Flying cars are . Even Elon Musk wants in on the fun, with his plans to so it can jump like . But, it appears one owner in China has has beaten Elon to the punch, figured out a way to fly a Tesla without any of that fancy SpaceX tech — provided you don’t need to do it twice.
A video posted to YouTube by , a Shanghai-based electric car news outlet, appears to show the aftermath of a river jump conducted by a Model 3. The video seems to have bounced around over the past day, between various news sources and TikTok and Weibo users, before making its way on to YouTube and the global stage.
According to CnEVPost and , the Tesla was traveling over 62 miles per hour when it left the ground, and traveled more than 65 feet before touching down. No one was seriously injured, but the car’s occupants left their landing zone in an ambulance.
Few consumer vehicles are actually built to , and the Tesla appears no different. The front end is destroyed, with at least one headlight neatly missing, and the entire side of the car appears to have collapsed. The rear bumper, similarly, is in pieces, and the trunk appears to have opened during the landing.
While flying cars may be one of Silicon Valley’s favorite genres of vaporware, they certainly aren’t here yet. Most cars, trucks, and require to get any real hangtime. Still, it seems that some passenger vehicles really can carry enough momentum to clear obstacles — provided you don’t ask them to do it again.