Ferrari Patent Shows They’ve Been Thinking About A Jet-Propelled Car, Just Like Isaac Newton

A patent by Ferrari from 2019 has recently made it into the publicly-searchable patent database, which means that it has been found by clever patent-sniffing automotive journalists, which means it’s been written about a lot lately. And that makes sense, because it’s an interesting patent! It describes a system of cold gas reaction control thrusters that would be used to enhance the performance characteristics of a future Ferrari supercar. Many people noted the similarity of this concept to some crap Elon Musk was saying about the still currently fictional next-gen Tesla Roadster back in 2018. Those statements from Elon also reminded me of an idea I wrote about involving the use of reaction control thrusters back in 2012, and if I’m honest, those ideas go back even further. Way, way further. Let’s dig in.

The Ferrari patent describes a really clever system that would, according to the patent drawings, mount thruster (they call them “pusher”) nozzles at the top, front, rear, and angled down at the bottom of the car. Each thruster location would have a “plurality” of exhaust nozzles, which would have differing diameters so that thrust remains consistent regardless of how much pressure is available in the system to drive the thrusters, or to vary the amount of thrust. As the abstract describes it:

A car having: a frame; four wheels, which are mounted on the frame in a rotary manner; a body, which covers the frame; at least one compressed air tank; and at least one gas pusher, which is connected to the compressed air tank, is integral to the frame and has a plurality of nozzles, which face outwards, can be activated in order to generate respective air jets, are arranged parallel to and beside one another, have the same orientation and are sized so as to generate different pneumatic thrusts given the same pressure of the compressed air flowing in; a pressure sensor, which determines a pressure inside the compressed air tank; and a control unit, which activates the plurality of nozzles in a coordinated manner so as to generate, as a whole, a desired pneumatic thrust based on the pressure inside the compressed air tank.

The patent describes the clever methods used to maintain constant and consistent thrust pressures via varying the nozzle diameter, even as the pressure in the compressed air tank drops as the supply of compressed air is depleted, and also describes an alternate system based on gasoline-fired pulse jets, which wouldn’t require a method to compress air or bulky compressed air storage tanks.

Ferrari’s system seems to be primarily designed to enhance handling and add safety features, as described here:

Patent application CN102514557A1 and patent U.S. Pat. No. 6,191,686B1 describe a car, which is provided with a compressed air tank and with gas pushers connected to the compressed air tank; in case of emergency (for example, 5 when the car is losing grip or is about to hit a front obstacle), the gas pushers are operated so as to generate, in the car, a (transversely, longitudinally or vertically oriented) additional pneumatic thrust, which stabilizes or slows down (as much as possible) the car.

This is in marked contrast to Tesla’s system, which, while it does seem like it would have had similar basic goals, also added one significant feature: the planned ability to fly. Or, at least sorta hop:

Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package *will* definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …

Certainly possible. Just a question of safety. Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2017

Elon doubled down on this in 2019, when he Tweeted this:

The new Roadster will actually do something like this https://t.co/fIsTAYa4x8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2019

Now, I’m gonna counsel nobody do any breath-holding while waiting for your Tesla hovercar. Also, it’s kinda stupid. And, it’s hardly a new idea, even. I myself proposed having reaction control jets on a car way back in 2012, though I was mostly interested in them from a handling perspective, as opposed to being able to hop your car from the road onto, say, someone’s cooler in the parking space next to you. Here’s more of what I was imagining:

Same fundamental concepts, really: use reaction engines to adjust the performance and handling characteristics of a car. And, as much as I’d love to shove a big, wet flag in the ground and claim that I was the Very Firstest to come up with this concept, I very much wasn’t, no more than Elon Musk/Tesla was or Ferrari was. I mean, look, here’s a 1955 patent filed by Diamler Benz AG that shows a system designed in particular for racing cars that uses adjustable jet nozzles, powered by the engine’s exhaust gases, to help give a car better acceleration and handling:

The patent suggests that an engine displacing 200 cubic inches and making 500 horsepower could power exhaust gas thrusters that produce 70 pounds of thrust! Is that right? The patent also suggests that at 125 mph, a jet thrust of 60 pounds is equivalent to an extra 50 hp! I’m not sure I believe all of these claims, but I have yet to do the real math to find out. I’ll look into that for a follow-up article, because right at the moment I really just want to make the point that this concept has been explored a lot over the years, and has somehow never quite made it to reality.

There’s more patents using this general idea, but I want to go all the way back to the very, very beginning of this whole reaction-jet controlled car idea, because the idea of it actually pre-dates automobiles as we understand them, period. The idea actually dates back to the 1680s (some say 1687), with none other than the Daddy of Action-Reaction, Isaac Newton himself, who came up with the idea for a steam-wagon that would have looked like this:

Most drawings of Newton’s steam wagon are simple diagrammatic things like the one on the left there, but I do like that more detailed and speculative renderings exist, imagining what a possible actually-built Newton steam wagon may have actually looked like. It’s pretty fun to imagine an early 1700s London street filled with these things, trundling around and scalding the shit out of horses and people unfortunate enough to cross behind them under power.

It’s not terribly surprising that Newton would have come up with this idea; as soon as he came up with his Third Law of Motion, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, the concept of pushing a carriage forward by shooting something out backwards (in this case steam) would have been pretty obvious, especially to a smarty-pantaloons like Isaac. It’s not generally thought that Newton actually built this contraption, and given the state of mechanical arts of that era, I’m not sure it could have worked, at least at full scale. I bet a model would have scooted along pretty well, though.

So, I suppose my point here is that while patents like this for incorporating action-reaction thrust engines to help move or control a car seem like absolutely bleeding-edge tech, the truth is the concept goes back literally centuries. And somehow it’s yet to be implemented in an actual production car, perhaps due to the realization that for any of these ideas to work, there has to be powerful jets of something being ejected from one or more nozzles on the car, and that’s not especially compatible with, you know, being close to, um, anything, really.

But maybe I’m wrong! Maybe we’re on the precipice of jet-controlled cars! It’d be exciting, and I’m sure the ghost of Isaac Newton would get a kick out of it.

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Photos: US Patent Office