Tesla published a teaser on Saturday setting a date of October 1 for an unnamed event, above an image of four thruster plumes firing from the back of a car, the strongest public signal in months that it intends to show the second-generation Roadster nearly nine years after the prototype was unveiled.
The post, from Tesla’s account on X, carried the caption “Go for launch”, the flight-readiness call from a rocket countdown.
The image shows the rear of a low, wide car in near-darkness, with four white plumes rising from the deck, a full-width red light bar and the date 10.01 across the bottom.
The company did not name the vehicle, the venue or the time.
The Hidden Line
Set between the plumes and the light bar, at almost exactly the tone of the background, the image carries the words “WHERE WE’RE GOING”. The text is invisible at normal exposure and legible only when the shadows are lifted.
It is the line from Back to the Future that ends “we don’t need roads”, and it is the closest the image comes to naming what it shows.
Elon Musk has said since 2018 that the Roadster would carry an optional SpaceX package of cold-gas thrusters, and since 2021 that he wanted the car to hover.
What Is Meant to Happen
The Information reported on August 14, citing people with knowledge of the programme, that Tesla planned to unveil and demonstrate the car at SpaceX’s rocket development site in McGregor, Texas, as early as that month.
The demonstration would show the car lifting off the ground with nobody inside and spectators kept several hundred yards back, away from the thrusters.
August passed without an event.
The thruster system, known inside Tesla as A71, occupies the rear seating area with roughly ten thrusters and a high-pressure air tank. The version carrying it is not expected to be street-legal, and a conventional car without the full system is planned alongside it.
Earlier concepts, since scaled back, had the car launching up a magnetised ramp and recovering from inverted flight.
Eight Dates, Nine Years
Tesla unveiled the second-generation Roadster on November 16, 2017, alongside the Semi, promising 0-60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, 620 miles of range and deliveries in 2020.
Musk said in July 2020 the car was 12 to 18 months away. In January 2021 production moved to 2022, in September 2021 to 2023, and at the May 2023 shareholder meeting to 2024.
In February 2024 he said the design goals had been “radically increased”, promised an unveiling by the end of that year with deliveries in early 2025, and raised the acceleration target to under one second. On the October 2024 earnings call the date moved to 2025 or 2026.
At the shareholder meeting on November 6, 2025, Musk set a demo for April 1, 2026, and said the date gave him “deniability because I can say I was just kidding”. He put production 12 to 18 months after that, in 2027 or 2028, said the car “will be very different from what was shown previously”, and called the planned demonstration the “most exciting, whether it works or not, demo ever of any product”.
Asked whether the Founders Series customers who paid $250,000 in 2017 could attend, he said: “Sure, absolutely. It’s the least we can do for our long-suffering Roadster reservation holders.”
April 1 passed. On March 17 Musk had already moved the target, posting on X that the unveiling would come “hopefully next month” and would be “a banger next-level”, then that it would “probably” be late April.
On the April 22 earnings call Tesla described the project as being in design development and Musk put the reveal at “a month or so”, saying it needed testing and validation so that nothing went wrong. In June, reports moved it to August. In August it did not happen.
What the Executives Have Said
Franz von Holzhausen, Chief Designer, said on Jay Leno’s Garage in an episode released on August 10 that the Roadster was coming “very soon”. He had said in June, at a Tesla owners’ event in Austria, that a reveal was “a few weeks” away.
Lars Moravy, VP of Vehicle Engineering, and von Holzhausen confirmed on the Ride the Lightning podcast in May that the car will be built at Gigafactory Texas. Moravy said cancelling the Model S Plaid Plus had freed the engineering effort that brought the Roadster back into active development, and that alpha prototypes were “going around right now doing some work”.
Moravy said at a July 2025 owners’ event that the thruster package was among the hardest parts of the programme, because rocket propulsion depends on a fuel-to-weight ratio that a car’s mass and separate drivetrain complicate.
He described the team’s aim as building “the last best driver’s car” before autonomous driving becomes the norm.
The Case That It Is Real
Tesla filed two trademark applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office in February, one carrying a vehicle silhouette with a sleeker profile and squarer roofline than the 2017 prototype, and patent applications for a single-piece composite seat.
In October 2025 it advertised for a manufacturing engineer for the Roadster, covering battery manufacturing equipment.
Reservations remain open. Tesla has removed the prices from its site, which were $200,000 for the base car and $250,000 for the Founders Series, against a $50,000 deposit.
Nothing in Saturday’s post names the Roadster. It shows four thruster plumes, a tail light, a rocket-launch phrase and a date.
