On Thursday, Tesla engineers remotely drove the company’s new Roadster up a gigantic half loop that looked like a life-sized Hot Wheels track. At the top of the loop, the road ended, and the car, upside down, flipped and then slowly hovered to the ground. With jets of compressed air shooting from the car, it landed like a shuttle does in Star Wars movies.
To get up the ramp without falling, the car used a system of fans to create suction below the vehicle. To flip over and land, it deployed a compressed air propulsion system. Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk said the vehicle incorporates technology from both companies.
It was the stuff of teenage boy dreams and Hollywood fantasies. “Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
News coverage immediately downplayed the spectacle, of course. The Associated Press headline included the phrase “Don’t expect to drive it anytime soon.”
An Axios writer commented that “it’s hard to imagine what practical purpose a flying sports car might serve,” concluding that the “Roadster is a reminder of what makes Musk such a polarizing figure: his willingness to pursue ideas that other engineers — or corporate lawyers — might dismiss as insane.”
Right. What possible purpose could be served by a vehicle that can leap downed trees, sinkholes, crashed vehicles or snarky journalists?
Also, maybe a hover car would be… fun?
Some of the responses reminded us of The New York Times’ Oct. 18, 1903 coverage of the crash of Samuel Langley’s Aerodrome A.
“it might be assumed that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous eftorts of mathematicians and mechaniclans in from one million to ten million vears-provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight and strength in inorganic materials.
“No doubt the problem has attractions for those it interests, but to the ordinary man it would seem as if effort might be employed more profitably.”
Two months later, the Wright brothers achieved human flight with an even more improbable looking aircraft.
In 2020, New Hampshire became the first state to legalizing flying cars. We recall a decent amount of eye rolling at the idea that little New Hampshire should bother legalizing such sci-fi fantasies.
Six years later, a car can hover.
New Hampshire’s flying car law does not apply to the Tesla Roadster. It covers public road use for aircraft registered by the Federal Aviation Administration. Cars that can play leapfrog were not anticipated.
That’s the way innovation goes. The untried is considered impossible until an innovator proves conventional wisdom wrong.
Laws, regulations and local ordinances typically don’t anticipate innovation. For the most part, they lock in the status quo.
Nano breweries were illegal in New Hampshire until 2011 because the laws governing breweries were written for larger businesses. Legislators didn’t anticipate a businesses model in which beer was brewed and sold in tiny batches.
Despite having a major city with famously narrow streets, Massachusetts only revised its rules to allow K-trucks, miniature pickups popular in Asia, in 2024.
When Dean Kamen invented the Segway, all but three states had laws banning motorized vehicles on sidewalks, according to news reports at the time. No one had imagined anything like the Segway. States had to change their laws to create a new vehicle classification.
Some people look at Tesla’s prototype Roadster and see only folly or wasteful excess. Cars, airplanes and manned rockets were met with the same disdain when they debuted. Some people will always fail to see beyond the world they know.
That’s OK, unless those people are the ones writing laws and regulations.
Because policymakers can’t anticipate all possible innovations, U.S. states and many countries have begun developing what are called “regulatory sandboxes.” These are legal frameworks in which innovators can get permission to experiment with new products or services that don’t fall neatly into existing regulatory categories.
Last year the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Union published a Regulatory Sandbox Toolkit to encourage their adoption across the EU. Japan has a regulatory sandbox for businesses. Arizona created one to encourage innovation, and Utah’s is supervised by an Office of Regulatory Relief.
Even boring old Canada has a regulatory sandbox.
Attempts to create regulatory sandboxes in New Hampshire in the last few years have failed. With the growing proliferation of these deregulatory structures elsewhere, New Hampshire is already falling behind other places that are more aggressively pursuing private sector innovation.
Becoming the first state to legalize flying cars was cool. But legislators can’t anticipate every new innovation and pass a separate law to authorize them one at a time. A regulatory sandbox approach would facilitate greater innovation across a broader range of industries.
Maybe the floating Tesla Roadster’s time hasn’t come quite yet. But the time for regulatory sandboxes definitely is here.
Source: jbartlett.org
