Tesla posted a single image on X Saturday showing its long-promised Roadster bathed in launch-pad lighting with “10.01” stamped across the bottom and the caption “Go for launch.” A countdown clock on the Roadster order page now ticks toward the same date, October 1, a Thursday evening event set for 8:30 p.m. Eastern.
Formal invitations followed, sent to reservation holders and confirmed by digital tickets shared online. The venue is in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of Tesla’s Austin headquarters. Waco sits close to SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, the facility previously reported as the planned stage for the car’s cold gas thruster demonstration.
RSVPs close midnight September 16. Guests must be 21 or older. Invitations are non-transferable, and Tesla has not said whether the event will be streamed.
This is a car first shown to the public in November 2017, tacked onto the end of a Tesla Semi event like a dessert course nobody expected. Musk promised a sub-two-second 0-to-60 time, a top speed north of 250 mph, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery, and production by 2020. None of that happened on schedule.
At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk floated an April 1 demo and joked the date gave him “deniability” if it slipped. It slipped, first to late April, then to “a month or so,” then to August, and now to October.
The centerpiece of whatever Tesla shows is expected to be the SpaceX-developed thruster package Musk has been teasing since 2018. Internally code-named A71, a nod to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the system reportedly uses cold gas thrusters fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, the same tank design SpaceX flies on Falcon 9 boosters. Musk has claimed the thruster-equipped Roadster could hit 60 mph in roughly 1.1 seconds under about 2.75 g, nearly doubling the already absurd 1.9-second figure quoted for the standard version.
That thruster variant reportedly will not be street legal. It has been discussed as a limited production run sold through a track-only program. That raises the question of how many customers who put down $50,000 or $250,000 deposits nine years ago will actually end up with the car they thought they were buying.
The standard Roadster is still expected to carry its original $200,000 base price and $250,000 Founders Series tier, prices set when reservations opened in 2017. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has confirmed production will take place at Gigafactory Texas. Musk is targeting 2027 or 2028, a full 12 to 18 months after whatever demonstration takes place next month.
That timeline means the earliest reservation holders will have waited more than a decade from deposit to delivery. Inflation alone has eroded roughly 30 percent of the dollar’s purchasing power since those reservations opened.
Nine years of promises, five missed deadlines, and a production window that still stretches into 2028 at best. Tesla is now asking the same reservation holders who have watched every target slide to RSVP by next Tuesday.
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