You either love the way Elon Musk drops major news or you hate it. (For the record, we’d be okay with it if Tesla retained a PR department to provide sanity and accuracy checks. Alas, the company disbanded its PR department late last year.) Today, in addition to making other announcements and pronouncements, the Tesla CEO casually provided an update on the hotly anticipated Tesla Roadster on Twitter. After discussing some of the capabilities of the new Tesla Model S—at one point asserting “It can play Cyberpunk [2077],” the popular new open-world video game—a Twitter user by the name of ‘Earl of Frunkpuppy’ asked Musk, “What happened to the Roadster?” Elon provided a direct reply, likely shocking the esteemed Earl’s puppy right out of its frunk.
According to Musk’s tweet, development of the new Roadster will be finished by the end of this year and production will start sometime in 2022. If the statement is to be believed, Tesla will have a working, drivable prototype on the road by the end of summer 2021. That’s all well and good, but we’ll believe the production roadster is on sale when it’s on sale and examples are being delivered. Feel free to take Elon’s projected timeline with the usual grain of salt. Initially, the Roadster was officially projected for last year.
That said, if the second-gen Roadster (remember there was an original, Lotus-based Roadster, too) delivers on its Tesla’s claims for the sports car, the results will no doubt be spectacular. As a refresher, the Roadster is said to sprint from zero to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, achieve a top speed of more than 250 mph, and offer 620 miles of range on a single charge. All of that sounds great to us—even fantastical—and Elon’s tweet further makes the claim that the company’s developmental work on its triple-motor drive system and battery tech (such as for the insane new Model S Plaid) were important goalposts to achieve along the way to making the Roadster reality.
You can already place a reservation for your very own Roadster, so long as you’re prepared to pony up a cool $50,000 to get on the list. The Roadster’s MSRP is currently listed at $200,000, but like most things Tesla, the sports car’s price may change by the time everything’s said and done.
