Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has promised that the company’s next electric vehicle – the long awaited new Roadster – will be “something special beyond a car”.
The comment was made in reply to a fan-made video of the Tesla Roadster shared by Tesla’s China team on Weibo, where the Roadster is seen to be accelerating rapidly with a driver behind the yoke steering wheel.
Last year, in a post on X, Musk teased Roadster’s performance credentials, going as far as saying that some may not even call it a car: “Tonight, we radically increased the design goals for the new Tesla Roadster. There will never be another car like this, if you could even call it a car.”
At the same time, Musk also said: “I think it has a shot at being the most mind-blowing product demo of all time”.
Tesla first revealed the Roadster 2.0 back in 2017, which came roughly 10 years after the original Tesla Roadster began its production run.
To this day, Tesla’s Australian website has a Roadster 2.0 placeholder page. According to that page, the specs currently list 0-100 km/h in 2.1 seconds, which is identical to what the Model S Plaid sedan achieves in international markets today.
The website also lists a top speed of 400 km/h and an estimated range of 1,000 km. Along with that, the Roadster powertrain will feature 10,000 Nm of wheel torque. The original specs also list a quarter-mile time of 8.8 seconds, making it one of the fastest production cars.
Of course, that specification has to be confirmed when we know more about the new hypercar-level electric car from Tesla.
Tesla’s original roadster was the company’s first product, and given how niche it was, it had a relatively successful run. In Australia, several customers purchased them. Every now and then, they do pop up on the used market, with one 2012 model currently listed at $169,990 on carsales.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.
