Ikea Answers Tesla's Flying Car With a 2.99 Toy and a Towel

Ikea Answers Tesla's Flying Car With a $12.99 Toy and a Towel

A furniture post outruns a rocket demo

On the night of October 15, Tesla livestreamed its new Roadster from SpaceX's test site in McGregor, Texas. The car climbed a towering curved ramp, hung upside down, launched off the edge, spun through a mid-air kickflip and settled back onto the ground on cold-gas thrusters. Within days, IKEA Taiwan's Instagram account had taken the same idea and turned it into a furniture joke.

Two products, no pressure vessels

IKEA's version of a flying car is a four-piece Lillabo toy car set priced at $12.99, plus a Brokglim bath towel. There are no carbon-fibre tanks and no thrusters. Creative Bloq described the pairing as IKEA's answer to a "Roadster Rocket Edition setup suitable for any home" — a joke aimed squarely at the price and practicality of Tesla's concept.

The caption Tesla already wrote

The post opens with "Real life, baby," the exact line Tesla used when it published footage of the Roadster, then adds two words: "Safe, affordable." It is a small edit that reframes the whole launch. Tesla sold a spectacle; IKEA sold a shopping list.

Tesla's own caveats

Musk did not claim the car was engineered around crash safety. He told the crowd it is "not necessarily a safety-optimized car," according to IGN, and said it would be, long term, the only manually driven car Tesla makes. Tesla's own listing for the flying Rocket trim carries the line "not approved for public road use," as Daily Grail noted.

Fifty thousand dollars to hold a place

Tesla's site lists three trims: Performance, Thrust and Rocket. Fortune and InsideEVs report a $50,000 deposit for the Performance version and $250,000 for Thrust, with $5,000 due at order and the remaining $45,000 within 10 days. The Rocket, the only version with the full flight system, is invite-only, and Tesla has not announced a final price for any of them.

2028, eight years late

Production is scheduled for 2028 — eight years after the 2020 delivery date promised at the car's 2017 unveiling, as Yahoo Autos noted. TechBriefly lists 300 miles of range. Reservations are open anyway, which is the part IKEA's post quietly targets: money now, car later.

Hops, not flight

An aviation expert told CNN the demonstration was closer to hopping than to sustained flight. Fortune reported that the FAA does not treat the vehicle as an aircraft. Roger Connor, curator of vertical flight at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told reporters that a car-plane hybrid tends to be "a poor performing aircraft and a poor performing vehicle," a line Jezebel picked up.

Why IKEA could say it out loud

Affordability is IKEA's loudest claim this year. Ingka Group put €1.2 billion into lowering prices across Europe, Retail Insight Network reported, and Ingka CEO Juvencio Maeztu told BNN Bloomberg that the company dislikes "yo-yo prices." IKEA also runs a standing reactive team that meets several times a week to decide which cultural moments to join, according to Link in Bio. Mocking a $50,000 deposit is on-brand, not off-message.

Who the joke lands on

For shoppers, the post resets the price of "the future": a $50,000 place in line versus a $12.99 toy. For rivals, Alef Aeronautics CEO Jim Dukhovny welcomed Tesla to "the flying car race," adding that his company had "been here alone for eleven years" and that its Model A had completed its 1,000th flight, Creative Bloq reported.

The next race is delivery

Tesla still owes regulators and reservation holders a production car. IKEA got a nearly free round of attention and attached "safe, affordable" to its own name in the same breath. Until 2028, the most convincing flying car may be the one that costs less than lunch.