Elon Musk hypes up Tesla Roadster again after half decade of delay

By Craig Trudell

Elon Musk is resurrecting plans for the Tesla Roadster, a performance car he’s now looking to deliver at least five years late.
 

The billionaire said in a series of posts on X that the car will be a collaboration between Tesla Inc. and Space Exploration Technologies Corp., his two most valuable ventures. A Roadster unveiling is planned for the end of the year, and the companies will aim to ship the car next year.

Musk first unveiled a second-generation Roadster prototype in late 2017 and said then the car would arrive three years later. Tesla charged as much as $250,000 for reservations at a time when it was running low on cash and struggling to ramp up production of Model 3 sedans.

In the course of hyping the Roadster anew, Tesla’s chief executive revisited some of his own past posts on the social network he now owns. Back in June 2018, when Musk alluded to offering a SpaceX rocket thruster option package, he wrote that he had to choose between buying a house or a McLaren after selling his first company. He opted for the car.

“You will love the new Roadster more than your house,” Musk wrote in a reply Wednesday.

Left out of Musk’s posts was any mention that Tesla’s top competitor in electric vehicles just unveiled a high-performance model. BYD Co. early this week debuted the Yangwang U9, a 1.68 million yuan ($233,400) supercar pitted against gas-guzzlers from the likes of Ferrari NV and Lamborghini.

BYD, which sold more EVs than Tesla in the fourth quarter of last year, said the U9 will accelerate to 100 kilometers per hour (62 miles per hour) in 2.36 seconds. Musk wrote that Tesla will aim for a less than 1 second zero-to-60 mph time.

Tesla’s first-generation Roadster was based on the chassis of the Lotus Elise and went out of production in 2012, when the company launched the Model S sedan. Six years ago this month, Musk launched his cherry red Roadster into orbit on a SpaceX rocket.