At the Geneva Motor Show in 2008, Swiss automotive company Rinspeed announced their new car: The Rinspeed sQuba.
Inspired by the Lotus Esprit from the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, the sQuba was an electric vehicle that could be driven both on land and underwater. And, oddly, it was also a convertible. So to drive it you had to be wearing scuba gear.
The prototype cost more than $1.5 million.
This is what you call a ‘concept car’
I’ve always loved concept cars.
My favourite memory being a teenager was when my dad surprised me with a trip to the 2002 British Motor Show at the NEC in Birmingham. He picked me up in a bright yellow VW Camper he’d hired (I was OBSESSED with VW campers as a teen), and we hit the road for the weekend.
And my favourite thing at the motor show was the Lexus 2054 concept car. It had been designed for the movie Minority Report, so it looked insane. I remember looking at it and thinking it was the best thing I’d ever seen.
But even 15 year-old me knew this was a concept car. A proof of concept. It was obvious I’d never see it on the roads. And when the Rinspeed sQuba was announced, I knew I was never going to see it coasting down the local canal.
Yet, for some reason, people watched the demo last week of the ‘flying’ Tesla Roadster, and genuinely seem to believe they’ll be hitting the highways at any point.
Note: In that last paragraph, I put apostrophes around the word ‘flying’. I did this because it clearly didn’t fly. I think the most accurate description, to borrow a phrase from Buzz Lightyear, is “falling with style”. If a plane had to drive up a ramp only to glide back to the runway, you wouldn’t call it flying. So let’s all calm down.
It wasn’t flying, but it was cool AF
Now, I hate Elon Musk as much as the next informed person (unless the next informed person is my wife — she’s just better at hating than I am), but even I’ll admit that the Roadster demo was sick. Tesla demos have come a long way since Elon broke the Cybertruck window by limply lobbing a rock at it.
As a child I had a recurring nightmare where I would cycle up a very similar ramp to the one used in the demo. But instead of a cool steam-engulfed spin, I’d just plummet to my presumptive demise. So there’s actually something personally reassuring about the Roadster demonstration.
(Sorry to keep revisiting my childhood — I don’t have currently have a therapist)
But as reassuring as it is…what are the real world applications here? I’ve been known to drive too fast over the odd speed bump, but it would be overkill to explode into a cloud of steam and glide the two inches I left the ground.
The other demo Tesla showed was the Roadster jumping (not flying) over a truck. Which has made some folks on social media fantasise about jumping over traffic. Which would be wildly dangerous, unless you knew it was clear in front of the truck you were jumping. And if it was clear, the truck would just drive forwards anyway.
None of this matters
The truth is that there are no real world applications. And that’s fine because it’ll never be on the roads (or in the skies).
It was an advert for Tesla and Elon Musk. And a very good one!
But it’s still a concept car. You just need to look at the underside of the car in the demonstration. That’s clearly not a production chassis. It looks more like a stunt chassis…because that’s what it is.
I’d love to see what the inside of that car looks like. I’d wager it’s full of roll cage, gas bottles, and enough padding to protect an egg from a double decker bus.
Which is also why Tesla haven’t revealed a price for the flying ‘Rocket’ variant (it’s hard to put a price tag on a fictional car) and have said that buying one is ‘Invite-only’. Which basically translates to “We will produce a handful of these concepts to be used for demonstration purposes only, under very strict conditions”.
But if you really liked the demo of the flying car, you can still put down your deposit for one of the non-flying versions. The ‘Performance’ variant (just a standard electric car) requires a $50,000 deposit. And the ‘Thrust’ variant (can’t fly, but has a gas thruster at the back) just requires a $250,000 deposit. Oh, and they won’t tell you how much the final versions will actually cost.
They want people to order a car based on a feature they won’t get for a price they don’t know. And the dumb thing is that this will work. There will be plenty of people who will have just dropped $50k or even $250k off the back of this science fiction ad.
Personally, I’d rather drive underwater with the top down.
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This article is a bit of a departure from my usual ad teardown format. If you like it, let me know. I’ll still be doing the regular teardowns, but I want to mix it up a bit so it’s not just the same thing every day.