It’s been almost eight years since Tesla first announced the next-gen Roadster, but CEO Elon Musk is once again promising that the electric sports car is nearing release. However, one early buyer (and Musk nemesis) is not convinced it’ll ever see the light of day.
As PCMag reports, in a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Musk claimed that Tesla will “hopefully” demo its new Roadster before the end of 2025, and that the vehicle includes “crazy, crazy technology,” different from what has previously been announced.
That came after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted that he’d cancelled the Roadster order he placed in 2018, but got an email bounce-back when trying to retrieve his $50,000 deposit. “I really was excited for the car! And I understand delays. But 7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait,” Altman wrote last week.
The next-gen Roadster, named after the first EV Tesla released in 2008, has been presented as a high-end, limited-edition model with more advanced features than other Teslas. It was initially slated for production in 2020 before being pushed back to 2021 and every year since. In early 2024, Musk promised it would go into production in 2025.
Musk hit back at Altman with his own tweet: “You stole a non-profit,” Musk wrote, alluding to OpenAI restructuring as a for-profit company, which prompted Musk to sue. He also said Altman got a refund on his Roadster deposit within 24 hours. “You forgot to mention [that],” Musk wrote, “but that is in your nature.”
Altman countered over the weekend, arguing that he “helped turn the thing you left for dead into what should be the largest non-profit ever. You know as well as anyone [that] a structure like what OpenAI has now is required to make that happen.”
Musk left the OpenAI board in 2018. He started xAI and released Grok partly in response to OpenAI and ChatGPT. “You also wanted Tesla to take OpenAI over, no nonprofit at all,” Altman added. “And you said we had a 0% [chance] of success. Now you have a great AI company, and so do we. Can’t we all just move on?”
The answer to that is probably nope. Musk’s most recent retweet concerns former OpenAI employees who have criticized Altman’s leadership. On the Roadster, meanwhile, Musk tells Rogan that, “If you took all the James Bond cars and combined them, it’s crazier than that.”
The CEO made a vague allusion to making flying vehicles. “My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars. I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.” When asked if Tesla is actively working on a flying car, Musk said people would “have to wait until the demo.”
Launching a science fiction-style flying car in just a few months seems highly unrealistic.
Electrek believes it’s more likely that any “flying” capabilities we see will involve technology such as cold-air thrusters or fans, which could help the new Roadster take off and hover for a few short moments. Musk’s bold predictions come as Tesla’s profits dropped 37% in its most recent quarter and amid yet-to-be-approved shareholder proposals that could result in him receiving $1 trillion in stock over the next decade.
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