> It's an incredible engineering achievement to build in massive fans and rocket engines into a high performance car. It's truly wild.

How confident are you that the flying object in that video is a car?

Some cursory estimates suggest that one really could get several seconds of operation with enough thrust to lift a real car with a big motor and battery and seats and such, but the margins are not great. If I were designing this thing and I cared more about showmanship than about demonstrating an actual credible car, I might use the tiniest battery I could find with adequate power output (lithium titanate? small LFP?), as little motor as I could get away with, and no interior amenities whatsoever.

More cynically, I would also contemplate whether I really really needed the fancy downforce fan for this demo. After all, that’s a very controlled track and I can imagine other ways of getting a car up it.