Tesla unveiled a redesigned Roadster powered with rocket-style thrusters on Thursday and said it would start production in 2028, more than a decade after it first showed a next-generation version of its electric sports car.
The white two-seater vehicle, developed in collaboration with CEO Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, drove upside down on a ramp using a suction system, turned in the air and landed using built-in thrusters. Later in the event, it used the thrusters to jump over a truck and other vehicles, twisting in the air during the manoeuvre.
These kinds of cars aren’t flinging themselves in the air over highways and streets just yet. There are ample regulatory hurdles for flying vehicles overall. The fine print of the Roadster’s “rocket” feature on Tesla’s website notes: “Not approved for public road use.”
“I’m not sure every state is going to allow a driver in the middle of traffic to suddenly elevate himself and fly,” said David Vladeck, a Georgetown Law professor and former director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
“There is going to be a long process to let anything like that on a road.”
Some watchers saw the collaboration as Musk drumming up interest in a merger of the two big companies he controls, an idea he has explored by discussing their overlap.
Tesla shares climbed in morning trading on Friday before falling amid a sell-off in companies tied to artificial intelligence.
The reveal gives Tesla a showpiece car after years of missed Roadster deadlines, but it comes as the company shifts its focus to self-driving technology and robotics, and days before third-quarter results that analysts say matter more to investors.
‘An engineering flex’
“It was an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Tesla investor Deepwater Asset Management, said on social media platform X.
“The Roadster event is the latest example of why Elon can’t wait to bring [Tesla] and [SpaceX] together,” Munster said.
Musk has played down the car’s importance to Tesla’s finances, describing it in 2023 as a “small potato situation” that would not “move the needle in a major way financially.”
But the car still carries symbolic weight.
“Tesla does not currently have a halo car, or high-performance luxury vehicle designed to showcase an automaker’s best engineering and technology. The Roadster will be Tesla’s new halo car,” Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein said in a note last month.
Viewers and witnesses gushed over the spectacle of the launch.
“That was the most insane product demo I’ve ever seen,” Tesla fan and investor Sawyer Merritt posted on X. “I just saw this in person, and I’m still asking how this wasn’t AI.”
$50K US deposit needed
Musk and other executives did not specify any target prices at Thursday’s event, although Tesla nearly a decade ago quoted a base price of $200,000 US for the vehicle.
Tesla’s reservation page for the Roadster after Thursday’s event showed a “Performance” version of the vehicle requiring a $50,000 US deposit and a “Thrust” version with “acceleration thrusters” requiring a $250,000 US deposit. A “Rocket” variant, which Tesla says is “invite only,” is described as a single-seat model with a “full flight system.”
The event at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, had all the elements of a classic Musk product reveal: dramatic music, smoke, mechanical hissing sounds and a launch countdown.
“This is the culmination of incredible work by Tesla and SpaceX engineers working closely together to make something that you haven’t seen in any movie,” Musk, wearing a silver Western-style belt buckle emblazoned with the Tesla logo, told a cheering crowd of enthusiasts and investors.
Zero to 97 km/h in under a second
The Roadster can accelerate from zero to 97 km/h in less than one second and can hit a top speed of over 370 km/h, Tesla vehicle engineering chief Lars Moravy said.
“Definitely much faster than that,” an excited Musk said. “I think you’ve got to crack halfway to the speed of sound.”
The Roadster can also travel over 480 kilometres on a single charge. That is less than half of what Musk promised in 2017, when Tesla first revealed a prototype of the second-generation Roadster and said that deliveries would begin in 2020.
The Roadster, developed in collaboration with CEO Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, comes in for a landing at the unveilling on Thursday. (Tesla/Reuters)
The original Roadster, released in 2008 and on sale until 2012, was Tesla’s first-ever electric vehicle and used a Lotus Elise chassis. It helped change the world’s view of what an EV could be. The company has since been known for its Model Y and Model X SUVs and Model S and Model 3 sedans.
The reveal of the second-generation Roadster comes amid a sharp shift in Tesla’s focus to artificial intelligence-led self-driving tech and robotics from manufacturing cars for human drivers.
Thursday’s demo was technically autonomous “to make sure we don’t kill anyone,” Musk noted. But long term, he said, the new Roadster will be “the only manually driven car that Tesla makes.”
This year, Tesla stopped selling Model S and X vehicles to make space for production of its Optimus humanoid robots. It also launched Cybercab — a two-seater robotaxi that comes without manual controls such as a steering wheel, pedals and mirrors.
Tesla is set to report third-quarter results on Oct. 21.
Sales of Tesla’s aging lineup of EVs have declined over the past two years, although high gas prices helped boost deliveries in the third quarter of 2026.
“The margin and cash flow numbers will carry far more weight with investors than anything they saw at the reveal,” said Josh Gilbert, lead analyst for Asia-Pacific at trading platform eToro.
