Tesla first showed the Roadster in 2017 and pencilled in production for 2020, after which the date began to slide. Even this reveal needed a second attempt once severe weather bumped it. Production is now pencilled in for 2028, a date Elon Musk delivered with a chuckle. Now, nine years is a long time to hold a deposit, so early depositors can be forgiven for not laughing along. Reservations start from $50,000 going up to $250,000 for the really interesting versions.
Tesla lists three variants: the Performance gets two seats, an active rear wing and the fan. The Thrust adds rear cold-gas thrusters. The Rocket drops to a single seat and adds perimeter thrusters, which handle the actual flying. Which means actual flight is a trim level. Musk himself admitted it may not be legal everywhere.
The big night happened at SpaceX’s test site in McGregor, Texas. A prototype drove up a towering, Hot Wheels style ramp, held down by an underbody fan that Tesla says delivers 2 g of suction. Thrusters rated at more than 80 kilonewtons then fired it forward into a barrel roll, and it settled back down in a puff of white vapor. That vapor is compressed air rather than smoke, which means the party piece has a short fuse.
The Roadster’s acceleration got the same theater. A first run to 60 mph took a claimed one second, and when Musk was reminded he had promised better, a second run came in at 0.8 seconds. Four rear thrusters helped, so treat that as a rocket-assisted figure rather than what the motors manage. Top speed is billed at over 230 mph, with an ambition to chase half the speed of sound.
With that, the Roadster sounds like a hypercar that just happens to fly, rather than a flying machine wearing a bodykit. For the skeptics out there, caveats are plentiful. The stunt car was not the one parked on stage, and Tesla gave no price, no weight and no word on how many bursts those air tanks can deliver before a refill. Still, a manually driven Tesla is a rarity now, and Musk says the Roadster will be the last.
That makes the Roadster a halo car in the truest, most ironic, sense: Tesla is developing a car that promises to make driving more theatrical, just as the company increasingly focuses on removing the driver from the equation.
