Roadster v2 has a date - finally!
On September 12, 2026, the company posted a three-word teaser on X, "Go for launch", and put a countdown clock on tesla.com/roadster. The next-gen Roadster gets its reveal on October 1, 2026, at 7:30 p.m. Central (5:30 p.m. Pacific), just down the road in Waco, Texas. That's nearly nine years after the car was first shown.
Nine years is long enough that some of the people who paid to reserve one have changed jobs, houses and marital status since. It is long enough that the Model 3 the Roadster was meant to halo over has itself been redesigned. Before anyone gets excited about rocket thrusters, it is worth laying out how we got here.
| Spec | Claim |
|---|---|
| 0-60 mph | Under 2 seconds |
| Top speed | 250+ mph |
| Range | 620 miles |
| Battery | 200 kWh |
| Production start | 2020 |
| Base price | $200,000 |
| Standard reservation | $50,000 |
| Founders Series | $250,000 paid in full |
November 2017: the car in the truck
The second-generation Roadster was a surprise. Musk wheeled it out of the back of a Semi at the end of the Semi unveiling in November 2017, basically as a "one more thing". The numbers he gave were absurd for the time: 0-60 mph in under two seconds, a 250+ mph top speed, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh pack. Production was to start in 2020.
Reservations opened at $50,000 for a standard car with a $200,000 base price, and $250,000 for the Founders Series, paid in full up front. Torque News later put the Founders Series at 1,000 cars, which would mean around $250 million collected from that tier alone, and said it sold out, although Tesla has never published a running reservation count.
The deposit holders
Electrek reports that some customers have had money sitting with Tesla for eight years with nothing delivered, and that YouTuber Marques Brownlee, one of the depositors, had trouble getting a full refund when he tried to cancel. Deposits ranged from $50,000 to $250,000 depending on tier.
Those same early reservation holders are the ones invited to the Waco event. The digital invitations went out to them, and a ticket image shared on X by Sawyer Merritt confirmed the location. RSVPs were due before midnight Pacific on Wednesday September 16. Entry is non-transferable and 21-and-over only, with food and refreshments provided. The invite text is about as plain as it gets: "ROADSTER. October 1, 2026. Waco, Texas. Join us."
Every date that came and went
2020 passed. So did the years after it, while Tesla put its attention on AI, robotics and autonomy. Then things started moving again.
In February 2024 Musk tweeted that "Tonight, we radically increased the design goals" for the car, and added "There will never be another car like this, if you could even call it a car," flagging a collaboration with SpaceX. In 2026 Tesla filed several new trademarks for the next-gen Roadster. On the Ride the Lightning podcast on May 24, 2026, Lars Moravy confirmed the car was in active testing and would be built at Gigafactory Texas. In August 2026 design chief Franz von Holzhausen told Jay Leno's Garage it was coming "very soon".
The actual demo date has been a moving target all year. At the November 2025 shareholder meeting Musk named April 1, 2026, and joked that the date gave him "deniability" if it slipped. It slipped. Sources disagree on the exact order of the subsequent dates, but the pattern is repeated slippage through spring and summer 2026 before landing on October.
| Standard | Thruster version | |
|---|---|---|
| 0-60 mph | 1.9 sec | ~1.1 sec |
| Peak g | Not stated | ~2.75 g |
| Street legal | Yes | Reportedly no |
| Availability | Production car | Limited track-only program |
Why Waco
Waco is roughly 90 minutes north of Tesla's Austin headquarters. It is also about 20 miles from SpaceX's rocket test site at McGregor, Texas. Tesla has not named the venue, only the city, so nobody outside the company knows whether the event is at McGregor itself or somewhere else in the Waco area.
McGregor matters because of what The Information reported in August 2026 about the planned demo: it would happen at the SpaceX test site, with the car operated remotely and nobody inside, because the cold gas thrusters are loud enough to risk eardrum damage. Spectators would be held several hundred yards back. If that plan survived into October, a site with existing rocket test infrastructure and a lot of empty Texas around it is the obvious place to do it.
The thruster package
The system is reportedly code-named A71, after the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. Benzinga, citing The Information, describes pressurized inert gas rather than combustion, the same class of hardware SpaceX uses for attitude control during Falcon 9 booster landings, fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel of the type used on Falcon 9. Roughly ten thrusters are expected to sit behind the rear seats.
The thruster count is, at best, uncertain. Musk's 2018 line was "~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly throughout the car". The Information's reporting puts around ten behind the rear seats. The new teaser render shows four plumes. Pick whichever you like, we'll find out for sure in October.
Musk has said a thruster-equipped Roadster could reach 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds under roughly 2.75 g, against 1.9 seconds for the standard car. The thruster version reportedly will not be street legal, and has been discussed as a limited run sold through a track-only program.
What the car might look like
Tesla's Roadster page carries a shadowed render. Enthusiasts flipped it upside down and read an angular rear end, an aggressive aero wing, and four plumes firing off the rear deck. The teaser image itself shows the car lit as though sitting on a launch pad, with "10.01" across the bottom.
Beyond that, the evidence is thin. Trademark filings and job listings have been read as pointing to a squarer roofline and new composite seating, which is interpretation rather than confirmation. Will it even remain a four-seat targa like the 2017 prototype? Likely not, at least not with the thruster package.
A demo is not a production car
This is the caveat worth holding on to. Electrek makes the point that von Holzhausen's "very soon" still only describes a demo, and it would be the second demo in a decade. Musk is targeting production for 2027 or 2028, which is 12 to 18 months after whatever happens on October 1.
No word yet on whether the event will be live-streamed, but it's hard to imagine it won't be; this is the halo product that Tesla, arguably, no longer needs, but regardless of that, it's the ultimate headline-grabber.
Mark the calendar for 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1. Then mark 2027 in pencil ;-).
