The new Tesla Roadster finally showed up on Thursday night in a cloud of compressed air at SpaceX’s rocket test site in McGregor, Texas. It was the perfect example of Elon Musk’s personal brand: the epic announcement full of grandiose promises, the magic act that keeps the audience staring at the smoke while the real trouble happens backstage (see his delayed Optimus , the delayed Cybercab , and Tesla’s lack of true autonomous driving).
The Roadster showed off its ability to do absolutely useless stuff that no car has ever done before. It raced upside down, clinging to a giant inverted ramp like a Hot Wheels car. It jumped over a Model 3, a Model Y, a Cybertruck, a Tesla Semi, and a Cybercab. The Roadster fast-and-furious’d its way through a stunt course, flipping in midair and floating down on air thrusters to land back on solid ground, momentarily hiding the car in a puff of gas.
What it didn’t do was give us a price or a date anyone should believe. Musk’s latest toy is the most literal case of vaporware in tech history: a product you can’t buy, propelled by actual vapor.
Consider what was promised in 2017, when Musk surprised everyone at the Semi truck event with a red Roadster that looked nothing like this new one. Tesla said it would do 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, go 620 miles on a charge, seat four in a 2+2 layout, cost $200,000, and reach customers in 2020. Fans put down $50,000 to get in line, or $250,000 to claim one of the 1,000 Founders Series cars.
Nine years later, the Roadster’s range claim is “over 300 miles,” not even half the original figure. The back seats are gone. There’s no price at all. And the delivery date has become “2028, actually,” as Musk put it on stage, according to the EV publication Electrek . The deposit for this new car is still $50,000.
[Photo: Tesla]
Wedge issue
On the design front, the Roadster looks like the unholy son of a Model Y and a Cybertruck. One that dreams of becoming a Lamborghini when it grows up but is just too ugly to ever pull it off.
The Roadster has gone from the rounded, almost sensual shape of the 2017 prototype to a white, angular wedge with scissor doors. Tesla pitches it as an aerospace look, with nods to the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane and the F-35 fighter jet that are nowhere to be seen for anyone with eyes. Musk called it “better than any James Bond car.” Better, no. But he’s right that it looks like one. Its front instantly reminded me of Roger Moore’s Lotus Esprit submarine car from the 1978 film The Spy Who Loved Me .
The problem is that every element feels borrowed. The Autopian’s David Tracy, who likes it, made a list of the cars it resembles: the Lamborghini Murciélago and Countach, the Ferrari Testarossa, the Lotus Esprit, the Lancia Stratos Zero, the Vector W8. “It’s all a familiar wedge-y design and nothing groundbreaking,” he writes. Road & Track places it somewhere between the Cybertruck and the wedge supercars of the 1980s.
I look at it in profile and I see a Model Y’s tall cabin trying to squeeze into a Lamborghini Countach costume, with the faceted Cybertruck surfaces and the Cybercab hubcaps on the stunt car giving away the family tree. The great wedges by Lamborghini’s designer Marcello Gandini were low, tense, and outrageous. But they made sense. Next to the Vector W8, Tracy notes, the Tesla “looks rather tall and upright.” The 1980s posters on our bedroom walls had proportions. This thing doesn’t.
[Photo: Tesla]
Not everyone agrees. MotorTrend’s Edward Loh , the most enthusiastic of the big car magazine critics, finds it “fresh and futuristic looking” and calls the cabin “straight-outta- Tron awesome.”
Rocket man
The Roadster comes in three versions, according to Tesla . The Performance model seats two and uses fans that suck the car onto the road for grip, which is what allowed it to cling to the ramp upside down. Tesla claims it does 0 to 60 in under 1.6 seconds. The Thrust version adds rear cold-gas thrusters, basically nozzles that blast compressed air backward like a giant can of keyboard duster, to get under 0.9 seconds. And the Rocket version, which is invite-only, seats one person and carries thrusters all around its body. Tesla bills it as having a “full flight system.” It’s also, in Tesla’s own words, “Not approved for public road use.”
Think about that for a second. The headline trick of a car called Roadster can’t legally go on a road. When someone in the crowd asked Musk if it would be street legal, he answered , “Yeah, yeah. Depends on your street.” Wired talked to Scott Miller, an airline pilot who lectures on aviation at San José State University, who reminded everyone that the Federal Aviation Administration “has jurisdiction over any machine that leaves the surface of the earth.”
[Photo: Tesla]
The air has to live somewhere, too. Tesla says it stuffed “every usable void in the car” with high-pressure tanks wrapped in carbon fiber. But as TechCrunch’s Sean O’Kane notes, that kind of tank has been behind several SpaceX rocket explosions. And all these tricks make the car worse to live with. “I, for one, use my trunk a lot more than I would use the ability to do a standing flip in a car,” writes Jalopnik’s Amber DaSilva .
Even Musk doesn’t pretend this is anywhere near sensible. “Now, I should say that this is not necessarily a safety-optimized car. But it takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10,” he said on stage. Back in January he said that, “if safety is your number one goal, do not buy the Roadster.” Tesla, he added, would “aspire not to kill anyone in this car.”
Smoke and mirrors
And that’s basically the summary of it all. It feels like the Roadster was never really about the car. It’s about the show. Last year, Musk promised Joe Rogan it had “a shot at being the most memorable product unveil ever.” And indeed, it was memorable. But a show only goes so far.
[Photo: Tesla]
In 2019, the Cybertruck’s “armor glass” shattered on stage, Musk swore, and the internet went wild for a $39,900 truck due in late 2021 . It arrived two years late, its price starting more than 50% higher , and became a flop . In 2024, the “We, Robot” event promised a sub-$30,000 Cybercab . This January, Musk admitted its production would be “agonizingly slow” this year.
As for the Roadster, it has slipped so often that Musk picked April Fools’ Day 2026 for the reveal because, as he put it, “I could say I was just kidding.” Then he missed that date too, followed by late April, early summer, August, and October 1. The final two-week slip was blamed on the weather.
The internet is not buying it either, even when it loved the show. On Reddit’s r/cars, the top comment , with more than 2,000 upvotes, reads: “The new Roadster goes into production in 2028. I’ll see you all in 2035 at the next press conference where they announce this car again.”
And here we are now. New jumping Roadster, same Tesla problems to hide behind those nozzles’ exhaust. Tesla deliveries fell about 2% year over year in the third quarter, the shares had lost 21% of their value this year by the start of October (the company reports its quarterly earnings on October 21).
The whole night felt like a commercial for a possible Tesla-SpaceX merger, as Electrek’s Fred Lambert wrote. Musk himself admitted he’s “not sure it moves the needle massively from a revenue standpoint.”
On that, I believe him.
