New Tesla Roadster finally revealed, and it's a literal rocketship!
Long overdue electric hypercar is designed to defy gravity and crush every track record there is
The long-awaited new Tesla Roadster has finally arrived, featuring rocket technology borrowed from SpaceX that allows it to do 0-60 mph in less than a second and fly. No, we’re not kidding, this thing can fly.
“You’re going to see some crazy stuff tonight”, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk told the crowd at the reveal event for the new Roadster. “What you see with your eyes, you will not believe!”
The new Roadster features cold-gas thrusters that fire pressurised air out of four thrusters in the rear of the car, with the gas exiting faster than the sound of speed and, supposedly, creating over 80 kilonewtons of thrust. That’s about the same amount as the engines in some fighter jets and commercial airplanes. Gulp.
For context, the Tesla can hit 60mph in less than half the time it takes the Bugatti Chiron or Aston Martin Valkyrie to do the same sprint. To prove that's not all talk, during the live unveiling for the new Roadster, Tesla ran the car on a test pad and recorded an astonishing 0-60mph time of just 0.81 seconds. Musk suggested the car would go even quicker though, meanwhile top speed will be over 230mph.
Those cold-gas thrusters will come as standard with the standard ‘Thrust’ model, however the invite-only ‘Rocket’ version adds more thrusters positioned around the vehicle that Tesla says “support forward and upward acceleration, as well as lateral rotational movement.” Or in other words, allow the new Roadster to fly.
The electric actuators deliver precise thrust control and micro adjustments within a fraction of a second, to help with stabilisation in flight. Unsurprisingly however, this thruster system that allows the new Roadster to get airborne will prevent it from being street-legal.
The new Roadster also features impellers that pull air out from beneath the car, sucking it into the tarmac and generating ludicrous amounts of downforce even when stationary. The fan set-up generates so much downforce, in fact, the car can drive upside down, which Tesla demonstrated during the reveal event that took place at SpaceX’s gigantic rocket development and test facility in McGregor, Texas.
The more useless benefit of the ‘Multi-Mode Suction System’ as Tesla calls it for drivers is the downforce it produces while cornering, with forces through the bands supposedly exceeding 2 G as a result – about the same as a Formula One driver experiences. It “looks like you’re breaking physics because the car sticks to the ground so hard”, Musk said excitedly. He also boldly claimed the new Roadster is “going to crush every track record that’s ever existed”, although we frankly have no reason to doubt that after seeing how fast it is in a straight line.
There will be high downforce and low drag modes that can be used on the track, with the car lowering when in Track mode. Meanwhile, Tesla claims the new Roadster’s steer-by-wire system delivers incredible levels of feedback in various road conditions,
The design is nothing like the second-generation Roadster prototype we saw nearly a decade ago when plans for the new electric megacar were announced. The wedge-shaped silhouette makes it look more like a Lamborghini or Lotus from the eighties than a Tesla, while there’s lots of active aerodynamics, including a gigantic rear wing that extends out of the tail and would make a Ferrari F80 jealous.
The design supposedly took inspiration from jets and other awe-inspiring aerospace machines, with the tinted glass windows meant to mimic the copper coating that gives spacesuit visors their gold radiance. Even the Ano White paint was designed to provide UV and cryogenic protection when exposed to the harshness of space.
The interior, on the other hand, is exactly what we’d expect from Tesla. The incredibly minimalist cabin features very little, aside from a steering yoke that uses steer-by-wire technology, lots of microsuede upholstery and a central touchscreen that’s meant to be supported by two smaller displays which provide critical driving info, although we can see where they are based on the images released so far.
Originally, the new Roadster was going to be a four-seater. However, the final version offers seating for two, while the ridiculous ‘Rocket’ model only has one seat, and the seats are fixed to try and save weight.
The new Tesla Roadster will go into production in 2028, Musk claims, nine years after it was supposed to launch. Pricing is one of the many technical details about this unfathomably-fast machine not confirmed at the time of writing, but we know that it’s going to be available exclusively in left-hand drive, so we’re almost certainly never seeing one on a UK road.
With all the engineering that will have gone into the new Tesla Roadster over its nearly decade-long development – especially the rocket thrusters – it's sure to cost a lot, lot more than the 200,000 to 250,000 dollars originally promised. For context, a Rimac Nevera costs close to £2 million.
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