Tesla Roadster Revealed: It Flies, Flips, and Hits 60 in 0.8 Seconds
3 min readNine years after the concept first appeared, Tesla has finally shown the second generation Roadster, and it did not settle for a quiet stage reveal. At a SpaceX test facility in McGregor, Texas, on October 15, a prototype drove up an arching track, hung upside down, lifted off on SpaceX supplied thrusters, performed a barrel roll and landed in a cloud of white vapor. Elon Musk told the crowd the car “can basically fly like a rocket.”
A Long Wait for the Tesla Roadster
Tesla unveiled the Roadster concept in November 2017 with production promised for 2020. The date slipped almost every year since, with deposit holders asked to wait through 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025 and then 2027. An October 1 reveal was itself pushed back by weather at the outdoor site. The original pricing of $200,000 for the base car and $250,000 for a Founders Series was pulled in 2021, and Tesla reopened reservations in September with a $50,000 deposit.
What Tesla Showed
According to Car and Driver, the prototype’s party trick comes from two systems. A fan array under the car creates enough suction to hold it to a surface even when it is stationary and inverted. Four rear mounted cold gas thrusters, fed by ultra high pressure air tanks the car can refill itself, are said to produce more than 80 kilonewtons of force. In acceleration runs the car reached 60 mph in a claimed one second, then 0.8 second on a second attempt after Musk was reminded of his sub one second promise.
Musk claimed a top speed of “over 230 mph,” with a stated goal of reaching half the speed of sound. The car also carries an active rear wing with high drag and high downforce modes. Tesla later confirmed three configurations: Performance, with the wing and fan system; Thrust, which adds the rear thrusters; and Rocket, a single seat version with perimeter thrusters that let it move upward and rotate, which is the one that flies.
Specs were thin otherwise. The cabin glimpse showed butterfly doors, two seats, a yoke and a wide horizontal screen. Musk said production starts in 2028 and admitted the car may not be legal in every jurisdiction.
Why It Matters
The most telling line of the night was not about thrusters. Musk said the Roadster will, over the long term, be the only manually driven car Tesla makes. That frames the company’s entire future lineup around autonomy, with the Roadster as the one deliberate exception for people who still want to drive. It is also a reminder of how Tesla sells itself: a halo car built with SpaceX hardware, teased for nearly a decade and revealed with a stunt rather than a spec sheet.
Whether a 2028 date holds is the open question, given the track record. Watch for final pricing, regulatory details on the flying variant and whether the fan system survives into a production car.