There's a grate on the bottom that keeps out big debris. Small debris isn't great for the fan, but it's even worse for the car behind you.

The car has onboard compressors (fills from the rear).
Very loud with the fan, extremely loud with the rockets.
You get blasted with hurricane-force winds.

Fan cars, like rockets, are too noisy and have too much debris risk for normal roads. Both fans and rockets will have to be locked behind a track mode, with the possible exception of in emergencies / AEB, where things like noise and debris hazards are generally waived if it can help prevent or ameliorate an accident.

Depends on how big the rounds are and how far away they're fired from.

They don't float though. Sounds like Elon kept pushing and pushing the engineers on that one and they just could not deliver in any sort of way that would keep practical as an actual car. I wonder how much money they burned trying...

That compares to the OP's claim that the car is CG how?

I'd also add to CAIMLAS's list about how to make the exhaust gas travel so quickly away from the car and form sustained mach diamonds if they're not actual thrusters with choked supersonic jets

The car has onboard compressors, of course.

10-15 seconds available of a couple Gs of thrust should have no problems. Even if total thrust is only 2G (and remember, they have the bottom fans too) - just 1G beyond gravity - I calculate it should only take about 4 seconds of counterthrust to stop from terminal velocity (if the car's flight is kept with the bottom oriented toward the airflow, that is).

If the car had a radar that could let it accurately estimate time to collision, it should be able to arrest pretty much any fall safely.

The tanks are powered by an onboard compressor, powered by the battery pack; you don't have to find "a place" with a compressor to recharge them. Air intakes are at the rear. No word on how long they take to refill, but I would imagine 1-3 minutes. And I imagine you probably have ~15-20 seconds of thruster power before pressure drops enough that the thrusters are no longer choked and their thrust collapses (and thrust will steadily drop even before then). TL/DR, it's a jumping car, not a flying car.

Obviously, all of these features need to be locked behind a "track mode", like other features that are illegal on normal roads. That said, they could probably get an exemption for "emergency features" (AEB and the like).

Ion thrusters are extremely low thrust and take an extremely large amount of power per unit thrust. They're for mass-efficiency. But we don't care about mass efficiency here, we have an atmosphere.

This version has always been described as the "SpaceX Options Package". It's supposed to be more expensive than the standard version, which is supposed to have a back seat instead of the COPV. No comment about whether the standard one would also be a fan car. The fan assembly is where much of the battery pack would normally go. If they were to make a non-COPV, non-fan version, it could have plenty of range. My bet is that this one's range is limited (though not tiny - ultimately, you still need a lot of power - and pack size directly relates to pack power output - for them to be able to set the sorts of track records that they want to)

But since they didn't bring up the standard Roadster at all here, who knows if that's even still supposed to be a thing?

60 seconds would be a godsend - they never showed it operating for more than like 10 seconds. It's a hopping car, not a flying car.

That said, it probably *is* streetlegal in the US (barring state laws) if the rocket and fan-car functionality is locked behind a "Track Mode" wall. And if they wanted to they probably could get permission to use the cold gas thrusters and fan in an emergency accident-avoidance / AEB scenario (normal restrictions like noise, debris, etc) get readily waived in the interest of avoiding crashes or reducing injury risk. E.g., firing an airbag is anything but quiet, but that's not relevant to normal noise regs. Also, even noncompliant supercars (including fan cars) can generally get a "show and display" exemption in the US, which lets the vehicle be driven up to 2500 miles per year.

Don't expect this to pass muster in Europe, of course.

(Note that normally rocket cars are flatly illegal, as sufficiently large rockets count as "explosive devices" and require an ATF permit. But that doesn't apply to cold gas thrusters, as they do not involve combustion)

about Uber itself here. But as some minor trivia about Manchester: the "Man" comes from "Mamm", meaning "breast", referencing a small breast-shaped hill that used to be located in what's now the Castlewood district (it's since been lost).

The name of the city basically means "Tit Fort".

When the US was attacked, we sent our children to die in one of your foreign wars.

When WE were attacked, the largest war in the continent since World War II, you abandoned us - even witholding things that cost you *literally nothing*, like intel to help intercept drones and missiles targeting civilians - and switched to instead threatening to attack us as well, helping pick us apart piece by piece.

  Do not act surprised when you get seen as duplicitous snakes and we take action to separate ourselves from your levers of pressure.

O Lord of the Abyss, Prince of Darkness, Morning-Star, please hear my cry: I invoke thee, Lucifer! Turn your gaze toward the Vatican's operating rooms! Guide the surgeon's scalpel with your claws! Burn the tumors from the Holy Father's chest with the infernal fires of Hell! Cast your curses upon any bacterium that may seek to cause opportunistic infection! In the darkness I beseech thee.

Hail Satan, please save the Pope, Amen.

It's cheap and easy to audit OSS for malicious code with AI these days.

It's not really about Microsoft. Increasingly, Europe sees the US as a potential threat who blackmails allies, even a potential invader, rather than an ally.

Literally just yesterday the US shut off intel-sharing to Ukraine (which mainly helps with targeting incoming drones) and blocked all Starlink terminals in Ukraine moving faster than 100kph (e.g. terminals on air-defense interceptor drones), both in effect dramatically hurting Ukraine's ability to defend against Russia's nightly drone waves - all in order to pressure Ukraine into stopping striking Russian oil refineries while Trump seeks to buy more Russian oil and Russia keeps strikig Ukraine's energy infrastructure.

We all know that the US could do this sort of stuff to any of us. We have to move US companies out of our critical paths.

Once upon a time, when the US called for aid after 9/11, Europe stood up. More Danes died per capita fighting in Afghanistan, in a war that was not their own, than Americans did. This year, Denmark was rapidly rushing explosives and bags of blood to Greenland to prepare for firefights against invading US forces.

All of Europe got the message. We're not dining with friends - we're on the menu.