Tesla Unveils Airborne Roadster: 0.81-Second Sprint, But Not Until 2028

Tesla pulled the wraps off the production version of its long-promised Roadster this week — and did it somewhere no auto show could match. The stage was SpaceX’s 4,000-acre proving ground in McGregor, Texas, where the white coupe performed a series of aerial stunts with nobody behind the wheel.

The car ran a banked C-shaped section of track upside down, clinging to the surface with what sounded like a vacuum at work. Then it launched, twisted upright in midair, and landed back on the platform. It also jumped over a row of Tesla’s current lineup, the Cybercab, Cybertruck and Semi included.

How the Thing Actually Flies

Most of the hardware comes straight out of the SpaceX parts bin. Two carbon-wrapped pressure vessels hold 600 liters of air — roughly 250 kilos of it — feeding ten nozzles. Four rear thrusters, styled to look like exhaust tips, are quoted at 80 kilonewtons of thrust. Underneath sits a fan suction system Tesla says can pull up to two Gs, enough to hold the car against an inverted road surface.

The same fan setup is credited with cornering forces above 2g, with selectable high-downforce and low-drag modes and a variable-pitch rear wing. Tesla timed the zero-to-60 run with thrusters lit at 0.81 seconds.

Other numbers: top speed beyond 230 mph, seating for two, steering and braking both by wire. Franz von Holzhausen, Lars Moravy and Elon Musk handled the introductions, and the design is clearly a rework of the 2017 concept rather than a fresh shape.

Musk was blunt about the risk. “Success is not guarantee,” he told the crowd, adding that the team was standing at a safe distance in case it didn’t work.

Two Years and a Lot of Questions

Production isn’t scheduled to start until 2028. No pricing was announced, though earlier reporting has placed the car above $200,000. Musk also admitted he isn’t certain the car is road-legal everywhere, and nobody outside Tesla has seen what it does with a person actually driving it.

One detail worth filing away: Musk says the Roadster will eventually be the only manually driven vehicle the company builds.

For a project that has slipped through years of teases, the reveal answered the spectacle question convincingly. The real-world question — what this car is like to drive on a normal road, under normal laws — stays open until at least 2028.