I Put the Mystery Machine in Tesla’s Roadster Flip. Here’s How You Can Too.

One clip, two photos, three edits.

• The clip: 12.5 seconds of Tesla’s kickflip video: a front angle, a wide angle and the drive-off
• The swap: Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Machine, from two photos of one real van
• The model: Seedance 2.5 by ByteDance, run on Replicate, one edit per camera angle
• The cost: about $6 for the final, about $12 counting the tests that didn’t work

Same frame, before and after. Drag the line.

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Tesla originalAI swap

Get the clip and cut it in three.

Download the 44-second kickflip video from Tesla’s “Do a kickflip!” post on X. Then cut these pieces. Seedance holds the swap better one camera angle at a time, and it needs at least 4 seconds per run.

Why piece 3 overlaps: the drive-off is only 1.4 seconds long, under Seedance’s 4-second minimum. Send 4 seconds and keep the end.

Get two photos of your vehicle

• Two angles: a side view and a front three-quarter view
• One vehicle: same make, same model, same paint. Mixing vehicles is the mistake that cost me a run.
• No background: the background remover on Replicate did both of mine for less than a cent

Use Replicate: pay per run.

• No subscription: you pay for the seconds you make. A Seedance edit at 480p is about 43 cents a second.
• One account, every model: I ran Seedance, Kling, a background remover and an upscaler without signing up for four apps
• A plain web form: no code. Upload, type, click Run.
• It tells you what broke: when a run fails, the log names the setting that caused it

Is it cheaper than Higgsfield?

Depends how many you make. Higgsfield sells plans from about $19 to $129 a month, according to Creatify’s 2026 pricing guide. Runway sells credit plans too.

• One Tesla flip, or a few videos a month: pay-per-run wins, because a month where you make nothing costs nothing
• Dozens a month: a subscription bundle can come out cheaper per video

Run the three edits on Seedance 2.5.

1. 1

   Open Seedance 2.5. Sign up at replicate.com, add a card and open the Seedance 2.5 page.

2. 2

   Upload. Put piece 1 in reference_videos and your two photos in reference_images.

3. 3

   Paste the prompt. Use the piece 1 prompt from the builder below.

4. 4

   Set three settings. aspect_ratio to adaptive, duration to -1 and resolution to 480p. The run fails without the first two.

5. 5

   Run and check. Watch the upside-down frames. If the paint goes plain, run it again. Then repeat for pieces 2 and 3.

Build your three prompts

These are the exact prompts I ran, one per piece. Type in your vehicle and copy each one. The defaults are the Mystery Machine.

Edit [Video1]. Replace the car that drives toward the white semi truck, launches, flips over it and lands with the Mystery Machine van, shown in [Image1] (side view) and [Image2] (front three-quarter view). Use these two photos as the exact design.

Vehicle: a boxy 1960s cab-forward van with a flat front and round headlights. Paint: a light sky-blue body, a lime-green band along the lower sides, "THE MYSTERY MACHINE" in orange letters, and big orange flower decals.

Action: it follows the original car's exact path, size and timing: it drives up, launches off the ramp, flips fully over the semi truck with the blue thruster jets firing from its underside, and lands on its wheels. Keep the paint, logos and decals clearly visible from start to finish. When it is upside down, show a dark chassis with four wheels.

Keep unchanged: the camera, framing, timing, the white semi truck, the other parked cars, the floodlights, the smoke, the road markings and the night lighting.

Avoid: a plain or untextured shape, losing the logos or decals, turning back into a sports car, extra vehicles.

Stitch it back together.

Any editor works. CapCut and iMovie are both fine for this.

1. 1

   Lay out the pieces. Piece 1, piece 2, Tesla’s 1 second of smoke (0:16.3 to 0:17.3), then the last 1.4 seconds of piece 3.

2. 2

   Stretch each piece. Seedance hands back clips a little short (5.7 seconds for a 5.8-second piece). Slow each one to its original length so the flip lines up with the sound.

3. 3

   Use Tesla’s audio. Mute the edited pieces and lay the original audio from 0:06.3 to 0:18.8 under the whole thing.

4. 4

   Upscale. Run the finished 480p video through the Topaz upscaler on Replicate to get 1080p. About 30 cents for this one.

Four mistakes you can skip.

• Three photos, three vans: my first set was a 1960s Dodge, a 1960s Ford and a Japanese mini van. Seedance blended them into a blue box. Two photos of one van fixed it.
• The cheaper model lost the van: Kling v3 Omni costs about 17 cents a second and drew a near-perfect van in the first frame. Then it turned back into a Roadster for the flip.
• Two settings, two dead runs: Seedance rejected my first edit until aspect_ratio was adaptive and duration was -1
• The whole clip in one run: in the wide shot the van lost its paint until I split the clip by camera angle and described the paint in the prompt

About $6 for this video.

• Seedance 2.5 edit, 480p: $0.43 per second, about $6 for the 14 seconds you send across three pieces
• Seedance 2.5 edit, 720p: $0.97 per second, about $13.50 for the same three pieces
• Topaz upscale to 1080p: about $0.09 per 5 seconds
• Kling v3 Omni, 720p: $0.17 per second, but it lost the swap on this video

Prices from each model’s Replicate page, checked October 19, 2026. Retries cost the same again.

Label it

• Rights: this is Tesla’s footage and Warner Bros.’ van, which makes mine a parody, not an ad. If you’re selling something, use footage and a vehicle you have the rights to.
• Labels: most platforms want realistic AI labeled, and some will label it for you. My platform guide on Alignment Machine covers who labels what.

None of this is legal advice.