The Rocket-Powered Tesla Roadster Is Almost Ready To Be Revealed

By Gary Gastelu |

Jul 28, 2025

The Tesla Roadster has been a work in progress for the eight years since the prototype was first revealed in 2017, but it sounds like it’s finally progressing.

Lars Moravay, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, appeared at the X Takeover event held by the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley and discussed the long-gestating performance car.

“Roadster is definitely in development,” he said, proclaiming that Tesla is approaching it a “swan song” for human-driven sports cars before the autonomous driving it is pursing becomes the norm.

“We spent a lot of time in the last few years rethinking what we did, why we did it, and what would make an awesome and exciting last best driver’s car. We’ve been making it better and better, and, as you know, it’s even a little bit more than a car and we showed Elon [Musk[ some cool demos last week and tech we’ve been working on, and he got a little excited.”

Moravay didn’t go into any details, but reconfirmed the car is being designed with a SpaceX rocket pack that has been one of the toughest engineering challenges.

“You think about just like fuel to weight ratio of a rocket, It’s like 90 to 1, 90% fuel to weight. 95 is really great,” he explained. “But when you have a car, it has to do all the car things. There’s a little bit more mass there and then you get a separate propulsion system to do the car things. You know, you’re fuel to weight doesn’t exactly work out to be these high 90s, you know, and that’s been making it a bit challenging, but we’ve found some really cool ways just to get the mass right where it needs to be to get it to do what it needs to do.”

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What it needs to do, based on previous proclamations made by Musk, is help the car accelerate to 60 mph in less than one second, improve its handling and allow it to fly for short distances, likely in a hover fashion enabled by the cold gas thrusters.

Moravay didn’t say exactly when the public demo would happen, but that it was scheduled for this year.

Tesla is expected to reveal a new entry-level model based on the Model Y in the coming weeks, so it is possible the new Roadster will make an appearance at that event, although it also has its annual shareholders meeting scheduled for November 6, which is several months later than it is normally held.