Tesla Roadster teased with rocket thruster hardware

Tesla will finally pull the covers off the production version of its second-generation Roadster on 2 October 2026, Australian time, ending more than six years of missed deadlines and mumbled excuses.

And judging by the single teaser image Tesla has released, the sports car that turns up will bear little resemblance to the four-seat concept wheeled out in 2017. Think sharper, Cybertruck-flavoured surfacing – and what appear to be cold-gas thrusters slung along the bottom of the bodywork.

Before you start pricing petrol, the “gas” in cold-gas thrusters isn’t the stuff you buy at the servo. The system uses compressed gas fired through nozzles rather than burning rocket fuel, and it comes courtesy of Elon Musk’s other company, SpaceX.

Musk has hyped it for years, and Tesla now claims as many as 10 thrusters could fire the Roadster from 0-97km/h (60mph) in as little as 1.1 seconds.

For context, the ‘base’ 2017 concept was quoted at 1.9 seconds to 97km/h, or 2.1 seconds to 100km/h, from four electric motors and a 200kWh battery good for a claimed 1000km of range.

Nine years on, treat all of those numbers with a large grain of salt.

Tesla also trademarked two new Roadster logos earlier this year, one of them a silhouette of a low, hypercar-shaped machine – a long way from the sensible 2+2 of 2017.

Whack the brightness up on the teaser and hidden text appears reading “WHERE WE’RE GOING”, a nod to Back to the Future and its hovering DeLorean.

Musk has previously claimed the Roadster will hover using thrusters mounted where the rear seats once lived. We’ll believe that one when we see it.

The delays have been spectacular even by Tesla standards. Deliveries were promised for 2020, then pushed to 2021, 2023, 2024, 2025 and April 2026 before landing on next month’s reveal.

Australian punters could lock one in with a $7000 refundable pre-order followed by a $59,000 non-refundable bank transfer within 10 days, while the limited Founders’ Series demanded $319,000 for that second instalment.

In October 2024, Elon Musk said: “I’d like to thank our long-suffering deposit holders of the Tesla Roadster. The reason it hasn’t come out yet is because the Roadster is not just the icing on the cake, but it’s the cherry on the icing on the cake.”

Those deposit holders get their answer on October 2, 2026.

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