Tesla’s Latest Patent Sucks

• A new Tesla patent shows off a new twist on old racing tech.
• It describes using fans and retractable skirts to generate gobs of downforce for better grip on the road.
• This could make the Tesla Roadster, the automaker’s “swan song,” an insanely quick car.

Remember a few weeks ago when Tesla CEO Elon Musk teased that the company would have the “most epic demo ever” by the end of the year? We had an idea that this would have something to do with the Tesla Roadster, especially after the company’s VP of Engineering, Lars Moravy, said it would be the “last, best driver’s car” Tesla ever makes.

A new patent filed by Tesla and spotted by Teslarati shows exactly what Musk & Co. might have up their sleeves. Tesla is working on a system that uses fans to suck the car to the ground.

Photo by: USPTO

I know this looks like a bunch of nonsense, but let me explain what you’re looking at here.

Normal cars can use carefully-honed aerodynamics not just to improve range, but to generate downforce, helping them stick to the road, too. This new Tesla patent puts a spin on old race-car tech.

Tesla’s patent describes a system of fans to create an area of low pressure underneath the car, which helps effectively suck it to the ground. This helps generate tons of grip, improving acceleration, braking, and cornering. With typical aerodynamic devices, downforce increases with the square of speed. Put another way, a car makes no downforce when static, and maximum downforce at its top speed.

A fan system allows you to create incredible levels of downforce regardless of vehicle speed. Even when the vehicle isn’t moving. The world first saw this sort of thing on the Chaparral 2J Can-Am car and then on the 1979 Brabham BT46B Formula 1. Like the F1 cars of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Tesla system also uses side skirts to help seal off the underside of the car, which provides a massive increase in downforce by maintaining that low-pressure area.

This system has multiple skirts for the sides and front of the car. In “high-downforce” mode, the system deploys all the skirts. That’s great on a smooth surface, but it’s hard to maintain that aero performance on bumpy roads. In its other mode, the system retracts the front and rear skirts and leaves the side skirts in place, creating a “modified bounding region” that allows for more air to flow under the vehicle. At the same time, Tesla uses its fans to tailor downforce levels. The automaker says it can do this by enabling or disabling fans, changing the speed of the fans, or even modifying the ducting that directs airflow at any given time.

It even uses the car’s onboard electronics, sensors, and navigation data to define fan speed and skirt height like some sort of intelligent, performance-oriented Roomba (with a serious taste for G-Force instead of whatever’s under your couch).

This new patent is a masterpiece of automotive nerdery that clearly draws inspiration from track weapons like the the 2J, BT46, GMA T.50 and McMurtry Speirling. I’ll admit that this patent is actually pretty genius. It blends over-engineered tech with modern engineering and some old-school race car vibes. I can only imagine what kind of break-neck acceleration something with a ton of instant torque and insane grip can actually achieve.

Now, just because Tesla patented something doesn’t mean it will make it into a car. Automakers do this kind of thing every single day and we still haven’t seen a Toyota that can dispense tear gas at thieves. But if this is the tech that makes it into the Roadster, I’m a bit more inclined to believe that Tesla’s engineers are ready to show off an “epic” demo like Musk promised.