Tesla's New Roadster Flies, Flips Midair, and Still Has No Price Tag

Tesla unveiled its long-delayed second-generation Roadster on Thursday night at SpaceX's rocket testing facility in Waco, Texas, two weeks after weather pushed the reveal back from its original October 1 date. The car rode up an inverted half-pipe, held in place by a vacuum fan system, launched upside down, flipped in midair, and used cold-gas thrusters to right itself and land. In a second stunt Tesla billed as an automaker first, the Roadster cleared several parked Teslas, including a semi truck, and touched down on its thrusters.

The car arrives in three configurations: a road-ready Performance trim, a race-ready Thrust trim with rear thrusters, and a one-seat Rocket trim with perimeter thrusters built for short flights. Tesla's official 0-60 mph times are under 1.6 seconds for Performance, under 0.9 for Thrust, and under 0.59 for Rocket, and a live demo at the event hit 0.81 seconds. Top speed tops out at 230 mph for the Rocket trim, with CEO Elon Musk targeting Mach 0.5, roughly 383 mph, for the eventual production version. Musk says production begins in 2028; reserving a spot requires a $5,000 deposit followed by a $45,000 wire transfer within ten days. Tesla has not announced a price, though outside estimates expect one well north of $250,000.

What Tesla didn't say was more telling than what it did: no price, no explanation for how a car with flight capability gets street-legal, and no acknowledgment that a company still trying to sell affordable EVs at scale just spent an evening staging stunts at a rocket facility. Tesla bull Gene Munster called it "an engineering stunt with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional automakers," and he's right that the Roadster won't move fundamentals. But fundamentals were never the brief. The Roadster is a trailer for the idea that Tesla and SpaceX are becoming one brand story, and the stunt did exactly what it was built to do: everyone is talking about a car that flies, not about an eighteen-month-and-counting wait for a confirmed price.

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Source: Yahoo Finance

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →