SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 15 (Reuters) - Tesla is set to unveil its redesigned Roadster on Thursday, nearly nine years after it first showed a next-generation version of its electric sports car.
Tesla revealed a prototype of the $200,000 car in 2017 and said deliveries would begin in 2020. The price has not been updated but reservations are still $50,000 each.
Chief Executive Elon Musk has played down the car's importance to Tesla's finances, describing it in 2023 as a "small potato situation" that would
not "move the needle in a major way financially."
But the car still carries symbolic weight.
"Tesla does not currently have a halo car, or high-performance luxury vehicle designed to showcase an automaker's best engineering and technology. The Roadster will be Tesla's new halo car," Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein said in a note last month.
Musk set expectations in 2017, saying a four-seat Roadster would travel 620 miles (1,000 km) on a single charge. In 2024, he posted on X that it had been redesigned. The new Roadster would accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour (100 km per hour) in less than a second. "And that is least interesting part," he wrote, adding it was a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX, the rocket company Musk also leads.
Goldstein expects Tesla to sell around 2,000 Roadsters a year — a fraction of the 1.6 million vehicles Tesla sold last year.
The original Roadster, released in 2008 and on sale until 2012, was Tesla's first-ever EV and used a Lotus Elise chassis. It helped change the world's view of what an electric vehicle could be. The company has since been known for its Model Y and Model X SUVs and Model S and Model 3 sedans.
The reveal of the second-generation Roadster also comes amid a sharp shift in Tesla's focus to artificial intelligence-led self-driving tech and robotics, from manufacturing cars for human drivers.
This year, Tesla stopped selling Model S and X vehicles to make space for production of its Optimus humanoid robots. It also launched Cybercab - a two-seater robotaxi that comes without manual controls such as a steering wheel, pedals and mirrors.
The Roadster event is set to start at 8:55 p.m. EDT (0055 GMT) on Thursday at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas.
(Reporting by Abhirup Roy in San Francisco; Editing by Peter Henderson and Chris Reese)
