Tesla’s New Roadster Can Fly, but It Won’t Arrive Until 2028
Trending Topics Jakob Steinschaden
Tesla showed a flying Roadster at a Texas SpaceX site, but says production won’t start until 2028. It can hover, sprint absurdly fast, and still arrives very late.
Based on reporting by Trending Topics, Jakob Steinschaden — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Tesla finally rolled out the second-generation Roadster after nine years of waiting, and it did not bother with a quiet reveal. The car appeared at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, climbed a curved wall, hovered on cold-gas thrusters and flipped over a line of parked Tesla vehicles. Production, Tesla says, begins in 2028.
Before the car came out, SpaceX fired a Raptor rocket engine. Then the Roadster drove up a curved ramp to about 21 meters, nearly upside down, held there by fans pulling air from beneath it. A “Starman” mannequin sat in the driver’s seat as the car drove itself, which Musk said was there “to make sure we don’t kill anyone.” Tesla also showed a 0-to-60 mph run that first appeared as a recorded one-second clip, then came back live at 0.81 seconds.
Tesla is splitting the car into three versions. The base Performance model has two seats, active aerodynamics and suction fans, and is said to reach 60 mph in under 1.6 seconds. The Thrust version adds rear cold-gas thrusters and does the sprint in under 0.9 seconds. The Rocket version is a single-seater with thrusters all around the car, can lift off and rotate in the air, and is quoted at under 0.59 seconds to 60 mph with a top speed above 230 mph.
A lot of the Roadster has changed since the 2017 prototype. Tesla now says the range is more than 300 miles, not the roughly 620 miles once promised. The car also lost seats along the way: four became two, and the top version is now a single-seater. The old 250-plus mph top-speed claim is gone too, though the acceleration number is much quicker than the 1.9 seconds Tesla talked about back then.
Tesla still hasn’t named a price. Reservations are open again, with $5,000 due immediately and another $45,000 within 10 days or the booking disappears. That totals $50,000, the same figure Tesla asked in 2017. For the Thrust version, the deposit is $250,000. Morningstar’s Seth Goldstein expects about 2,000 sales a year, which makes the Roadster more showroom drama than business engine, and Musk basically admitted as much.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic Musk theater: spectacular enough to grab attention, vague enough to keep the accountants from sweating too hard. The Roadster looks less like a car program than a rolling proof-of-concept for SpaceX-flavored bragging rights, which is exactly how hype machines like this survive. The funny part is that Tesla still wants credit for the demo while asking everyone to wait until 2028 for the privilege.
Read more about this at: Trending Topics
