Tesla Pins October 1 on the Second-Gen Roadster as its Finally Go For Launch…Again

Tesla posted three words on X Saturday. “Go for launch.” A red sports car sat under hard vertical light, the kind used on a pad before a rocket leaves the ground. The date 10.01 ran across the bottom of the frame. A countdown on the company’s Roadster page now points at the same Thursday. Invites followed within hours.

People who paid a lot of money for a reservation years ago are finally receiving their digital tickets to Waco, Texas, and that’s about it so far. The event appears to be scheduled for October 1st at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Just a heads up that RSVPs must be submitted by midnight Pacific on September 16 or you will not be admitted. The invitation is only open to people aged 21 and up, and your ticket is not transferable. On the food and drink front, we’ve been told there will be some, but details are limited. Waco is about 90 minutes from Tesla’s Austin plant and close to SpaceX’s McGregor test facility.

It’s been nine years since Tesla dropped the prototype on stage at the close of the Semi event on November 16, 2017. Owners have yet to hear formal word from Tesla on some of the promises made that nite, and no updates have been supplied since. They claimed that the car will accelerate to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, top out at over 250 mph, travel 620 miles on a 200 kilowatt hour battery pack, and seat four people at a base price of $200,000. The Founders Series variants were going to cost $250,000, and apparently, it was meant to go into production in 2020.


Then one of those dates was pushed out, first to 2021, then to 2022, then 2023, and eventually to 2024 and 2025. Just last November, Musk informed investors that manufacturing would be pushed back to 2027 or 2028, at least 12-18 months after whatever is shown off next month. We had great hopes when Tesla announced they’d give a demo on April 1st, but that date came and went, as did the summer and spring windows. Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s design leader, recently spoke with Jay Leno and advised him to hang in there; the wait will not be too lengthy.

Lars Moravy, Tesla’s VP of vehicle engineering, has described the Roadster as the last ‘driver’s car’ that the company will make, a sort of ‘last statement’ before software takes over much more of the labor that goes on beneath the hood. According to him, the team spent years basically going over the original design and showing Elon Musk some of the new technology he’d been working on, which elicited a response from him somewhere along the way. Production will presumably take place at Gigafactory Texas. There were reports back in 2025 that the 2017 body will be replaced with a whole new design, but we have yet to see it because it has been kept under wraps.

Musk has discussed the potential of a SpaceX option package that includes cold gas thrusters for the automobile. When he originally discussed it in 2018, he said it would have roughly ten tiny nozzles fed from composite tanks similar to those used by SpaceX on the Falcon 9, and would replace the Roadster’s back seats. He claimed it could accelerate the car to 60 mph in under a second and lift it off the ground for a brief hover. At one point, he did admit that the extra acceleration was perhaps the least amazing aspect of the whole operation.
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