Tesla’s New Roadster Is a Cool Party Trick. Is It Anything More?

Tesla has shown off a new Roadster, and the headline act was pure spectacle: the car jumped over parked Teslas and drove upside down along a ramp at SpaceX’s test site in Texas. Elon Musk’s old Roadster has already had a longer flight than most cars ever will — it’s been orbiting the sun since 2018 — but the successor now has its own party trick, at least on stage.

That was enough to draw a sharp rebuke from Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, one of the internet’s most visible tech critics. He called the unveiling a prank and pointed straight at Tesla’s unfinished history with the Roadster name. In 2017, Brownlee put down $50,000 for the promised model. Tesla said it would ship in 2020 with four seats and about 620 miles of range. Eight years later, that car never arrived.

What Tesla is showing now is something else entirely. The new Roadster has two seats, not four, and Tesla says it will do about 310 miles on a charge. Production is supposed to start in 2028. Tesla still hasn’t named a price, though it is asking customers in Europe for a €50,000 deposit. InsideEVs says Tesla also warns that not every pre-order is guaranteed to be delivered.

The dramatic demo also comes with a long list of caveats. Tesla says the top-end Rocket version, with 10 thrusters, is not approved for public roads and is invitation-only. Musk said he wasn’t sure the car was legal everywhere and added that it “depends on the street.” He also said the Roadster is “not necessarily a safety optimized car.” Brownlee, meanwhile, doubts some of the performance claims and says the Rocket version is basically a phantom product.

Then there’s the hardware behind the seats. The thruster versions use pressure tanks holding air at about 10,000 P.S.I., and the Rocket version replaces the passenger seat with a second 400-liter tank. These carbon-fiber-overwrapped pressure vessels are standard in SpaceX rockets, where they’ve also been involved in several explosions. Tesla has not explained what happens to that tank in a crash, and at the show nobody was behind the wheel anyway — the car drove itself while the audience stayed far back.