A suction fan and SpaceX thrusters: CNET condenses Tesla's Roadster night

The ten-minute recap of the Waco reveal passed five million views in about a day, and its comment section filled up with police-chase and Rocket League jokes.

Channel: CNET Story of October 17, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 4,640,610 views a day, 80 times a normal first day on this channel (57,671).

Tesla's Flying Roadster Revealed: Everything That Happened in 10 Minutes

Ten minutes, one very strange car. CNET's "Tesla's Flying Roadster Revealed: Everything That Happened in 10 Minutes" trims Elon Musk's presentation in Waco, Texas, down to its demonstrations and the engineering talk between them. It is CNET's edit of Tesla's own event, not a test drive by the channel's reviewers.

Musk sets the tone at the start. The live audience, he says, is there to confirm that what follows is not AI or CGI, "because what you see with your eyes you will not believe." After a countdown, the Roadster drives up a curved ramp that turns vertical, then uses thrusters to hover and land.

The explanation comes in two parts. An underbody fan sucks the car toward the ground with up to 2G of downforce, and SpaceX rocket-thruster technology pushes it the other way. Musk cannot resist: "I mean, this car really sucks, okay?" A video clip then shows the car launching over a parked semi-truck and flipping in midair, which one presenter names after a skateboard trick, the kickflip. Onstage, the physical two-seater shows its steer-by-wire controls and active rear wing, and Musk insists "this will be an actual car that's on the roads," with production targeted for 2028.

The audience arrived in a hurry. The video passed five million views in about a day, and the comments came in more than a hundred times faster than on a usual CNET first day. Viewers point out that flying cars got here before GTA 6, picture Los Angeles police chases, and want to know whether mechanics will now need aerospace training.

Flying machines have done well for CNET before: its second most watched regular video is Adam Savage building an Iron Man suit that really flies. The same day, a Short about whether buyers can still get an iPhone Duo in October also started well above the channel's usual pace, a reminder that the Apple news never stopped while the Roadster took the attention.

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The numbers

A recap of someone else's event became one of the fastest starts this news channel has had, and its comment section moved even faster than its views.

the video's first day

usual first day here

57,671

this video

4,640,610

subscribers

4,100,000

▲ 10,000 in the last 7 days

total views

2,128,368,172

views per day

328,085

typical day: 480,430

the video

views

5,477,191

likes

58,162

comments

10,854

days online

1

subscribers: this channel and similar channels

JayzTwoCents

4,350,000

Techquickie

4,300,000

TechSource

4,190,000

CNET

4,100,000

Nikola Toy

3,920,000

CarterPCs

3,810,000

As of October 17, 2026 · Data source: Trari Social News, Trari Traffic Trends and Ranking Platform, Google YouTube

Subscriber, view, like and comment counts are YouTube's. Rates, usual days, rankings, comparisons and categories are Trari's own calculations.