The anatomy of the new Tesla Roadster

Tak Hoffman · made with Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code and the anatomy skill by wheresryan22

An interactive cutaway of the Roadster's thruster system, built in an afternoon with an open-source figure skill, and everything that went wrong on the way.

So the new Roadster dropped and the reveal video is kind of insane, cold-gas thrusters, a car that drives up a wall and hangs there on fans, a kickflip over a Semi, and the first thing I wanted was to see inside it, like one of those old cutaway posters where you can see every pipe, except interactive. So that's what this is, an anatomy of the thing, made in one afternoon in Claude Code, and it's live right here, you can poke at it.

Hover a part and its whole system lights up and everything else goes ghostly, space makes it hop, T fires the four main thrusters into a load-cell stop on the pad, F spins up the suction fans, and if you leave it alone it runs a little tour on its own.

The skill that made it look like this

The look is not mine and it's not really Claude's either, it comes from anatomy by wheresryan22 on GitHub, which is an agent skill for building these crafted isometric figures, real objects on a bench made of hundreds of small precise parts with four-tone shading and one lit accent and nothing floating in the air. I didn't even install it, I just had Claude clone the repo into a temp folder that gets wiped on restart, read the SKILL.md and follow it, and that was enough. The skill is opinionated in the best way, it says things like "the object is the explanation" and "every line ends on something", and it ships tools that check those rules for you, which turned out to matter a lot more than I expected.

It also told Claude to size the job before starting, and a whole car counts as what it calls an Epic, six hours plus, so instead of just going, it stopped and offered me a smaller version, the thrust system cut away, and I took that, which in hindsight was the right call because the smaller version still has about 220 parts in it.

Doing the homework first

Before any drawing it went and read the coverage of the reveal, and it wouldn't make up the numbers it couldn't find, Tesla hasn't published where the thrusters sit or what pressure the tanks hold, so anything the figure shows that isn't from Tesla is labelled as a guess or a model in the caption. The physics underneath is a small model file that everything reads from, the readout and the hop and the caption, so 596 litres of carbon-wrapped tanks at 380 bar is about 250 kg of air, cold air gives roughly 65 seconds of specific impulse, a hop at 1.4 g burns about 21 kg, a quarter-second static fire of the 80 kN main jets burns about 31 kg, and all of that is computed, not typed in.

The first version looked like a chassis

The first render was technically fine and honestly looked like a go-kart frame on a plate, too much was cut away, so we put the near fender and rear quarter back, added gold-tinted glass (Tesla says the windows are tinted like a spacesuit visor), and turned the camera around to a front three-quarter view, which mostly mattered because the skill's light comes from screen-left and the inside of the car was sitting in its darkest shade. That one change made it read as a car.

The audit is the part I didn't expect

The skill comes with an audit that measures the actual geometry, does any pipe pass through anything, does every pipe end on a real fitting, is every part held up by something that eventually touches the ground, is everything that overlaps on screen drawn in the right depth order, and the first time it ran it said 111 problems. The front wheels went straight through the hood, which is how we ended up with raised fenders, the seat tank was sunk three centimetres into a rear motor, the jet valves were cutting into the pipe ring, the tanks were floating in mid-air with nothing holding them so they got straps and brackets and the car got a floor pan, and a bunch of curved parts needed real equations instead of hand-typed points so their shading wouldn't step. It got to zero, and there's a second check for line ends that also reads zero, every seam and tick and tread line lands on something.

Hover, then smoke, then better smoke

I asked if I was supposed to be able to hover over things, I wasn't, so now you can. Then I asked for some flow, so air dashes run through the pipes when the jets fire, and the first smoke was a soft realistic fog, which was fine but I wanted cel-shaded smoke you can kind of see through where the car turns into an x-ray inside it, and the first try at that looked like soap bubbles, cute, too cute, so it got a fast jet core that slams into the pad and bursts into a wall of billows, a shockwave ring, a little camera kick, ragged edges, harder shading, and it clears in about a second because real cold-gas plumes are gone almost instantly. The x-ray is a live copy of the whole car with every fill turned clear, masked to the smoke, so wherever there's cloud you see the wireframe.

I had the thrusters wrong

Then I mentioned I thought there were more thruster locations, and Claude went back and found newer write-ups that contradicted what we'd drawn, the four main thrusters are in the rear diffuser below the license plate firing backward with gold-lined nozzles, there are thrusters at the corners firing down for landings, and the screen in the car reads 5,500 psi, about 380 bar, so the layout got redone, four main nozzles on a manifold fed by one bent pipe, the corner jets kept, the side jets cut down, and a thrust stop with a kN dial added to the pad so the static fire reads as a number. Coverage still disagrees on the tanks, some say two tanks, Tesla's own post says every usable void is packed with them, and the figure follows Tesla's post and says so.

How the video was made

The video isn't a screen recording, a script opens the page in a record mode and steps it forward one sixtieth of a second at a time, moves a drawn cursor over the systems, presses the keys, screenshots every frame, and ffmpeg stitches them together, so it's smooth no matter how slow each frame is to draw.

What it is and isn't

This is an unofficial illustration, not Tesla's drawing and not a teardown, the outside is accurate in spirit and the inside is my best reading of what was shown, labelled where it's a guess. The figure kit is wheresryan22/anatomy, go look at the examples in that repo, the Raptor engine one is absurd.