Late last month, Tesla's executives spun up the rumor mill amidst plummeting sales and financial hardship that the Elon Musk-led company was "gearing up for a super cool demo" of the company's long-awaited next-generation Roadster.
Two weeks earlier, the billionaire CEO had teased a "most epic demo ever by end of year," without elaborating any further.
While we can only speculate what they're planning to show off, one reasonable guess is that it could be related to Musk's years-long promise of a "SpaceX package." He's made outsize promises in the past, saying that the package could somehow allow the rumored Roadster to "hover" and accelerate at ludicrous speeds, thanks to cold gas thrusters mounted in the rear portion of the vehicle.
But a new filing with the US Patent Office, as spotted by Electrek, suggests the company is actually heading in the opposite direction. To generate as much downforce as possible — a necessity when you're pushing the limits of acceleration but still want to go faster — SpaceX is investigating adding powerful fans that blow air out from under the car, effectively (but not literally, for any physicists reading) sucking it to the ground.
As Electrek points out, the patent filing closely resembles existing "fan cars" that already do something similar, allowing high-performance cars to more effectively hug the ground, squeezing every last drop of performance from the drivetrain.
It's a neat concept, but not one that Tesla's inventing; in fact, similar tech has been around for decades. Case in point, the 1977 Brabham F1 team added side skirts and large fans to the bottom of its racecar to generate more downforce at any speed, giving it unique handling characteristics, as Goodwood Road & Racing reminisced earlier this year.
In April, a hypercar called the McMurtry Spéirling became the first car to literally drive upside down thanks to a proprietary "Downforce-on-Demand fan system."
The additional downforce is a proven way to maximize performance on the track. McMurtry Automotive has been working on fan cars for years, allowing it to beat several track records, including Top Gear's test track.
According to Tesla's patent application, side skirts could be controlled automatically by an onboard computer system depending on context. The skirts play an extremely important role as they allow the fans to create zones of low pressure.
How well such a system would actually work in the real world, given the often uneven, pothole- and manhole cover-lined of the actual streets we tend to drive on, remains to be seen. As Electrek suggests, Tesla could geographically limit the feature to known racecar tracks and other known roadways.
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