What if the purpose is not flying but accident prevention when falling off a bridge or cliff?
At the price of your passenger seats being occupied by gas tanks, that surely are safe in a collision that's far more likely occurrence.
It's PR stunt, nothing more.
They showed a still of the submarine car from James Bond as inspiration for this.
That's the roadster they should have built. This compressed air jumping thing is impractical and dangerous and will never be road legal. But a submersible car would have actual practical uses, increase survivability in several accident situations and not face the same regulatory hurdles.
If they were actually trying to build something cool I think that would be the play, but everything Elon does now is to bump stock price
I imagine that if you were to crash your car into a body of water, the damage could allow water to enter the normally sealed vehicle anyway.
That does not really sound cooler than a car that can drive up walls and jump.
How many times have you been in traffic waiting to cross a bridge or driving around a body of water wishing you could just go over it?
Given that we don't have such software, and that this currently requires trading all three seats for compressed gas storage, there are obviously some hurdles to this becoming a practical emergency feature.
We could just put oversizes brakes on cars to achieve this. Have you seen the stopping distance of a Formula 1 car with its giant brakes?
Bigger brakes != more stopping power.