla says the real car's tanks hold about 600 liters of squeezed air. That much space would fill about three bathtubs!
Zip has little holes called nozzles. Here is the big secret, called action and reaction: when Zip pushes air one way (action), the air pushes Zip back the other way (reaction).
Air out the back? Zip goes forward. Air out the bottom? Zip goes up! 👆 Tap the buttons and watch where Zip goes.
🔬 Every push has a push back, just as strong, the other way. A scientist named Isaac Newton wrote this down more than 300 years ago. Rockets use it, a swimmer pushing water back uses it, and so do the real Roadster's thrusters!
To jump, Zip blasts a jet of air down, hard and fast. Action: the air goes down. Reaction: the air pushes Zip up!
At the show, the real car hopped over a pickup truck and even a giant semi truck, one after another!
🚀 These air blasters are called cold-gas thrusters. Spaceships use thrusters like them to turn and steer in space.
What goes up must come down. Falling fast makes a big BONK!
So just before the wheels touch the ground, Zip blasts air down again. Action and reaction: the air pushes Zip up, and that slows the fall. Soft landing! 👆 Can you do it?
🚀 Some rockets land the same way! As they come down, they push fire and gas toward the ground to slow down, then touch down gently.
Driving upside down needs a different trick: air pressure. Zip has a fan underneath. It sucks the air out from under the car. Then the air all around pushes Zip onto the road, so hard that it can drive upside down!
It's like a suction cup: push the air out, and it sticks to the window.
🌀 Tesla says the real car's fans can hold it upside down, even when it's standing still. A few race cars have used fans like this to stick to the track in fast turns.
Now Zip blasts air out the back, really hard. Action: the air shoots back. Reaction: Zip zooms forward!
Tesla says its fastest Roadster can go from standing still to about 100 km/h in less than 0.6 seconds. A cheetah, the fastest runner on land, needs about 2.5 seconds just to reach 72 km/h. 👆 Press Go!
🛞 Tires can only grip the road so much. Push too hard and they just spin. Thrusters push on the air instead, so they don't need the tires to grip.
So is it a flying car? Not really. The squeezed air runs out after a few hops, and then the tanks have to be filled up again. It can hop and flip, but it can't fly like an airplane.
Tesla says it will start making the Roadster in 2028. Lots of people want to see if it is safe on real roads first. Tanks of squeezed air are very strong, so only trained grown-ups work with them.
🎈 Try it at home with a grown-up: tape a blown-up balloon to a straw, thread a long string through the straw, and let go. Watch your balloon rocket zoom along the string!Action and reaction: push air down, go up. Push air back, go forward. Air pressure: suck the air out from under, and stick to the road!
🧠 Quick Quiz!