166 Comments The Tesla Roadster appears to be quietly disappearing after years of delay. is it ever going to be made? I may have jinxed it with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which suggests any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with “no.” The prototype for the next-generation Tesla Roadster was first unveiled in 2017, and it was supposed to come into production in 2020, but it has been delayed every year since then. It was supposed to get 620 miles (1,000 km) of range and accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds. Advertisement - scroll for more content It has become a sort of running joke, and there are doubts that it will ever come to market despite Tesla’s promise of dozens of free new Roadsters to Tesla owners who participated in its referral program years ago. Tesla uses the promise of free Roadsters to help generate billions of dollars worth of sales, which Tesla owners delivered, but the automaker never delivered on its part of the agreement. Furthermore, many people placed deposits ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 to reserve the vehicle, which was supposed to hit the market 5 years ago. The official timelines from Tesla are pretty useless at this point since they haven’t stuck to any of them, but the latest official one dates back to July 2024 when CEO Elon Musk said this: “With respect to Roadster, we’ve completed most of the engineering. And I think there’s still some upgrades we want to make to it, but we expect to be in production with Roadster next year. It will be something special.” He said that Tesla had completed “most of the engineering”, but he initially said the engineering would be done in 2021 and that was already 3 years after the prototype was unveiled and a year after it was supposed to be in production: Musk commented on the Roadster again in October 2024, but he didn’t reiterate the 2025 timeline. Instead, he called the new Roadster “the cherry on the icing on the cake.”