Nine years after it was first promised, the new Tesla Roadster finally had its big night. It flew, it flipped, it went upside down, but the ultimate question still stands: can all of this thrust propel it out of vapourware land?
Cast your mind back to November 2017. Tesla rolled a red Roadster off the back of a Semi truck and promised the world: under two seconds to 60mph, roughly 1,000km of range, a US$200,000 base price, and deliveries in 2020. Keen buyers handed over US$250,000 upfront for a Founders Series slot, on the easiest interest-free loan we’ve ever seen.
2020 came and went. So did 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The demo itself slipped from April Fools’ Day to May, June, August and finally October. So when Tesla finally lit up an auditorium, I pulled up a chair and watched the whole thing, every part of it. You’re welcome, here’s what you missed.
Drum roll
The tone was set in the first thirty seconds. Musk opened by telling the crowd success was “not guaranteed”, but if it all went wrong, everyone was at a safe distance: yeah, I remember the Cybertruck demo vividly. Then came the real promise of the night: “excitement is 100% guaranteed.”
That’s not how you launch a car. That’s how a ringmaster opens a show.
And a show is what we got. After a SpaceX-like countdown, the Roadster drove up a half circle and parked upside down, and then lifted off the ground on cold gas thrusters and flew, as initially promised. It did what they called a “kickflip”, and at one point a Starman dummy popped up in the passenger seat for a gag. Was it one of Tesla’s robots? Who can tell.
Granted, it was genuinely spectacular to look at. It was also, by Tesla’s own admission, being driven by nobody! The car was operated autonomously “to make sure we don’t kill anyone”. This is, remember, the car Tesla says will be its only manually driven model. The one car built for drivers was flown without one. Oh, the irony.
Musk added, almost in passing, that the Roadster is “not necessarily a safety optimised car” and might not be illegal “in all jurisdictions”. Try getting that past a Waka Kotahi compliance officer, or selling it in Europe, where the Cybertruck is already very successful. Oh, wait.
And don’t even get me started on the design. If you look up the definition of a Roadster, you will see that you are expected to have the wind on your hair. The other Tesla Roadsters delivered on that; here, not so much.
Even more frustrating is that buried under the fireworks was the one idea that could genuinely make this a great driver’s car: a fan car. Suction fans under the floor are claimed to pull the car down hard enough to corner at more than 2G, against roughly 1.2G for a car relying on tyres alone. Add an active rear wing, a high-downforce mode and a low-drag mode, and you’ve got something motorsport fans will remember. Brabham’s BT46B did this in 1978 and was withdrawn after winning its only race, forever cementing its legend. And, more recently, Gordon Murray’s T.50 revived the idea for the road and proved it actually “somewhat viable”.
That in itself is interesting, and worthy of discussion had this been a more serious endeavour. But Tesla treated it as a warm-up act, with the fan system getting just a few sentences of shouted explanation over whirring fans, a crude joke about sucking chrome off a trailer hitch, and another headline-grabbing claim of it “crushing every track record that has ever existed”.
As usual: more promises, more horizon gazing, less evidence. The interior got even less: two seats moulded into the chassis, and everything-by-wire: steer, brake and throttle. That’s it. Nothing on battery size, range, weight, charging or price.
The 0-60 farce
The 2017 promise was 0-60mph in 1.9 seconds and, back then, it was impressive. Today, even their own 5 seater luxury sedan does that, and people are quickly realising it’s no longer the be-all metric. Today, it quickly merged to “under one second”. And then a car was sent off down the pad for a live run and everyone stood around waiting for a number. The pad was too short, so the run was cut off, and it was even said they’d broken the system. A figure flashed up that was so absurd Musk himself joked it would have destroyed the human inside, and then we see a less-than-1s run.
Everyone clapped, and Musk promised the production car would be quicker still, limited only by the need not to “detach the retina” of the driver. Through all of it, nobody explained what tyres, what surface, what timing gear or whether the thrusters were helping. Those rear thrusters, for the record, are claimed to make over 80 kilonewtons and run off 600 litres of high-pressure air in two carbon wrapped tanks, which the car recharges itself. It’s a fun spec sheet, not a performance figure you can compare with anything – certified for anything other than Lower Earth Orbit, that is.
The next act
Just when you thought the circus was packing up the tent, Musk announced an encore. Tesla wants to have another crack at Evel Knievel’s failed 1974 jump over Idaho’s Snake River Canyon. With a Roadster. At something like half the speed of sound.
The line that got the biggest cheer was “where we’re going, you don’t need tyres”. It’s a great Back to the Future gag. It’s a strange thing to say about a sports car whose entire selling point is supposedly grip. And production? 2028. “Actually, for real,” Musk said, which tells you everything about how much weight the previous dates carried.
The verdict
I’ll give Tesla this: it was the most entertaining car launch I’ve watched in years. They know how to put an spectacle, in proper America-f-yeah kind of fashion. Watching a two-seater hover and backflip over a Texas launch pad is something I’ll remember. But strip away the quite literal smokescreen, and here’s what we actually learned about the car you might one day buy: it has two seats and a yoke, it might have a very clever fan system and space thrusters. And it might arrive in 2028. Also, it might not.
That’s basically it. No range, no price, no weight, no lap time, no real world test with a human behind the wheel. Founders Series buyers have now waited nearly a decade with a quarter of a million US dollars on deposit, and they were rewarded with a flying stunt the car will probably never do on their driveway.
I genuinely take my hat off to the people at Tesla that completely revolutionised the EV market, and created products that are still compelling to this day. But what we saw today was different: the circus came to town. The acrobats were brilliant. But when the tent comes down, there’s still no Roadster in the car park.
