Tesla to unveil redesigned Roadster on Thursday after nine-year delay
Tesla is set to unveil its redesigned Roadster electric sports car on Thursday, nearly nine years after a prototype was shown. The car, priced at $200,000 with a $50,000 reservation fee, is seen as a "halo car" showcasing Tesla's engineering, though CEO Elon Musk has downplayed its financial impact.
Tesla is set to unveil its redesigned Roadster on Thursday, nearly nine years after it first showed a next-generation version of its electric sports car.
Tesla revealed a prototype of the $200,000 car in 2017 and said deliveries would begin in 2020. The price has not been updated but reservations are still $50,000 each.
Chief Executive Elon Musk has played down the car's importance 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 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 it 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.
The Roadster event is set to start at 8:55 p.m. EDT (0055 GMT) on Thursday at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas.