Tesla Roadster Did a Barrel Roll — and Got a 2028 Date
By TechPulse USA Staff
Nine years, five-figure deposits, and roughly half a dozen broken promises later, Elon Musk finally did what he said he would do: he made a Tesla fly. For about five seconds. Upside down. Over a ramp in Texas. And then came the punchline nobody in that crowd paid $50,000 to hear — you still can't buy one until 2028.
The reveal, livestreamed from SpaceX's rocket test facility in McGregor, Texas on Thursday night, was classic Musk: a genuine engineering feat by a man whose relationship with delivery dates remains purely decorative. The Roadster drove up a wall, clung to the ceiling, let go, flipped, and landed. Whether any of it ends up street-legal — or ever leaves Texas — is a question Tesla conspicuously declined to answer.
File photo: the red Roadster prototype Tesla unveiled in November 2017. The car revealed on Oct 15, 2026 has a sharply restyled design. Photo: via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
A car drove on the ceiling. Then it let go
The set looked less like a car launch and more like an outdoor concert that had wandered into an aerospace facility — fog, red lasers, content creators flanking the stage, per the Wall Street Journal. Behind it loomed the evening's real star: a towering, backward-curving ramp "not unlike a skateboard halfpipe."
The Roadster launched up the ramp, came down, went up again — and this time did not come down the same way. Using what Tesla engineering vice president Lars Moravy called "a fan suction system" underneath the car for extra grip and downforce, it drove along the curved surface until it was on the ceiling. Then the suction eased off, the thrusters fired, and the car dropped, spun, and landed on the pavement.
"What you see with your eyes, you will not believe," Musk said on the livestream beforehand. After the landing: "Well, it worked. Flying cars are real."
The second trick was arguably better. The Roadster used its thrusters to lift itself up and over a slow-moving row of Teslas — a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Semi, a Model Y and a Model 3 — hopping the entire product line in one leap. Tesla also claims an acceleration run of about one second to 60, with no timing method explained.
Rocket tanks where the back seats should be
The physics is genuinely novel for a road car. Moravy told the crowd the Roadster carries ten thrusters connected to 600 litres of compressed air, which lifted and spun the car in mid-air. The tank can be recharged — because a flying car you can only fly once is a party trick with a maintenance plan.
Where does 600 litres of high-pressure air live in a sports car? Everywhere: Tesla wrote on X that "every usable void in the car is packed with Carbon Fiber Overwrapped Pressure Vessels (COPVs)" — the same tanks SpaceX uses on its rockets, and, as TechCrunch dryly noted, the vessels "that have been at the root of multiple SpaceX rocket explosions."
The fans matter as much as the thrusters — suction "fan cars" were banned from Formula 1 in 1978 for being too fast, and Tesla is now pairing that old racing concept with SpaceX cold-gas hardware and calling it a production plan. It is audacious. It is also, by Musk's own admission on the night, not built for the cautious: the chief executive acknowledged the car was not necessarily designed with safety as the top priority.
Three Roadsters, one catch
Tesla is selling three Roadsters, each more committed to the bit than the last.
Performance is "road ready": two seats, active aerodynamics, and a "multi-mode suction system." No thrusters — for buyers who want the shape and the suction but draw the line at rocket hardware.
Thrust is "race ready": two seats, the suction system plus rear-mounted cold-gas thrusters, which Tesla says enable 0–60 in under one second — the headline claim from Musk's 2024 posts.
Rocket
All three trims, Tesla says, will offer 300 miles of range and a top speed above 230 mph. Now the comparison Tesla didn't volunteer. The 2017 car was a four-seater promising 620 miles and over 250 mph for $200,000. Thursday's car is a two-seater promising 300 miles and 230-plus, at a price Musk refused to name. Nine years of development have produced a car with half the range, half the seats, and a lower top speed. The barrel roll is spectacular. The spec sheet is a retreat.
The money question Tesla wouldn't answer
Price is where the evening went quiet. Musk named no price; The Times reports upwards of $200,000, but Tesla confirmed nothing. Reservations ask for a $5,000 deposit plus a $45,000 wire transfer within ten days.
We re-ran the arithmetic on Tesla's own numbers while the lasers were still cooling. Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein — who calls the Roadster Tesla's missing halo car ("Tesla does not currently have a halo car, or high-performance luxury vehicle designed to showcase an automaker's best engineering and technology") — expects about 2,000 sales a year. At $200,000 apiece, that is roughly $400 million of annual revenue against Tesla's $94.83 billion in 2025 sales: four-tenths of one percent.
Musk said it himself, three years ago, in blunter language: the Roadster is a "small potato situation" that wouldn't "move the needle in a major way financially." The market got the message before the event started — TSLA slid 2.82 per cent to $356.80 in Thursday morning trading, per Blockonomi. A halo car is a marketing expense with wheels. Thursday night was the most expensive one Musk has staged in years.
2028: a date with a history
The single most important thing Musk said on Thursday was also the least surprising. "Tesla will finally build the long-delayed vehicle in 2028," TechCrunch reported from the event. Another date. To appreciate how little that date is worth, you need the full rap sheet.
Tesla unveiled the second-generation Roadster in November 2017 and took deposits — $50,000 base, $250,000 up front for a Founders Series capped at 1,000 cars. Production was slated for 2020. It never materialised, and the timeline slipped at least six times since — including the October 1, 2026 event itself, pushed two weeks by high winds at the outdoor McGregor site. The car revealed this week looks, per the Journal, "like an almost completely different vehicle" — sharp Cybertruck-like angles, a long way from the sleek prototype reservation holders paid for.
Musk's explanation: "There's so much technology packed into the car that it requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong." Fair description of rocket science — and the same excuse, in different words, that has been offered for most of a decade. The people who wired $250,000 in 2017 have been waiting longer than a Tesla lease, a Tesla loan, and most Tesla relationships.
The bottom line is the one the industry learned from every Musk product launch since the Model 3: a reveal is not a delivery. Thursday was a brilliant demo of a car with no price, no factory line, and — as far as any public record shows — no FAA certification for anything it did in the air. No confirmed sustained flight has been demonstrated, and a temporary flight restriction was reportedly in place around McGregor during the event week. What the crowd saw was a controlled stunt at a rocket test site, performed by a company that owns the rocket test site. Genuinely impressive. Genuinely not a flight.
The verdict: spectacle, shoddily wrapped in promises
Musk called the Roadster "the best of the last of the human-driven cars" and promised the crowd a car that will "literally... puff itself up, and be able to do these maneuvers whenever you'd like." It is a wonderful image — of a man selling manoeuvres, not miles. The Roadster was never going to move Tesla's needle, and Musk knows it; this was about the halo, the legend, the story Tesla tells itself about what it can still do when it remembers it used to build the most exciting cars on the planet.
None of the hard questions got answered under the red lasers: whether 2028 holds, whether the Rocket trim's thrusters clear a single regulator, whether the price starts with a two or a three. What got answered is simpler — the car can fly, briefly, upside down, over a ramp in McGregor. Everything else is, as ever with Tesla, a promise.
Our preview of the event: Tesla's Roadster Gets Its Night After Nine Years of Waiting. And the bigger empire picture — Barclays: Musk Could Merge Tesla and SpaceX Before December: the SpaceX thruster tech on display Thursday is exactly why that merger talk has teeth. The Cybercab the Roadster hopped is already carrying passengers: Tesla's Cybercab Gave Paid Rides.
Frequently asked questions
When will the Tesla Roadster be available?
Musk says production begins in 2028 — the latest entry in a long series. The car was supposed to ship in 2020 and the date has slipped at least six times. A reveal is not a delivery.
How much will the new Tesla Roadster cost?
Tesla named no price at the reveal. The Times reports upwards of $200,000. Current reservations ask for a $5,000 deposit plus a $45,000 wire transfer within ten days.
Can the Tesla Roadster really fly?
It did a thruster-assisted barrel roll and a hop over parked cars — not sustained flight. No FAA certification for the car has been identified in public records. Call it a flying stunt, not a flying car.
What are the three Roadster trims?
Performance (road ready, 2 seats, suction, no thrusters), Thrust (race ready, 2 seats, rear thrusters, sub-1-second 0–60 claimed), and Rocket (air ready, 1 seat, ten thrusters). All claim 300 miles of range and 230+ mph.
Is this the same car Tesla showed in 2017?
No. The 2017 prototype was a sleek four-seater promising 620 miles of range. The 2026 car has Cybertruck-like angles, two seats (one in Rocket trim), and 300 miles of range. Same name, different car.
Sources: Wall Street Journal, The Times, TechCrunch, New York Post, Autoblog, ZeroHedge, tech-insider.org. Quotes attributed in text; figures cross-checked against at least two reports unless marked as single-outlet.
About the author: TechPulse USA's news desk covers the collisions between technology, money and power — from rocket test sites to earnings calls — with every fact checked against multiple sources before publication.
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