What to expect from the extremely delayed Tesla Roadster launch

Tesla will reveal its new Roadster sports car on 1 October, the company and boss Elon Musk have said.

To take place in Waco, Texas at 19:30 local time (that’s 1:30am the following day in the UK), the reveal comes almost a decade after the second-generation Roadster was first announced, and six years after it was supposed to go into production.

Little else has been said for now, other than an X post by Tesla stating “Go for launch” and sharing the 1 October reveal date. Tesla’s website has been updated to show a reworked ‘Roadster’ name badge, a timer counting down to the reveal, and an image seemingly of the rear of the new car.

This all comes just a month after a report by The Information claimed Tesla is preparing to demonstrate a SpaceX version of Roadster with cold-gas thrusters and an ability to hover above the ground. This echoes claims made by Musk for several years now that the new electric sports car will use thrusters and SpaceX tech to perform unlike any other car.

Here’s what to expect from the Tesla Roadster event on 1 October:

When will the Tesla Roadster launch?

Honestly, how long is a piece of string? The second-generation Roadster was revealed way back in 2017, alongside the Semi truck. It was intended to go into production in 2020, but that deadline was missed, along with several more over the next half-decade.

The finished car now seems closer than ever, but that doesn’t amount to much in Elon Time. All the usual indications of a car imminently going into production – hot and cold weather testing while wearing camouflage, for example – are missing. So it’s unlikely that the new Roadster will land on buyers’ driveways any time soon, despite the October event.

What will the Tesla Roadster look like?

The car revealed in 2017 looked fantastic. A 2+2 sports car with a removable hard roof and sleek bodywork wrapped around a powerful EV platform with the promise of rapid acceleration, a huge top speed and massive range. That same design has been seen a few times since, most notably in an exhibition at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, and also occasionally in public too.

But the latest imagery from Tesla throws a spanner in the works. The graphic on Tesla’s website advertising the reveal event shows the rear of a car, seemingly with a full-width light bar, a significant rear diffuser below, and what looks like the exhaust gasses of four roof-mounted thrusters, framed by a pair of angular wingtips. The position of these thrusters – if that’s even what they are – suggests the Roadster, or at least the SpaceX version, no longer has a removable roof.

The rest of the car is anyone’s guess, but I’d expect it to retain the 2017 show car’s 2+2 seating layout, with two small seats in the back, and a triple-motor (maybe even quad-motor), all-wheel-drive setup.

How fast is the Tesla Roadster and what is its range?

There have been precious few new performance figures shared by Tesla since the 2017 reveal event. At the time, a 0-60 mph sprint of 1.9 seconds sounded otherworldly, but since then we’ve seen several electric hypercars dip below the 2.0-second benchmark. These include the Rimac Nevera R and related Pininfarina Battista, plus the Lucid Air Sapphire, Xiaomi SU7 Ultra and (albeit not road legal) McMurtry Spéirling.

Posting on X in early-2024, Musk said Tesla had “radically increased the design goals for the new Tesla Roadster” and that it could achieve a 0-60 mph time of under one second. Before that, in 2021, Musk said a time of 1.1 seconds could be possible with an optional “SpaceX package” fitted to the car.

In 2017 Tesla claimed a top speed of over 250 mph, which for an electric car would still be deeply impressive – but, crucially, no longer enough to put the Roadster in a class of one. The Rimac Nevera R can also top 250 mph, while the BYD-owned Yangwang has the U9 Xtreme, a development car that achieved 308 mph in testing.

One stat from 2017 that still hasn’t been topped is the Roadster’s claimed 620 miles of range. This was never proven, however, and while Musk said in 2017 the car would have a 200 kWh battery pack, no other drivetrain details have been shared since. Fast-forward nine years, and today’s flagship EVs like the BMW iX3 and Mercedes EQS have just passed the 500-mile barrier using much smaller batteries closer to 110 or 120 kWh.

How much will the Tesla Roadster cost?

In 2017 Tesla said the Roadster would be $200,000, or $250,000 for the Founders Series edition. Even then, this made it much more affordable than sports cars with similar performance, electric or otherwise. Since then, a bunch of £2m EV hypercars have arrived and, it would be fair to say, sold poorly.

Lower down the food chain, manufacturers have struggled to drum up much interest for electric sports cars. Porsche’s all-electric Cayman and Boxster have been repeatedly delayed; McLaren and Aston Martin have avoided the shift to electric entirely, at least for now, Lotus has added an engine to one of its EVs, the convertible Polestar 6 has no firm release date and Ferrari side-stepped the idea of an electric supercar entirely with its Luce, an ultra-luxe family car.

It is extremely unlikely that Tesla’s 2017 prices can still be achieved, and a SpaceX version of the Roadster equipped with thrusters would – if ever made reality and homologated for road use – naturally cost significantly more.

Even if the Roadster is remotely affordable by modern EV supercar standards, sales figures are unlikely to be high enough to justify the folly of fitting gas thrusters to the roof.

The Roadster's biggest challenge is standing out in an EV market where rivals have caught up in terms of power, acceleration, range and charging – and where other companies have discovered near-zero interest in electric supercars.