The Permission to Be Ridiculous: Flying Cars, Play, and the Future of Innovation

In October 2026, Tesla revealed a redesigned version of its long-delayed Roadster at a SpaceX test facility in Texas. The car climbed a curved ramp until it hung upside down, held itself in place with an underbody fan system, and then used cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX to flip back onto its wheels. Tesla says production is planned for 2028. Whether the most extreme versions ever reach public roads is another matter.

On Modem Futura, Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard treat the moment less as car news than as a prompt for a broader question: what is the value of ideas that look ridiculous?

Playpens and playgrounds

Modern education and work are full of language celebrating creativity and boundary-pushing. Yet creativity is often expected to happen within limits set by someone else, closer to a playpen than a playground. Sean describes a high school project to build a mousetrap-powered car, which he completed by having the mousetrap trigger a model rocket engine. It outdistanced every other car in the class and earned a D for not following the expected path. The lesson many people absorb from experiences like this is not "be creative," but "be creative in approved ways."

Spectacle, spinoffs, and power

A long-standing argument holds that ambitious, seemingly frivolous projects pay off indirectly; NASA's research budget is often defended through the technologies that trickle out into everyday life. Fan systems that let a vehicle grip a surface at any speed might find uses far beyond sports cars, perhaps in specialized rescue vehicles. Yet there is an uncomfortable complication. When the most visible acts of technological play are funded and fronted by some of the world's most powerful people, celebrating the play can feel inseparable from endorsing the power. One response the hosts return to is widening access: more of this kind of experimentation in universities and public research labs, where results can be shared openly.

The flying car as a borrowed future

Futurist Jim Dator's second law holds that any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous. Flying cars complicate that. They still look ridiculous, yet they are also among the most familiar images of the future, inherited from more than a century of inventors, industrialists, and cartoons. Futurists sometimes describe this as a "used future": a vision borrowed rather than imagined. The challenge is distinguishing ridiculousness that opens new possibilities from ridiculousness we have simply grown used to.

The more durable question is not whether any of us will drive an upside-down car, but how to create places where students, researchers, and teams have room to pursue the improbable without needing a billionaire's budget to do it.

Listen to the full conversation on Modem Futura, Episode 108.

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