Tesla to unveil redesigned Roadster sports EV after years of delays
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Tesla will show off its redesigned Roadster on Thursday, nearly nine years after the electric sports car was first previewed in next-generation form.
The event is scheduled to begin at 8:55 p.m. EDT (0055 GMT) at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas.
A prototype of the $200,000 vehicle was revealed by Tesla in 2017, when the company said deliveries would start in 2020. Reservations for the car remain $50,000 each, and the price has not been updated.
Chief Executive Elon Musk has played down the Roadster’s significance to Tesla’s finances, describing it in 2023 as a “small potato situation” that would not “move the needle in a major way financially.”
But the car still carries symbolic weight.
“Tesla does not currently have a halo car, or high-performance luxury vehicle designed to showcase an automaker’s best engineering and technology. The Roadster will be Tesla’s new halo car,” Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein said in a note last month.
Musk set expectations for the vehicle in 2017, saying a four-seat Roadster would travel 620 miles (1,000 km) on a single charge.
In 2024, he posted on X that the car had been redesigned.
The new Roadster would accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour (100 km per hour) in less than a second. “And that is least interesting part,” he wrote, adding it was a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX, the rocket company Musk also leads.
Goldstein expects Tesla to sell around 2,000 Roadsters a year – a fraction of the 1.6 million vehicles Tesla sold last year.
The original Roadster, released in 2008 and on sale until 2012, was Tesla’s first-ever EV and used a Lotus Elise chassis.
It helped change the world’s view of what an electric vehicle could be.
The company has since been known for its Model Y and Model X SUVs and Model S and Model 3 sedans.
The reveal of the second-generation Roadster also comes amid a sharp shift in Tesla’s focus to artificial intelligence-led self-driving tech and robotics, from manufacturing cars for human drivers.
This year, tesla stopped selling Model S and X vehicles to make space for production of its Optimus humanoid robots.
It also launched Cybercab – a two-seater robotaxi that comes without manual controls such as a steering wheel, pedals and mirrors.
