The second run was made for cameras. The car hopped over a line of Tesla vehicles, a Semi truck among them, and did another roll on the way. Musk’s reaction afterwards, as Teslarati reported it, was that it worked. Everyone watching stood well back, because he had said earlier that if it failed, at least they were at a safe distance.
And the car itself has a long history of not showing up. Tesla first showed it in November 2017 and promised deliveries in 2020. It promised 0–60 mph in 1.9 seconds and 620 miles of range. Base price was supposed to be $200,000. Now the production target is 2028, which is eleven years after the unveil.
Nine years of dates
I want to put the delays in one place, because the pattern is half the story. The target moved to 2021, then 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. At the November 2025 shareholder meeting Musk said the demo would be April 1, 2026, and joked that the date gave him deniability. In March he tweeted “hopefully next month”. On the Q1 earnings call it became “maybe in a month or so”, then late May or June, then August.
Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief designer, told a crowd at the Tesla Takeover Europe event in Austria that the reveal was coming “in a few weeks”, just days after The Information reported it had slipped to August. Both turned out wrong. In September Tesla posted a “Go for launch” graphic for October 1 in Waco, Texas. On September 28 it was moved to October 15 because of severe rain.
Rain. After nine years, rain was the delay people could actually understand.
Three versions, and a lot of blanks
The car is completely redesigned compared to the 2017 prototype, and Tesla now lists it in three versions. The Performance has two seats, an active rear wing and the underbody fan system that kept the car stuck to the ramp. Electrek reported a listing of under 1.6 seconds to 60 mph for it.
The Thrust adds rear thrusters. Tesla’s own page says it reaches 60 in under a second, and it’s marked as limited. Then there’s the Rocket, which is invite only. Electrek reported listings of under 0.59 seconds for it, a single seat, and a top speed around 230 mph (370 km/h).
Now the 0.81 second number. Tesla showed a recorded test of that during the event, and outlets covering it described it as a claimed result, not something measured by anyone independent. Musk says production car will beat it. He also says the eventual top speed target is half the speed of sound, which InsideEVs worked out to about 383 mph. I’d put that one in the “we’ll see” pile, next to the 2017 range number.
Here’s what Tesla did not say. There’s no price. There’s no new range figure. Musk said the thruster and fan features may not be legal in every place, but he stopped short of calling them street legal, and InsideEVs’s Mack Hogan pointed out that regulators are unlikely to approve a road car that jumps over traffic or vents compressed gas at speed. I spent way too long trying to find a price for each version, going through coverage from five or six sites, and it just isn’t there. Any price table you see online is a guess or the old 2017 figure, so treat those carefully. Even the 2017 numbers are shaky after nine years of inflation and a completely new design.
The money part: a $50,000 deposit and no price
What exists is the deposit. Tesla reopened Roadster reservations in September with a $50,000 deposit that’s fully refundable, and the reservation terms say any estimated price can change because options and packaging aren’t final. InsideEVs reports that all three versions need that same $50,000 within ten days of reserving.
Fifty thousand dollars is a lot to put down on a car with no price.
The older money is the bigger story. In 2017 Tesla took $250,000 in full from people who wanted one of the first 1,000 Founders Series cars, and $50,000 deposits from everyone else. Fred Lambert at Electrek wrote on August 14 that Tesla owes hundreds of Roadsters to early adopters who paid in full nearly a decade ago. About the thruster version being previewed, he asked who the hell asked for it. InsideEVs also ran a headline on October 16 saying Tesla cannot guarantee a pre-order will ever be delivered, though I only saw the headline and not the full terms.
So what will it cost? My guess is that the Performance lands well above the old $200,000, probably past $250,000. For the thruster versions, The Information reported before the event that a limited, track-only edition could cost anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to millions. That report described something like Ferrari’s XX Programme cars, and I think the Rocket is the closest thing to it. You will only get the 10-thruster version if Tesla invites you, so for most readers the price question is more theoretical than it sounds.
What the thrusters are actually for
A cold gas thruster is simple. It’s compressed air let out through a nozzle, a bit like a very angry bike pump. There’s no fire. SpaceX uses the same idea for small adjustments in space, and Tesla says the Roadster has 10 nozzles, with tanks the car can refill by itself.
The tank numbers are where I got confused. Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, said the thrusters are connected to 600 litres of compressed air, according to TechCrunch. InsideEVs, going by Tesla’s own details, says 250 kg of compressed gas. Those could be the same tank described in different units, but I can’t make them match and I haven’t found anyone who explains it. If you see a number in other articles, check where it came from.
Teslarati reported that the thrusters can produce four to five times the force the tires can. That’s the real reason they exist. Tires are the limit on every car, because grip decides how fast you accelerate or corner. A thruster pushes on the air and not the road, so it can add force when the tires are already giving everything they have. Add the fans, which Moravy said generate up to 2G of suction, and the car can in theory corner harder than any production car now. Tesla also filed a patent for an electric fan car weeks before the reveal, according to InsideEVs, so the fan part looks like a real engineering direction and not just a show.
Quick tangent. The first Roadster, the one that went on sale in 2008, was built on a Lotus Elise body, and I think something like 2,450 were sold in total. It was a modest car that proved batteries could be fun. The second one has gone about as far in the opposite direction as possible.
Other reasons are less technical. The demo happened at SpaceX’s site, and Musk described the car as a joint Tesla and SpaceX project. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the event put the Tesla and SpaceX relationship on the table in a tangible way, and merger talk started again within hours. Whether that matters to you depends on if you own shares, but it explains why a car demo had SpaceX engineers all over it.
Now the limit. Compressed air runs out quickly. Anyone who has used a can of air duster knows how fast it gets weak, and a car is far heavier. I’m reasoning from basic physics here and Tesla hasn’t published burn times, so take it as my view. A few seconds of strong force from a few hundred litres is believable, and half an hour of it is not.
Are flying cars next?
No. I’d say 90-10 against, and I’m being polite.
The car doesn’t fly. It jumps and rolls, then lands, which is a better stunt than most people expected, but it’s a hop.Before the event, reports said Tesla was planning magnetised ramps and sustained flight, and then the plan got cut down to something closer to a hover. Musk had also told Joe Rogan the demo might fly briefly. What they showed was less than that, and the demo car was reportedly remote-operated with nobody inside.
Real flying cars are a separate problem. Companies like Joby and Archer are building electric air taxis with big rotors, and they spend years on aviation certification before a single passenger flies. Compressed air can’t give lift for minutes. And a road car that can launch itself over traffic would need a regulator in every country to agree it’s fine, which I don’t see happening in a city. Somebody will say early prototypes always look silly. True, but this one isn’t silly, it’s just pointed at a different goal.
So what is it good for? On a track, a lot. In a Tesla showroom, as a halo car, it gets attention that the Model 3 never will. For everyday driving, I’m guessing nothing from the thruster system reaches normal cars. The fan idea has a better chance, because downforce at low speed is something every performance car wants.
What the critics are saying
The split is pretty clear. People who cover cars liked the engineering and doubted the product.
Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management called the demo a ridiculous piece of engineering with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional automakers, though he also said it shows Musk wants Tesla and SpaceX together. A site called Tech Insider made the plain point that a flying-car demo doesn’t change Tesla’s quarterly delivery numbers or its core margins.
Hogan at InsideEVs was toughest on delivery. After nine years of missed dates, he wrote, the company has used up most of its goodwill, and anyone reserving at $50,000 has almost nothing to go on. Which is why Lambert’s August complaint still matters: Tesla showed a version that most customers can’t buy while people who paid in full are still waiting.
On the other side, Musk’s own pitch is that this is the best of the last human-driven cars, according to Townhall’s coverage, and Townhall itself was openly a fan. I get it. A car going upside down on a ramp is hard to look away from.
And I’m with the critics, about 70/30. The engineering is real, or at least real enough to survive a live stream. The product is a different thing, because nobody has seen a price or a street-legal version. The 30 percent is that Tesla did something this week that no other carmaker would even try, and it worked, which I didn’t expect.
So, do you put the $50,000 down?
It’s refundable, so you won’t lose the money. What you lose is use of it until 2028 or later, while you wait for a configurator that may show a price you can’t afford or a version you can’t register. If you want the Performance, I’d wait until a price page exists. If you want the thruster car, the Rocket is invite only anyway, so there’s nothing for you to decide.
Two things are still open as I write this, two days after the event. Nobody has explained the tank numbers. And Tesla’s page says the Thrust is limited, but there’s no word on how limited.