To understand how Elon’s new car hops, glides, and sticks upside down, we need to talk about friction and force.

Photograph: Courtesy of Tesla Inc.

We’ve been promised flying cars for decades. We finally have one. Well, sort of.

Last week, Elon Musk revealed Tesla’s long-delayed Roadster 2 with a few bells and whistles. The car flies—but not for very long—and the prototype also did a few other things normal cars can’t , like driving up a vertical wall and jumping over Tesla’s entire lineup of vehicles.

This raises two questions: Should we let humans drive up walls and into the air? Given their trouble navigating two-dimensional roads, this seems like an obvious no. But that’s one for lawyers and the Federal Aviation Administration to figure out. The other question is, how did the Roadster 2 prototype do this stuff? We can answer that ourselves, with physics.

Driving Up a Wall

Let’s start with how the car drove up a circular ramp and then stayed glued to it Spider-Man–style, completely upside down.…