- Tesla’s next-gen Roadster is due for its unveiling, again, this month.
- The automaker’s design boss says that the release will be very soon.
- Even Jay Leno is jabbing at Tesla for dragging out the car’s release for “just shy of 10 years.”
If you’re one of the people who dropped $250,000 for a Tesla Roadster when it was announced in 2017, you’re probably kicking yourself over what that money could have done in an index fund instead of sitting in Tesla’s books for the better part of a decade.
You’re also probably tired of hearing the vague answer of “soon” when anyone kicks the release date can down the road. But according to Tesla’s chief designer, Franz von Holzhausen, that’s exactly when the next-gen Roadster will be debuted. Soon.
Franz recently appeared on an episode of Jay Leno’s Garage where the car-loving host dogged on Tesla for dragging out the release of the Roadster for “just shy of 10 years.” Franz wasn’t specific, but be assured Leno (twice) that the production car would finally debut “very soon.”
When Tesla originally announced the Roadster back in 2017, it was the automaker’s Apple-esque “one more thing” moment at the Tesla Semi reveal. Tesla hyped up the room by promising a zero-to-60 MPH sprint of under two seconds (half a second faster than the then-flagship Tesla P100D) and the ability to stretch its legs to a speed unheard of for an electric car: 250 MPH. All of the performance will also be backed by a claimed 620 miles of range and a release date some time in 2020.
That timeline slipped. 2020 became 2022. Then that became 2024. Now it’s 2026 and Tesla’s April Fools release date has come and gone. Musk told investors in June that the reveal was “a month or so” away, which brings us to August.
After Tesla missed out on its “most epic demo ever” in 2025, the world learned that one of the Roadster’s holdups is the SpaceX package. That’s the claimed cold-air thruster tech that Tesla wants to bake into the Roadster in order to give it wings (and wild performance). It’s not clear where Tesla is exactly on finalizing the collaboration between the two Musk companies, but if Franz’s vague “very soon” timeline is accurate, the automaker might be close to working out all of the bugs. Assuming, of course, that this is a real thing that’s happening.
Lars Moravy described the car as the automaker’s swan song and the “last, best driver’s car” that Tesla will produce as it transitions its focus to steering-wheel-less robotaxis.
Then again, if I were one of the folks who shelled out tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars on my very own electric sports car nearly a decade ago, I’d be tired of asking questions of waiting for that swan song. We’ll see if the company can finally deliver.
