It’s finally here.
Tesla unveiled its next-generation Roadster at a livestreamed event Thursday night, giving customers who have waited years their first fresh look at the EV maker’s new halo car.
In a dramatic demonstration, the Roadster traveled up a huge curved ramp until it was upside down. The car then flew off the ramp, flipped, and landed safely on the ground, thanks to what appeared to be thrusters attached to the bottom of the vehicle.
“Well, it worked,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said after it successfully landed.
“Flying cars are real,” Lars Moravy, Tesla’s VP of vehicle engineering, added.
Musk called the latest Roadster a result of a collaboration with Tesla and SpaceX engineers.
The Tesla CEO said the car uses an “advanced ultra-high pressure air tank” to lift itself.
“The car has obviously altitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket, and it could do rolls,” he said.
In a separate recorded demonstration shown on screen, Tesla also showed the Roadster hitting 60 mph in under one second, marking .81 seconds.
Musk said the Roadster will be the only Tesla vehicle meant to be driven manually and that it’s not “necessarily a safety-optimized car.”
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An observant audience member at the event also asked a glaring question: Is it street legal?
“Depends on your street,” Musk said. “It’ll be a viable car.”
The long road behind
The revived nameplate has been a long time coming.
The original Roadster was Tesla’s first production vehicle, launching in California in 2008. It used a chassis derived from British sports-car maker Lotus’s Elise, but replaced its gasoline engine with an all-electric powertrain. That model ended production in 2012.
Musk surprised audiences in November 2017 at an event for Tesla’s Semi truck by unveiling a second-generation Roadster. At the time, Tesla said the two-door sports car would have a 1.9-second zero-to-60-mph time, a top speed above 250 mph, more than 600 miles of range, and a gargantuan 200-kilowatt-hour battery pack.
That month, customers could put down a $50,000 deposit to reserve a Roadster, or pay $250,000 upfront for a Founders Series model.
Musk also floated a SpaceX package for the supercar with cold-gas thrusters that he said might “allow a Tesla to fly.”
With the wait time creeping toward a decade, Musk apologized to “long-suffering” deposit holders in an earnings call, adding that Tesla was focusing heavily on its robotics and autonomy programs.
“Roadster is not just icing on the cake; it’s the cherry on the icing on the cake,” he said at the time. “We are working on it, but it has to come behind the things that have a more serious impact on the world.”
Tesla began ramping up the Roadster’s design cycle in the summer of 2025, Business Insider previously reported.
Musk had been hyping Thursday’s livestreamed event on X. He claimed that event would be “a candidate for greatest product demo of all time” and that “the whole world will watch this.”