MCGREGOR, Texas — Tesla unveiled its redesigned Roadster on Thursday, nine years after the company first showed the car in 2017 and six years after the date it gave for customer deliveries. The demonstration took place at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, where the car climbed a curved ramp, stayed attached while upside down on fan-based suction, and fired cold-gas thrusters to launch, flip in midair and land. Some coverage called it a flying car. What it did was a launch, a flip and a landing.
The original plan was simpler. Tesla showed the car in November 2017 and promised customer deliveries in 2020. The date then moved several times. On Thursday the company said it is targeting production in 2028, which coverage described as a target rather than a guarantee that every outstanding order will be filled by a particular date.
Dale Pruett, 58, of Dayton, Ohio, put his name on the list in 2017 for a car that was supposed to arrive in 2020. He watched the demonstration at his kitchen table, where a folder marked “Roadster, Pending” sat beside a cold cup of coffee.
“I put my name on the list in 2017 for a car that was going to arrive in 2020,” Pruett said. “Now it’s ahead of that, so I’m six years early and nine years late. I’ve decided to stay in the middle.”
Dr. Chad Brickhouse, a senior fellow at the Institute for Common Sense, said the timeline can be read two ways, and the company has chosen both. “Measured against 2020, it is six years early,” Brickhouse said. “Measured against 2017, it is nine years late. It is the same car, on the same ramp, and it landed in the same place.”
The arithmetic is not complicated. Under the company’s current schedule, the Roadster is nine years late and six years early at once, which is a state the institute has not previously recorded in any product category. Brickhouse said the institute had asked its analysts to check the figures. They checked them, and they said the figures were correct, and they asked whether the institute could stop tracking the car.
Tesla did not disclose a price. Coverage of the event described the thrusters as the centerpiece of the demonstration and noted that the car’s acceleration figures came from the company. Those figures were not independently measured.
Pruett said he plans to wait for the car in 2028, or possibly earlier, depending on how the thrusters are scheduled. He has already moved his reservation paperwork to a high shelf, next to the folder from the last delay.
Tesla did not say whether he would receive his car early, late or both.