Elon Musk says he wants the new Tesla Roadster to be able to hover 'without, you know, killing people'

• Elon Musk said he wanted the next Roadster to be able to hover "like, a meter" off the ground.
• He told Joe Rogan he was trying to work out how to do this "without, you know, killing people."
• Musk has already promised that some versions of the Roadster will come with rocket thrusters.

Elon Musk said he wanted to make the next Roadster able to hover.

On the "Joe Rogan Experience" podcast on Thursday, the host asked the Tesla CEO about the next generation of the high-end Tesla Roadster electric car.

Musk, who has a history of making grand, futuristic promises he does not always keep, replied: "I want it to hover, and I was trying to figure out how to make this thing hover without, you know, killing people."

He added: "I thought maybe we could make it hover but not too high. Maybe it can hover, like, a meter above the ground, or something like that. If you plummet, it'll blow out the suspension, but you're not going to die."

Musk said that the company was finishing the engineering on the Roadster this year and that it would "hopefully" start shipping in 2022, echoing a tweet he posted late last month.

"We're going to throw some rocket technology in that car," Musk said.

This isn't the first time Musk has said the Roadster will have rocket functionality. In 2018, he tweeted that there would be a version of the car with a "SpaceX option package" that included "~10 small rocket thrusters."

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Musk told Rogan that the standard Roadster would have two small back seats similar to a Porsche, while a SpaceX option package would have "a bunch of thrusters" in place of the two rear seats.

"At minimum, I'm confident we could do a thruster where the license place flips down James Bond-style with a rocket thruster behind it, and that gives you three times the thrust," Musk said, clarifying that this would be on the ground.

In 2016, Musk predicted that Tesla would make a car able to do a "demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York" by 2017.

Teslas come with a "full self-driving" mode, but the company stipulates that this requires "a fully attentive driver, who has their hands on the wheel and is prepared to take over at any moment."

This was Musk's third appearance on Rogan's podcast. In September 2018, Musk caused controversy when he smoked marijuana and drank whiskey with the host during a two-hour live conversation.