A big red button saves a Tesla Roadster from a collapsing bridge in a clearly AI-generated video. The driver presses it to activate cold-gas thrusters, sending the car across the gap in dramatic slow motion. It’s an imagined rescue, not evidence that a Roadster could pull off the maneuver.
The clip opens with the car cruising along a bridge over a beautiful river valley. A section of the bridge instantly collapses ahead, turning a scenic drive into an airborne escape. “The Roadster could genuinely be a lifesaver in situations like these,” the Tesla fan who shared the scenario wrote.
Other AI clips give the car less urgent reasons to take flight: jumping over toll booths and flying over standstill traffic. None of these clips shows the Roadster actually doing any of this. They’re animations.
Futurism’s criticism is blunt. It says there’s “zero chance” of the bridge scenario happening and rejects it as a justification for the Roadster’s existence. The publication also says the car won’t be able to pull off the toll-booth and traffic escapes shown in the other clips. In its view, the aerial capabilities are a marketing stunt: an impressive tech demo, but nothing more.
The publication compares the concept to something you’d buy in GTA Online rather than at a dealership, arguing that such a vehicle would be neither practical nor plausibly street legal. It also mocks the assumption that the Elon Musk fans imagining these scenarios could necessarily afford one. Futurism’s own question is simple: if brief flight isn’t useful for saving your life, what is it for? It admits it struggles to come up with a better use case.
For comparison, it points to the Cybertruck. Musk marketed that vehicle as “apocalypse-proof”, with somewhat bulletproof doors and windows and off-road capabilities. Futurism argues that this pitch clashes with a truck it describes as prone to breaking down and held together with glue, making its usefulness in an apocalypse hard to picture.
The bridge jump gives the Roadster’s thrusters a dramatic job, but only inside an AI animation. The clip illustrates the fan’s proposed use case without demonstrating that the car can do it.
