The Seed and the Stunt

Yesterday, Tesla unveiled a flying car. Yep, a flying car. At a SpaceX test site in Texas, its Roadster drove up a curved ramp into an upside-down position, left the ramp, flipped in mid-air and landed on its thrusters. Oh, and then it jumped over a row of Teslas. The prototype was – some would say thankfully – »uncrewed«.¹

»Sometimes a problem finds a solution; sometimes a solution goes looking for a problem. Neither order is the wrong one«

In 2013, Volvo Trucks released its Epic Split advert, in which martial-arts actor Jean-Claude Van Damme did a fearless split between two reversing trucks, demonstrating a capability every truck driver could name: precise steering.² Tesla’s stunt is even more dramatic, but it demonstrates a capability nobody can name. The century-old question »Where’s my flying car?« has now got an answer, but it doesn’t yet have a purpose.

The Roadster comes in three versions. Performance is road-ready; Thrust is race-ready and adds rear thrusters; the invite-only, single-seat Rocket is air-ready.³ Tesla notes, to nobody’s surprise, that the car isn’t approved for public roads. The most extraordinary capability belongs to the version least suited to the road.

In 1972, the organisational theorists Michael Cohen, James March and Johan Olsen described organisations as a »garbage can« in which problems and solutions drift about until they happen to meet.⁴ Sometimes a problem finds a solution; sometimes a solution goes looking for a problem. Neither order is the wrong one. Ambulances have a congestion problem at times, but air ambulances already exist, and the flying Roadster probably isn’t the answer.

We tend to say that technology exists to »solve« »a« »problem«. Each word in that phrase does quiet work. »Solve« promises an ending. »A« promises that exactly one thing is wrong. »Problem« promises firstly that someone has already named it, and secondly that the job is mending rather than making something. Much of what widened humanity’s capacity began without any of those: the laser was famously a solution in search of a problem,⁵ and the weak glue that became the Post-it note waited years for a use.⁶ If we write the requirement in advance we can only ask for what we already know we want. Invention without a problem is how the list of things we can want gets longer.

But the inventor of a capability is often a poor judge of its use. In The Shock of the Old, historian of technology David Edgerton argues that technology’s history is better understood through what people use than what inventors announce.⁷ The Roadster was announced in 2017 and promised for 2020, Musk now says production starts in 2028. Invention isn’t the same as adoption, and the announcement is the least reliable part.

The second most dramatic part of the demonstration is the one with a history: the few meters at the top of the ramp, when the car drove upside down, held by fans. Tesla says a multi-mode fan and ground-sealing system pulls air from beneath the car, holding it to a surface even at standstill; the readout showed 4,700 kg of downforce while inverted.^8,9 Tesla didn’t invent that idea. In 1970, US race car developer Chaparral’s 2J model used fans and sliding skirts;¹⁰ in 1978, British racing car manufacturer Brabham’s fan car won the Swedish Grand Prix;¹¹ and in 2025, the electric single-seat sports car McMurtry Spéirling drove upside down.¹² Now Tesla has planted the idea again.

Nobody can say yet what the fan is for, and that’s not unusual. Palaeontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba called it »exaptation« when a feature evolved for one purpose is put to another use: feathers probably first kept animals warm, and only later helped them fly.¹³ Inventions often work that same way. Their uses are found afterwards, by people other than their inventors. That gives us a way to tell a seed from a stunt. A seed is a capability that others can pick up and use without its inventor. A stunt only shows what a capability can do. By that test the fan looks like a seed: four teams have picked it up in more than half a century. The flip belongs to one company and one night. Whether the fan will matter beyond a racetrack is another question.

Yesterday, everyone watched The Flip. Tesla has shown what the car can do, but it hasn’t decided what it’s for. If history is any guide, that won’t be Tesla’s decision alone. Maybe the question to ask isn’t about the flying car but about the driving surface: if grip no longer has to come entirely from the road, then what will the road be for?

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