Tesla teases new Roadster reveal for October 1: ‘Go for launch’

Tesla is teasing an October 1 reveal for the new Tesla Roadster, nine years after it first showed the prototype.

The company posted a “Go for launch” teaser image Friday showing the electric hypercar bathed in rocket-launch lighting, with the date “10.01” stamped across it.

What Tesla showed

The red car sits under bright vertical light like it’s on a launch pad, “Go for launch” is the caption, and the date “10.01” sits at the bottom. The message: the Roadster is going to hover.

That squares with what’s been reported for months. Tesla’s Roadster is supposed to debut with a set of SpaceX-developed cold gas thrusters that let it lift off the ground, and the company has been dangling a “flying” demo since 2018.

A countdown clock on Tesla’s Roadster page is ticking down to the same date. October 1 is a Thursday, and Tesla didn’t say where the event will happen or whether it’ll be live.

Nine years of broken timelines

The new Tesla Roadster was unveiled as a prototype in November 2017, with a $200,000 base price, a $250,000 Founders Series, 620 miles of range, a sub-two-second 0-60 mph, and a 250-plus-mph top speed. Production was promised for 2020.

It didn’t happen. Tesla has moved the Roadster goalpost at least eight times since: to 2022, then 2023, 2024, and “2025-2026.” At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk said production wouldn’t start until “2027 or 2028,” and floated an April 1 “demo” while joking he’d have “deniability because I can say I was just kidding.”

That April date came and went. So did late April, “maybe in a month,” and the August demo Tesla pushed to this summer. Now it’s October.

Meanwhile, the people who put money down in 2017 are still waiting. Reservations ran $50,000 for the standard car and $250,000 for the Founders Series. Marques Brownlee and Sam Altman have both said they canceled.

The demo keeps shrinking

Here’s the catch on the “flying” part. When The Information reported on the plan in August, the demo had already been scaled back from a wild version (up a magnetized ramp, driving upside down, righting itself, hovering) to something closer to a hover. We covered how the car will lift off with nobody inside, operated remotely, with spectators kept hundreds of yards back because the thrusters are loud enough to damage hearing.

And the car Tesla plans to show isn’t really a product. It won’t be street legal, it’ll likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or more, and Tesla has discussed selling it to a handful of superfans through a Ferrari-style track program.

Electrek’s Take

We’ve said it before, and the teaser doesn’t change it: the Roadster stopped being a car program a while ago. It’s a commercial for the Tesla-SpaceX relationship, staged with SpaceX hardware, right as Musk warms Wall Street up to merging the two companies.

The timing fits a pattern. Tesla spent September re-launching products it first showed years ago (the Roadster, the Semi, the robotaxi) to keep the story exciting ahead of an expected shareholder vote on a merger. A rocket-powered reveal at the end of a stock-pump month is right on brand.

So we’ll watch on October 1. Maybe it hovers. The only date that matters, though, is the one where a normal person can actually buy one — or preferably a normal version without thrusters.