The energy required to flip a tonne of car is not “miniscule”, and that is the amount of energy the compressor needs to put into the gas - plus all the additional energy required because compressor and cryopump are not terribly efficient; and to cap it all, compressed gas jets are also an incredibly inefficient way to lift anything, you get roughly 25% of the compressed energy out as kinetic energy (there is a reason, after all, that SpaceX use them for attitude control, not to actually launch rockets.)
All told, hovering a 1 tonne car (which is generous, given the weight of a Tesla) with gas thrusters would require about 3 kWh of energy input per second - the fact that it gets stored as a gas instead of in a battery does not suddenly make this magic fairy dust with no environmental impact.
Back of the envelope maths and the comments from Tesla’s own engineers suggests that demo used 300kWh minimum - more if they used industrially supplied liquid nitrogen. Which is to say one numbnuts trick to impress 8 year olds used as much energy as driving a typical EV 1,500km.
If you think that is not a negative for the environment, well… Why would I expect anything else from a septic?
Were you homeschooled?
The energy required to flip a tonne of car is not “miniscule”, and that is the amount of energy the compressor needs to put into the gas - plus all the additional energy required because compressor and cryopump are not terribly efficient; and to cap it all, compressed gas jets are also an incredibly inefficient way to lift anything, you get roughly 25% of the compressed energy out as kinetic energy (there is a reason, after all, that SpaceX use them for attitude control, not to actually launch rockets.)
All told, hovering a 1 tonne car (which is generous, given the weight of a Tesla) with gas thrusters would require about 3 kWh of energy input per second - the fact that it gets stored as a gas instead of in a battery does not suddenly make this magic fairy dust with no environmental impact.
Back of the envelope maths and the comments from Tesla’s own engineers suggests that demo used 300kWh minimum - more if they used industrially supplied liquid nitrogen. Which is to say one numbnuts trick to impress 8 year olds used as much energy as driving a typical EV 1,500km.
If you think that is not a negative for the environment, well… Why would I expect anything else from a septic?