For about nine years Elon Musk has claimed some variation on the following:
- There’s a flying and/or hovering Tesla Roadster in the works.
- The flying and/or hovering is part of a new system that primarily provides unprecedented acceleration.
- This system may also enhance sharp turns and braking.
- These abilities are enabled by SpaceX cold gas thrusters.
- Thruster-equipped Teslas will have special SpaceX air tanks in place of a backseat.
Here’s Musk tweeting about it in 2018:
SpaceX option package for new Tesla Roadster will include ~10 small rocket thrusters arranged seamlessly around car. These rocket engines dramatically improve acceleration, top speed, braking & cornering. Maybe they will even allow a Tesla to fly …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 9, 2018
This all, of course, starts with the company bringing back the original Tesla model, the Roadster, a prototype of which was shown at an event in 2017—though Musk’s more confident claim that the Roadster would fly or hover would not come until two years later, in 2019. According to an X post last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman paid Tesla $45,000 to preorder one in 2018, then he tried to cancel the order last year, only to find that the email address Tesla had been using no longer existed.
In October of last year, Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that a new Roadster model would soon be demoed, and that the demo would be “unforgettable.” In March he said this Roadster would be “banger next-level.”
New Roadster unveil hopefully next month.
It will be a banger next-level. https://t.co/sO0iB63l07
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 17, 2026
But no April announcement seemed forthcoming, and at the end of April, Musk said on an earnings call that he hoped it would happen in about a month, meaning the end of May or the beginning of June. Now it’s early June and there’s no sign of the unveiling, but a new report in the Information finally has some detail. Sort of.
The detail, according to the Information, is that the new Roadster won’t be unveiled until at least August. The demo, a joint effort between Tesla and SpaceX, is supposed to show off the aforementioned cold gas thrusters—the ones that provide unprecedented acceleration, plus hovering and/or flight, and it sounds as if Tesla is still hammering the kinks out.
Musk reportedly (per the Information) received his own demo of the thruster system in April—meaning well after he confidently announced that the unveiling would be “banger next-level,” and before it was repeatedly postponed.
