Alef Aeronautics released video on Thursday of its electric flying car lifting off vertically and crossing above a Tesla Roadster, marking the California company’s 1,000th logged flight. The clip arrived the same day Tesla showed its redesigned Roadster performing a brief airborne hop with cold-gas thrusters at a SpaceX site in Texas. In the Alef footage the vehicle rises cleanly, maintains a level cabin, and glides over the Roadster along with a Cybertruck and other cars parked nearby.
Jim Dukhovny, Alef’s chief executive, framed the moment with a direct line. “Welcome, Tesla, to the flying car race; we’ve been here alone for eleven years,” he said. The company added that the Roadster had become the second flying car in history, following Alef. Dukhovny later noted that a large competitor helps prove demand, creates a clearer category, focuses investor attention, and supplies a benchmark for comparing technology.
Alef’s Model A has a body that can flip up to its sides, with the wings unfolding and the passenger compartment remaining upright. Eight electric motors power dispersed propellers to get the task up in the air and moving forward. Instead of storing compressed air, the concept merely sucks in air to keep it going, resulting in a vehicle light enough to transport a full-sized ballistic parachute. On the ground, it drives like a conventional automobile and fits into any standard parking space. The specs suggest it can travel approximately 220 miles on the road and 110 miles in the air, and the price is likely to be around $300,000.
Both vehicles have electric powertrains, four-wheel drive, and Tim Draper has been behind them as an early investor since the beginning. However, they take off in quite different ways. Alef has been actively exploring vertical takeoff and landing for several years. Tesla, on the other hand, employed short small rockets for a fleeting buzz in the air before landing on its wheels, which bodes well for manufacturing, which is currently scheduled to begin in 2028.
Alef received its first FAA Special Airworthiness Certificate in 2023, allowing them to test some of the prototypes in the air. Beginning in December 2025, they began dumping hand-built autos from their Silicon Valley plant. They have over 3,600 people ready to get their hands on one, and they estimate the worth of those pre-orders to be approximately $1 billion. They expect to send out the first client vehicles to test in the real world by the end of 2026, with manufacturing ramping up in 2027.
