Tesla’s chief executive Elon Musk has unveiled a “flying” sports car equipped with thrusters from his rocket company SpaceX as the carmaker tries to revive its image as a brash innovator.
At a launch event on Thursday night at a SpaceX test site in Texas, the electric-car maker showed off the Tesla Roadster. In one stunt, the car launched vertically into the air and performed a mid-air barrel roll over a line of parked Tesla vehicles before landing on its wheels on the other side.
“A friend of mine, Peter Thiel, once said the future promised us flying cars, but instead we got 140 characters,” Musk joked to a crowd of cheering fans, referring to the character limit of social media posts on Twitter before he bought it in 2022. “Well, not any more.”
Musk said the Roadster was “not necessarily a safety-optimised car”, but it would “be an actual car that’s on the roads”.
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“I’m not sure it’s necessarily legal in all jurisdictions,” he said. “But there will be such a car that someone can own.”
The vehicle, which has been under development for a decade and will not enter production until 2028, will be Tesla’s only manual car. With the help of its thrusters, it can accelerate to 60 miles per hour in less than a second and achieve a top speed of 230mph.
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The company postponed the launch on at least five previous occasions, originally promising to start delivering the vehicle in 2020. As a publicity stunt, Musk launched a prototype into space in 2018.
Customers – including OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman – paid $50,000 (€44,000) to remain on a waiting list for years. However, a year ago, during a vicious legal battle with Musk, Altman asked for his money back, saying “7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait”.
Musk spent weeks hyping his new product on his social media platform X, calling it “a candidate for greatest product demo of all time”. As far back as 2018, the billionaire had been stoking speculation that the Roadster would be able to fly using cold-gas thrusters developed by SpaceX for its reusable rocket-landing systems.
The Roadster has been a pet project for Musk. Tesla sold a predecessor model as a concept car between 2008 and 2012 to spread awareness of electric vehicles.
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It will now compete with ultra-luxury electric supercars such as the €550,000 Ferrari Luce and other new offerings from Bentley, Jaguar and Porsche.
However, Musk has played down the Roadster’s significance to his $1.4tn carmaker, saying sales would probably be modest and not “move the needle in a big way financially”.
Tesla has been reducing its number of offered models as it refits its production lines in California and Texas to build robots and autonomous taxis.
In January, Musk discontinued Tesla’s premium S and X models as the group shifted to development of the Cybercab, a gold-coloured self-driving taxi, and a humanoid robot called Optimus.
The vast majority of Tesla’s sales come from its Model 3 and Y, while its Cybertruck has sold poorly since the enormous stainless-steel truck was released in 2023. The company started mass production of the Semi, its articulated lorry, in Nevada this year.
Tesla deliveries fell 2 per cent in the third quarter, hit by a decline in US demand after President Donald Trump ended a $7,500 tax credit for EV purchases.
Tim Levin, a senior editor at the InsideEVs website, said with the bestselling Model Y having first gone on sale in 2020, the Roadster could help revive Tesla’s image as a brash innovator.
But he cautioned that the EV industry had changed since Tesla first announced the Roadster as a concept.
“Maybe back then the world needed convincing that EVs could be these superfast accelerating vehicles,” said Levin. “But maybe now it won’t have the same impact as it would have had in 2020.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
