We know that the the payload of the maiden Falcon Heavy flight will be... Elon Musks's Tesla Which will be placed in "Mars Orbit"
Assuming it is serviced and road ready when launched with the keys in the ignition...
100 Years later, someone plucks it out of orbit and lands it safely on a planet (Earth?), would it still be road ready? What if any service or repairs would likely be required to drive it?
Would 10,000 years or a billion years make a significant difference it is road readyness?
Making a car run when it's been stored on Earth for 10 years can be a challenge. Storing it in space makes things worse.
All lubricants will have evaporated. Cold welding is a possibility. The thermal environment is a variable. If the car + payload adapter tumble, the car will spend time in the shadow of the adapter, and you get thermal cycling which will eventually break up the electronics. The Roadster has a glued chassis, the glue bonds may fail at those low temperatures. The battery will be dead. Rubber (tires, seals) will degrade (it'll do that on Earth in 100 years, let alone in space). If the cooling system hasn't been drained prior to launch, the coolant will freeze. Depending on coolant type, the coolant may expand and rupture piping, and distort everything around the piping (batteries, power electronics). Radiation will degrade the electronics. The car could take micrometeoroid damage too, but at least the orbit it's in won't be as dirty as LEO.
Getting the car to run again will require a full restoration: it has to be stripped to bare metal, and every component tested. Expect to replace lots of moving parts, plus all the electronics and the battery.
Let's look at some of the biggest stressors in the Tesla-Probe's lifetime-
Launch- This will be a very stressful time. The car will be subject to around 3g for a few minutes, in a direction that it isn't accustomed to having any kind of force. Luckily the unofficial side-view of the Roadster shows that it is almost certainly mounted by the frame of the car, not the tires. It should be able to better hold up in that configuration. It does seem quite likely, however, that there was some "damage" to get it mounted there, and taking it off, even today on Earth, would likely significantly affect it's impact.
Also, it seems highly likely that they did testing to ensure that the Roaster won't come apart on launch. The last thing that SpaceX would want is to have their publicity stunt turn sour as it caused the failure of the Falcon Heavy. They must have done at least basic testing, vibration, thermal, and even shock testing, to ensure it won't break apart. It is entirely possibly that there were some parts that were welded together to keep it together, such as the wheels. These would have to be undone to drive it again.
Thermal- The thermal environment will actually be fairly benign. It will be warmer then on Earth, but not subject to the sudden changes in sunlight that, say, a LEO satellite will face. There will be some tumbling, so there will be some variation in temperature. I don't think this will be a major concern. It is quite likely, however, that the whole "probe" will at some point in time be subject to high temperatures, in the vicinity of 40-50 C. This could cause battery lifetime issues.
Vacuum- As has been noted by others, any exposed liquid will be evaporated, and cold welding is likely. I personally suspect they will have removed any exposed liquids prior to launch, to reduce the likelihood of incident. The seats are particularly likely to have issues being in a vacuum. They will outgas, and probably not be recognizable as the seats that they are.
Time- The batteries will almost certainly be completely depleted and would need to be completely replaced.
Micrometeorites/ etc- Not likely to be much of an issue, but there will likely be a few dents.
Sun Exposure- The color will probably be off, and again, more damage to the wheels.
Finding it- It will likely be very difficult to find it in 100 years. We have only found 90% of objects 1 km in size. Granted we should know a rough trajectory, but just to give you a comparable task, we don't know that well where all of the Apollo hardware is. For instance, there is the "Search for Snoopy", trying to find where Apollo 10's LEM is now. We will only be able to track the Roadster Probe when it passes close to Earth, which won't be that often.
Bottom line, I rather suspect that this is a fairly heavily modified Tesla Roadster to get it to work. Glass and liquids might have been removed, items have probably been welded together for improved stability, all of which would make it complex to drive even if it was taken off the rocket today, let alone in 100 years. But sure, if you spend the time, you could probably drive it, but it would involve a lot of work and new parts.
Would you be able to just jump in the car and drive it? No. Would you be able to get it roadworthy again with a little work? Maybe.
The state of the car itself will come down to how well protected it is in the capsule, it's going to experience some pretty extreme fluctuations in temperature which will not be kind to electronics that aren't designed for those sorts of conditions and the radiation levels it will pass through could do nasty things to the same components unless the capsule is providing some level of protection but even assuming that it's adequately shielded from any environmental concerns that would cause it to deteriorate such as radiation, space debris etc. then you'd still face most of the same challenges as any other attempt to park a car up for ten years:
Flat tires - while you won't really have a problem of flat spots forming on the contact patch (because the car will be in microgravity) you'll still have the problem of the air used in the inflation escaping naturally over time (no tire/wheel is 100% airtight) so you'll have to reinflate them before you go anywhere. The rubber of the tires is also likely to degrade significantly over that length of time, maybe not to the point where you couldn't move it around but I certainly wouldn't want to be doing long distances or high speeds on them.
Batteries - All batteries lose charge over time, and in 100 years the car's main drive batteries, any ancillary batteries and probably even the battery in the key will likely be either flat or in a really low state of charge. While it might have enough juice to start and run I highly doubt it and it certainly won't be going very far. Depending on the battery chemistry spending a large amount of time in the cold can actually do good things to preserve the condition of the batteries but cycling back up to hot and back down to cold won't do them any favors.
Perished rubber - while it won't have as many engine-critical seals as a car with a conventional ICE there will still be things like shock absorber seals etc that will perish over time (the large temperature variations will not be kind to them!)
In addition to all the structural and electrical perspectives, there is also the possiblity of the firmware in the ECUs being corrupted due to cosmic rays. The automobile is definitely certified for errr.. to be used on earth and not-space-hardened memory will not survive space.
The car is going nowhere when the the mechanics and electrics are ready and there is a ECU checksum error :)
Nope.
Silicon has a mortal enemy: radiation.
Space has a lot of radiation, including charged nuclear particles coming off the sun.
The computers, motor controllers, heads-up display, autopilot, and 1000 other important sub-systems in the car are driven by silicon.
While it might be a very good museum piece in 100 years, it is profoundly unlikely to ever drive again. .... assuming it doesn't blow up on launch.
After 100 years in space, the silicon based technology, not wrapped in very high atomic number materials, are going to be dead.
Polymers (think plastic cladding on wires) has "plasticizers", which make it elastic instead of brittle. Those are going to evaporate. Nothing made of plastic is going to be able to take tiny shocks after 100 years.
Update:
Chemical bonds are on the scale of a few electron volts (Chemistry). The solar wind's particles are on the order of keV, or about 1000x more powerful than the bonds (wikipedia- solar wind). Think about this like putting the device at the end of a kilovolt particle accelerator and ask about EMI/RFI consequences. In terms of particle interactions, not all materials are created equal, which drove the idea of "barns", particle capture cross-section, and thermal-neutron producing moderators (like carbon). (wikipedia - neutron capture) (wikipedia - thermal moderator)
I had a buddy who made dna-scale precious metal bar-codes by putting silicon at the working end of a cyclotron, blowing holes through it, then depositing alternating layers of metals. High velocity protons can blow holes in silicon.
Another buddy of mine got his work on the space station when he vapor-deposited tungsten on carbon fiber for super-light radiation protection hardware. What he described looks like this. Tungsten and other high-Z materials are used to shield electronics from total radiation dose.
Here are NASA links on the topic:
Here is an article saying how bipolar FETs die super early at super low doses of radiation. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/radiation-98a.html
Here is another, about power-down of satellites during solar storms because Van Allen belts accelerate charged particles. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/radiation-98d.html
Update2:
Thanks James for the related answer on plasticizers evaporating. (link)
Elon Musk is a man of his word. Mea Culpa:
FAA Launch License Including Payload
It would not survive launch. Upon orbit insertion, it would be a jumble of loosely assembled broken parts. Things would go downhill from there. If they are saying that they will do this, it is just a publicity stunt. Or maybe not a stunt, so much as "earned publicity" since they haven't actually done anything yet.
In order to substantiate this assessment, I spoke with two experts in the field of spacecraft design and launch. One is a Spacecraft System Engineer with multi-mission experience (PHD, MIT), the other is an Mechanical Engineer with experience designing spacecraft instruments.
Both had seen the press releases and pictures and both were incredulous. They expressed concern that during the launch phase the car would not be able to withstand the mechanical forces, particularly the vibration, and would come apart, endangering the launch vehicle and causing catastrophic failure.
The wheels in particular were called out as one egregiously dangerous example. In the pictures of the mounting, the wheels are neither supported nor constrained. They seem to be hanging freely by their suspension. During launch the wheels will be severely vibrated and would bounce up and down rapidly, stressing the suspension. The chances are good that the suspension will fail and the wheels would be set free to bounce around in the fairing like loose cannons.
Articles on this subject note that the FAA requires that a "non-traditional" payload undergo a review to make sure launching the payload “does not jeopardize public health and safety, safety of property, U.S. national security or foreign policy interests, or international obligations of the United States...” including the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
The results of such a review are made public by the FAA (e.g., Moon Express Payload Determination). There is no news yet of such a review determination having been made for the Tesla payload.
