Who needs tire grip with rocket thrusters.... Seriously, rocket thrusters? ....
No, I don't think they are serious. He talks about them, but I don't think they are even actually on the prototype, it's all talk/joke. I'm surprised it's not dated 4/1.
On YouTube, the "Engineering Explained" guy recently did a video analyzing the super fast acceleration claims. He said,
unless you are using rocket boosters, you can estimate best case 0-60 times from the best case 60-0 braking times (usually given in distance, but some calculus can turn that into a time estimate). On most high performance cars braking is limited by tire grip, so that is your acceleration limit as well.
But it is an approximation, weight distribution is towards the front while braking, towards the rear while accelerating, but close.
And he also rants about some "not counting the first foot of motion" or something. It's like saying "here's my 0-60 time, but I really stopped the timer at 55 mph - that's OK, right?". But by that measure, a Tesla is reported to be at sub 2.0 second times, and probably close in real life.
edit/add: That is with stock, street legal tires, not a prep'd surface, and no special driver. When you punch it in a Tesla (and many other modern cars), the power is delivered to keep the tires from slipping to maximize accel.
But yeah, rocket boosters!
-ERD50