Nine years after first trying to resurrect the Roadster, Tesla is apparently trying again. CEO Elon Musk might have relocated its HQ to Texas, but yet again he has returned to California’s showbiz industry to hawk his wares; last time it was a Hollywood back lot for the remote-controlled Cybercab demo, last night it was decades-old stunt technology to make a show car do tricks in the air.
The new Roadster, we’re told, will be unlike anything else, although the angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Marcello Gandini’s original Lotus Esprit—Musk is known to own a James Bond prop car—as well as the more recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear are four giant exhaust pipes; these do not signal Tesla’s sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation.
Rather, it’s where 100,000 psi jets of compressed nitrogen shoot out. It’s early in the morning and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Statutes are dense reading, so I am yet to find the section where it explains how and when it’s legal to use such a thing on the road.
Unusually, Tesla says it stuck with rear-wheel drive for the new electric vehicle. The battery pack uses the troubled 4680 cells it has been trying to scale up in-house; customer complaints of poor performance were presumably the driving force behind developing what the company says is a special battery chemistry just for this model.
Some of the performance claims are even more grandiose than nine years ago. Now, Musk claims a planned top speed of 383 mph (616 km/h), with a 0-60 mph time of 0.8 seconds. And as with the last time this happened, there are already other EVs on sale that are more capable than Tesla’s vaporware claims.
You want to drive upside down?
And right now, that’s the McMurtry Spéirling, which looks like a miniaturized Batmobile (the good Michael Keaton one) and which is capable of generating up to 3.5 lateral Gs. The best Tesla claims for the new Roadster is 2 Gs. Oh, and the Spéirling will most definitely drive upside down.
The Spéirling has also set a faster lap time around the Top Gear test track than an F1 car, blitzed the Goodwood Hill Climb record, and I’m pretty sure would demolish Volkswagen’s untouchable Pikes Peak time if it gave it a shot. McMurtry has sold at least 24 of the planned 100-car production run.
Will any of this happen?
Musk claims that the Roadster will go into production by 2028. But the CEO has a long and glorious history of overpromising and underdelivering; in 2017 he told attendees at the previous launch that “We are making it now.” Using the company’s referral program, some people were in line to receive two free cars. But those free cars never showed up, and neither did the ones that people put down $50,000 deposits for: last year Sam Altman discovered how hard it can be to get that money back.
And it’s not like there’s actually much of a market for very expensive, very fast EVs: hypercar buyers want noise and an emotional connection, and they don’t get that from an EV.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s core business remains in trouble. Even in quarters where the company has decent sales, its profits are vanishing as costs rise and selling prices drop. And most recently, sales have not been decent.
Its stratospheric valuation was predicated in large part upon promises of constant growth, something that perhaps seemed possible when its marketshare was near total and there was little competition for EVs. But now Europe and China have hundreds of models to choose from—only two of which are offered by Tesla. The Models 3 and Y are both increasingly aged, and Tesla has shown little ability to innovate rapidly like the Chinese brands that have taken so much of its sales away there. In fact, it might even leave the Chinese market.
But as Musk has told us time and again, Tesla is no longer a car company. Currently, he seems more interested in merging Tesla with SpaceX, claiming synergies having to do with AI despite most of his AI-derived revenues coming from renting GPU time to others. But a merger would give SpaceX a backdoor into the S&P 500 index, which rejected the rocket company in June, as it requires several consecutive profitable quarters for inclusion. Should Musk succeed, he will have access to billions of dollars from passive investment funds that invest retirement accounts in the S&P 500. Apparently that could happen before the end of the year.
