Tesla is pushing back the reveal of its redesigned, second-generation Roadster once again, this time due to a forecast of severe weather.
Originally slated for October 1 in Waco, Texas, the event is being pushed to October 15, Tesla said.
“We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule,” the company wrote in a post on X.
The event presumably needs to be held outdoors because Tesla has been working on integrating cold gas thrusters from SpaceX that are supposed to make the Roadster fly in some capacity.
This reveal has been delayed many times before, and Musk has pushed it for months altogether before this scheduled date. At one point, Musk even planned to hold the event on April Fools’ Day of this year. He said during Tesla’s annual meeting in 2025 — the same one where he was awarded a $1 trillion pay package — that an April Fools’ Day event would offer him “some deniability” if it got delayed again.
“Like, I could say I was just kidding,” he said at the time.
Tesla first showed off its concept of a second-generation Roadster in 2017 at an event where it debuted the Semi, the company’s electric big rig. The new-look roadster was supposed to be the first supercar the company designed from the ground up, as the original Roadster, which got the company its start in the early 2010s, was largely based on the Lotus Elise.
At the time, Tesla promised the new Roadster was just a few years away. It collected $50,000 deposits from prospective customers of the car, which had an estimated base price of around $200,000. Some people even paid the company $250,000 to reserve one of 1,000 “Founders Series” versions of the supercar.
The project languished for years, until Musk reportedly tasked the Tesla team with redesigning the second-generation Roadster and committed to the idea of using the SpaceX thrusters.
The promise of something outrageous like a flying car hasn’t been enough to tame critics of Musk and Tesla. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that “7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait” for his own new Roadster, though Musk claimed Altman had gotten a refund.
Much like the Roadster will be at this event, the ship date for the vehicle is up in the air. Musk has said he expects it to take a year or more before the new Roadster goes into production after it is finally revealed.
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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
You can contact or verify outreach from Sean by emailing sean.okane@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at okane.01 on Signal.
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