The SpaceX Package: Ten Thrusters, 600 Liters, and About Five Seconds

The package was promised in one sentence on June 9, 2018:

“SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …”

Label: Primary, Mr. Musk’s post of that date. The same day he added the mechanism: a composite-overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) with an electric pump to replenish the gas. Eight years later, the car that finally demonstrated is recognizably that sentence with hardware attached. The internal codename for the system, “A71,” rests on The Information’s reporting of June 2026 — it is not a Tesla statement, and it is labeled that way here.

The demo this hardware performed is on the reveal page. What Mr. Musk has claimed for it since is in the claims log.

The hardware, as described by the people who built it

• Cold gas. Nothing burns. The thrusters blow stored gas; there is no combustion, no fuel, no oxidizer. That is why the system’s limit is a tank, not an engine.
• The tanks. Carbon-overwrapped pressure vessels of SpaceX type, rated to 10,000 psi (690 bar). A cockpit screen at the demo read “Thruster · 5,500 PSI.” Label: the rating is as reported from the engineer interviews; the screen reading is in Tesla’s own footage.
• The layout, by trim. The Thrust version carries 4 rear thrusters and a 200-liter tank in the trunk. The Rocket version carries 10 thrusters in total and a second, 400-liter tank where the passenger seat would be — 600 liters, roughly 250 kg of gas — and one seat. The trims are compared on the trims page.
• Thrust. A figure of “80+ kN” for the rear thrusters circulates via SlashGear’s live blog and fan posts. Tesla has published no kilonewton figure, and tesla.com lists none. The number is reported, not specced, and this page does not upgrade it.

Five seconds

Lars Moravy, Tesla’s engineering chief, told Top Gear that one fill is about five to six seconds of thrust. Hold that number against the feud: Yann LeCun derived “probably more like 5 seconds, actually” from first principles on October 17, before Moravy’s figure circulated. Both men are working from the same arithmetic. What they disagree about is on the five-seconds page.

The explainers’ math lands in the same place: roughly 2 seconds at full blast, 7–9 seconds merely holding a hover. The physics shelf is indexed on the video index.

The refill is the product problem

• Thrust (200 L): 2–6 hours to refill, from an external high-pressure supply.
• Rocket (600 L): 6–7 hours, per the Hagerty engineer tour.
• Tesla’s target: under 30 minutes. A target is not a specification.

Against that, Mr. Musk said on stage that the car “can recharge its air tank.” InsideEVs flags the conflict openly: an onboard recharge and an external high-pressure refill measured in hours are different products. Nobody at Tesla has reconciled the two stories in public. Label: Unreconciled — both versions stand in the record, attributed, and this desk does not pick one.

Air or nitrogen

What is in the tanks is its own open question, and it gets its own page: Air or Nitrogen. The short version: Moravy said “air” on the livestream; the pre-event engineer interviews say nitrogen. Outlets split both ways. This desk does not settle it.

Where the idea came from

The suction half of the system — fans under the car — is older than Tesla. It is the Chaparral 2J of 1970 and the Brabham BT46B of 1978, both banned, both remembered. That lineage is on the fan car page.