Tesla is planning to finally show its new Roadster as early as this month, and the event is supposed to include a stunt where the car lifts off the ground, according to a new report from The Information (paywall).
There’s a catch. The car will be operated remotely with nobody in it, and spectators will be kept several hundred yards back because the SpaceX-developed cold gas thrusters are loud enough to damage their eardrums.
The demo keeps shrinking
The demonstration is planned for SpaceX’s rocket test site in McGregor, Texas, three people familiar with the plans told The Information. We reported based on another The Information report in June that Tesla had pushed the Roadster demo to August while the thruster package, internally code-named A71, was still being worked out.
A few months ago, the plan was a lot wilder. Tesla wanted the Roadster to race up a magnetized roller-coaster-style ramp, drive upside down, right itself, and hover, according to the report. Tesla previewed that version to Elon Musk, delayed it, and has since cut some of it back.
Musk has been managing expectations internally. He told staff in recent weeks that the demo will be hard to pull off and could go wrong, but that it will be entertaining either way, one person said.
Whether Tesla streams it live or releases edited footage afterward couldn’t be learned.
The car Musk actually picked
The report also fills in years of gaps in how the Roadster got here.
In 2022, two groups inside Tesla’s design studio were working on completely different cars. One was figuring out what a Roadster built on the Model S Plaid’s structure and components would look like, basically a stretched version of the 2017 prototype. The team tore a Model S apart to study the possibility. The other group started from scratch around an ultralight carbon fiber tub, the way top-end performance cars and race cars are built.
Musk picked the carbon tub and told staff to “do it correctly or not at all,” according to one person familiar with his comments. That killed the option of reusing Tesla’s existing vehicle architecture, which has since been discontinued anyway, and committed the company to building a real hypercar, which required engineering expertise Tesla didn’t have. It hired engineers out of Italy, including Stefan Nothdurfter, a former head of body engineering at Lamborghini. He has since moved on from Tesla.
The styling went through a Lamborghini Countach phase, a favorite of design chief Franz von Holzhausen. He later told the team he wanted the car to evoke the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, which is where the A-71 code name comes from. By 2025 the design had settled into something more conservative that pulled from the Countach work, and Tesla built a running two-seat prototype with butterfly doors late last year. Von Holzhausen said last week that the Roadster is coming “very soon.”
The flying part shrank along the way too. “We started off thinking we were almost making an aircraft and ended up with something closer to hovering,” one person with knowledge of the program said.
The limited edition isn’t really a car
The limited edition Tesla plans to demo in Texas won’t be street legal and will likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, according to the report. Tesla has internally discussed selling it to a handful of superfans through a program modeled on Ferrari’s XX Programme, where owners drive track-only cars under supervision.
Tesla also toyed with making it a single-seater, putting a cold gas thruster where the passenger seat goes. As currently designed, a person most likely can’t drive it while the thrusters are firing. Too loud.
And the people who actually paid are still waiting. Tesla took $50,000 reservations for the standard Roadster and $250,000 for the Founders Series in 2017, and it has moved the goalpost at least eight times since. Marques Brownlee and Sam Altman have both said publicly they canceled. Musk jokes about the “long-suffering” reservation holders at shareholder meetings.
The company filed new Roadster trademarks in May, which is the closest thing to hard evidence of progress anyone outside Tesla has seen in a while.
Electrek’s Take
If this report is true, who the hell asked for this? Tesla owes 100s of Roadsters to early adopters and people who paid in full a decade ago.
The version Tesla is about to show off can’t be sold to the public, can’t be driven with its main party trick running, and will cost more than most houses. That’s not a product. It’s a commercial for Musk’s ability to do things nobody asked for, staged at a rocket facility, with an empty driver’s seat because the car might blow out your eardrums.
I guess that’s Tesla in a nutshell today. More demo than product. Just like the Robotaxi.
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