To the casual observer - and to the teenage boy lurking inside every fan of fast cars, bolting cold-gas rocket thrusters onto a sports car sounds like peak tech-billionaire theatre. It is the sort of thing dreamt up after watching Back to the Future too many times. Yesterday’s Tesla Roadster demo was spectacular - it levitates, sprints from 0 to 60 mph in a brain-flattening second, and turns wealthy influencers into low-altitude projectiles.

It’s easy to assume this is a marketing gimmick with little real-world purpose, however the initial stated purpose of an engineering feat is rarely its true application. I believe the real genius here is a new era of road safety - and if you want the market to fund a radical leap in mundane public safety, you don't announce to the world that you're designing a better brake. You tell them you are building a rocket car.

Consider the reality of conventional car safety. For over a century, every milestone - from disc brakes and ABS to crumple zones and seatbelts, has remained trapped by one grim physical constraint: the friction coefficient of a few square inches of vulcanised rubber sliding across wet tarmac. Brakes don’t actually stop a car; tyres do. And when an articulated lorry pulls across your lane on a rainy motorway, the tarmac’s willingness to cooperate runs out very quickly.

Enter cold-gas thrusters. High-pressure gas does not care about tyre tread, black ice, or hydroplaning. The moment an AI vision model detects an unavoidable head-on impact, counter-thrust fires out the front of the vehicle, saving lives. An impending 60 mph catastrophe is compressed into an embarrassing 10 mph tap.

Let’s take it a step further - in a high speed, unavoidable head on collision the car kick-flips into the air, landing softly on the grass verge before the human driver has even registered the adrenaline spike.

Elon has, through the trojan horse of flying cars, ushered in a new era of road safety - and lowered the final piece of psychological friction to true autonomous driving; namely what happens if something goes wrong? High-speed collisions have always been treated as an inevitable tax on human mobility. Rocket-assisted deceleration and collision avoidance might confine road fatalities to a historical anachronism.