A former Tesla president says the endlessly delayed next-generation Roadster is being held up by SpaceX “hovering” technology — and that the project is really about pulling Tesla and SpaceX closer together.
Jon McNeill, Tesla’s president from 2015 to 2018 and now co-founder of VistaShares and CEO of DVx Ventures, made the comments as Tesla preps a long-promised Roadster demo nearly nine years after the car was first unveiled.
What the ex-president said
Speaking about the upcoming demonstration, McNeill said the event could show off the car’s most extreme party trick.
“I don’t know if we’re going to see flying, but we may see hovering in this demo,” he said via Yahoo.
McNeill framed the Roadster as a morale play for a company under pressure. “Elon recognizes that Tesla needs to inject some energy and excitement back into the car business,” he said.
He was more direct about the strategic motive. McNeill called the Roadster a “probably not-so-hidden attempt to further knit Tesla and SpaceX’s futures together,” and predicted the two companies “are going to come together, probably sooner rather than later.”
The “hovering” comes from a SpaceX-developed cold-gas thruster system, internally code-named A71, that points toward the ground to lift the car. We reported last week that Tesla’s “flying” Roadster demo could happen this month — and that the car would be remotely operated with no one inside, in part because the thrusters are loud enough to damage the hearing of anyone nearby.
A car promised in 2017 — and delayed at least nine times
Tesla unveiled the new Roadster in November 2017 with production promised for 2020. The reservation program asked buyers to put down up to $50,000, and Founders Series buyers wired the full $250,000.
The original specs were: a claimed 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and a 620-mile range — numbers that made it, on paper, the quickest production car ever announced. None of it required rocket thrusters.
The SpaceX package came later, as an add-on Elon Musk teased would cut the 0-60 time to roughly 1.1 seconds using cold-gas thrusters. Since then, the car has been delayed at least nine times. The demo alone has slipped from April 1, 2026, to late April, to “maybe in a month” on the Q1 earnings call, to August 2026 — and now the thruster work is the reason it isn’t ready.
Even the demo has been scaled back. Earlier plans reportedly had the car racing up a magnetized ramp, driving upside down, righting itself, and hovering. Those elements were cut after being presented to Musk, who said about the demo “will be hard to pull off and could go wrong, but that it will be entertaining either way.”
The financial backdrop
The timing matters. TSLA is down roughly 25% year-to-date, the worst performer among the “Magnificent Seven,” and Tesla’s core auto business has been shrinking as competition intensifies. The full history of the program is tracked in our Tesla Roadster guide.
McNeill’s read that the Roadster is meant to “inject some energy and excitement” and knit Tesla and SpaceX together lands against that backdrop of a struggling car business and open speculation about a Tesla-SpaceX combination.
Electrek’s Take
Let’s be clear about what this is: a demo. That’s likely all it’s going to be.
It may well be true that the SpaceX cold-air thruster work is what’s holding up the Roadster, but if that’s the case, it’s bad business. The Roadster Tesla unveiled in 2017 was extremely well received. It didn’t have thrusters from SpaceX, and it didn’t need them. A 1.9-second 0-60, 250-plus mph, and a 620-mile range was already the most exciting car anyone had announced. No one who put down $50,000 was asking for cold-gas rockets that make the car undriveable and un-street-legal. Nobody is asking for that.
Tesla should just deliver the car it showed nearly nine years ago – hopefully with some upgrades since it has been a decade. Instead, the company is bolting on a gimmick with almost no real-world utility so it can stage a driverless “hovering” stunt in a Texas field.
And McNeill might be right about tying Tesla and SpaceX closer together ahead of a potential merger that would primarily benefit a single shareholder. Using a highly anticipated, long-overdue product as a prop for that agenda, when you had a great car to begin with, is pathetic. Deliver the Roadster people actually paid for, and do it 8 years ago. The rocket show can wait, and you don’t even need it. Elon can force anything he wants on Tesla shareholders and they will say thank you. History has proven that time and time again.
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