Musk Unveils Flying Car Before 4,000 Guests, Confirms It Will Leave The Ground Next Year

Elon Musk unveiled a flying car on Thursday evening before 4,000 invited guests in an aircraft hangar south of Los Angeles. It is understood the car stayed on the ground for the entire presentation, as planned.

The unveiling follows a long period in which Mr Musk mentioned publicly, and with growing warmth, that a car capable of flight was nearly ready. The Sentinel's archive holds 11 clippings to that effect. They have since been stapled together and are used to prop open the newsroom's one working printer.

Speaking from the roof of the vehicle, Mr Musk told the crowd the car "already flies in every respect except height," and said an over-the-air update would "unlock the vertical axis" for owners who had opted into the beta. "Gravity is a legacy vendor," he said. "We are not renewing the contract." A fog machine was then switched on, and stayed on for about forty minutes.

Garrick Tull, the event's Head of Narrative Operations and Vertical Expectation Management, declined to comment, then commented at length. He said the car had adopted "a hover-adjacent posture" for eleven seconds while its air suspension rose 4.1 centimetres. "That should be read as a trend line," he said. "Extend it to the right and you are in Nevada."

Caltrain Commuter Number 14 was reached on the 7:42 the following morning and was unmoved. "I was told I would not need this train by now," he said. "I am on the train. The train is not flying either. At least the train goes somewhere."

Pre-orders opened at 9:14pm with a deposit of $100,000.00, which the website describes as "refundable in spirit". By midnight 38,000 people had reserved a place in the queue. A second, larger model with seven seats was announced at 10:02pm. It will fly "in roughly the same way", the presentation said. Nobody was able to say which way that was.

Dr. Lenore Vasquez-Hart, Director of the Institute for Applied Hype Studies, surveyed a cohort of 14 attendees as they left. Twelve said they had seen the car fly. One said it "leaned meaningfully". One had been at the bar. On average, attendees reported the car reaching 31.6 metres. Its measured height was 0.041 metres. "That is a gap of 77,073 per cent," Dr. Vasquez-Hart said. "It is the narrowest we have recorded at an event of this kind."

On Sand Hill Road, valuations rose overnight on a light easterly, with scattered optimism clearing by mid-morning. Hollis Brandt-Okafor of Brandt Okafor Ventures confirmed the firm had already led a $14 million seed round in Rooftop Dock, a startup building landing pads on top of multi-storey car parks. "The thesis is simple," he said from his standing desk, sitting down. "When they fly, they'll need somewhere to land. Until then, it's a car park with a nicer top floor."

Wendell Mossop, 68, of Los Altos, watched the livestream on his daughter's laptop. "In my day we shipped fruit," he said. "On a truck. On the road. Got there Tuesday."

The car was towed from the hangar at 11:40pm. The Sentinel understands the tow truck stayed on the ground as well.