Tesla will finally unveil its next-generation Roadster Thursday at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas — nearly nine years after Elon Musk first showed off a prototype and started taking $50,000 deposits from buyers who are still waiting.
The $200,000 electric sports car won't move the needle on Tesla's finances, and Musk himself has admitted as much, calling it a "small potato situation" in 2023, according to Fox Business. But the Roadster's decade-long journey from hype to product illustrates something working Americans already understand: the electric vehicle revolution runs on promises, and the bills come due long before the cars do.
Tesla first revealed a Roadster prototype in 2017 and said deliveries would begin in 2020. Every target date since has been missed. As recently as last October, Musk was promising a demo before the end of 2025. That didn't happen either — weather scrapped an Oct. 1 attempt, and CNBC reports the company had to establish a FAA no-fly zone around the SpaceX facility for the rescheduled event.
In the meantime, Tesla has been sitting on thousands of $50,000 deposits — and in some cases, far more. Lawrence O'Connor, founder and CEO of Other World Computing, told CNBC he put down $250,000 for a Founder's Edition reservation in November 2017, calling it what it is: an "interest-free loan" to the company. Nine years later, he's still waiting.
Musk's former friend and OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman publicly mocked the delays last year, posting screenshots of his own reservation and refund requests. "I really was excited for the car! And I understand delays," Altman wrote, according to CNBC. "But 7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait." He got his money back. Plenty of others haven't.
The car itself has evolved from an electric sports car into something stranger. Musk has said the Roadster will use SpaceX cold gas thrusters — the same tank design used on Falcon 9 rockets — and claimed it will hit 60 mph in under a second. Teslarati reports the system is codenamed A71 and that spectators at Thursday's demo will be kept "several hundred yards back" while the car operates unmanned. Musk teased the event as "a candidate for greatest product demo of all time" and warned it "will be a BANGER, probably metaphorically, though some chance literally."
The original 2017 specs — 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, a 1.9-second 0-60 time — remain the only official numbers, though Musk said in 2024 the car had been redesigned. Production, if it happens, isn't expected until 2027 or 2028 at Giga Texas, per Teslarati.
Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein estimates Tesla will sell about 2,000 Roadsters a year — a rounding error against the 1.6 million vehicles the company sold last year. Fox Business noted the car will serve as Tesla's "halo car," a high-performance showcase for the company's engineering.
CNBC framed the reveal around Musk's faithful fanbase gearing up for a spectacle. Fox Business buried the deposit drama and focused on the Roadster's role as a technology showcase. Teslarati leaned hardest into the SpaceX thruster angle and the possibility — acknowledged by Musk himself — that something could literally go bang.
Tesla reports third-quarter earnings on October 21. Whatever happens Thursday night, the working American who was told electric vehicles were the future is still waiting for one he can afford — and still footing the bill for the mandates pushing him toward them.
