Tesla Roadster With Rocket Thrusters: Price, Specs and 2028 Launch

Quick heads-up: Tesla just showed off a new Roadster that can turn in mid-air using actual rocket thrusters built with SpaceX. Yes, you read that right. It’s not on the road yet, but it’s a wild thing to see.

If you’re into cars, EVs, or just enjoy a good Elon Musk spectacle, this one’s worth a few minutes over your karak. Tesla says this new Roadster will start production in 2028, more than ten years after the company first teased a next-generation version of its sports car back in 2017.

Here’s everything that happened at the reveal, what the car can actually do, what it might cost, and why some analysts think this is about more than just a car.

So what did they actually show?

The event happened at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, and it had every bit of the usual Musk theatre: dramatic music, smoke, hissing sounds, and a countdown like a rocket launch.

The white two-seater drove upside down on a ramp using a suction system, turned mid-air, and landed using its built-in thrusters. Later, it used the same thrusters to jump clean over a truck and other vehicles, twisting while it was in the air. One investor and Tesla fan, Sawyer Merritt, who watched it live, said on X it was “the most insane product demo” he’d ever seen and that he was “still asking how this wasn’t AI.”

Musk, wearing a silver Western-style belt buckle with the Tesla logo on it, told the cheering crowd of enthusiasts and investors that the car was “the culmination of incredible work by Tesla and SpaceX engineers working closely together to make something that you haven’t seen in any movie.”

How fast is this thing, really?

Tesla’s vehicle engineering chief, Lars Moravy, said the Roadster can go from zero to 60 mph in under one second and hit a top speed of over 230 mph. Musk, clearly excited, jumped in and said it would be “definitely much faster than that,” adding that he thinks it could get to “halfway to the speed of sound.”

On a single charge, the car can reportedly travel over 300 miles. That’s less than half of what Musk originally promised back in 2017, when Tesla first showed a prototype of this second-generation Roadster and said deliveries would start in 2020. So yes, this has been a long time coming, and the numbers have changed quite a bit along the way.

What will it cost, and can you even reserve one?

No final price was given at Thursday’s event. Nearly a decade ago, Tesla had quoted a base price of around $200,000 for the Roadster.

Tesla’s reservation page now shows a few tiers. A “Performance” version needs a $50,000 deposit. A “Thrust” version, which comes with “acceleration thrusters,” needs $250,000. There’s also a “Rocket” variant described as invite-only, a single-seat model with a “full flight system,” though Tesla hasn’t shared much else about that one.

For context, even the lower deposit alone works out to roughly KD 15,000, and that’s before the car itself is priced. This isn’t going to be a common sight on the Gulf Road or Fifth Ring Road any time soon, but it’s the kind of car that tends to show up eventually in car meets and showroom windows around the region once it’s actually in production.

Why is Tesla doing this now?

Some people who watched the reveal think this is Musk drumming up interest in merging his two big companies, Tesla and SpaceX. He’s floated the idea before, talking about how much the two companies already overlap.

Gene Munster, managing partner at Tesla investor Deepwater Asset Management, was blunt about it on X. He called the reveal “an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers,” and said the event was “the latest example of why Elon can’t wait to bring [Tesla] and [SpaceX] together.”

Musk himself has played down how much this car matters to Tesla’s bottom line. Back in 2023, he called it a “small potato situation” that wouldn’t “move the needle in a major way financially.” But it still matters symbolically. Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein noted last month that Tesla doesn’t currently have a “halo car,” meaning a flagship, high-performance vehicle meant to show off an automaker’s best engineering. He said the Roadster will fill that role for Tesla.

The bigger picture: Tesla is changing what it actually sells

The original Roadster, sold between 2008 and 2012, was Tesla’s very first electric vehicle. It used a Lotus Elise chassis and is widely credited with changing how people saw electric cars, before Tesla became known for the Model Y, Model X, Model S and Model 3.

These days, though, Tesla’s focus has shifted hard towards artificial intelligence, self-driving technology and robotics, and away from simply building cars for human drivers. This year, Tesla actually stopped selling the Model S and Model X to free up production space for its Optimus humanoid robots. It also launched the Cybercab, a two-seat robotaxi that has no steering wheel, pedals or mirrors at all.

So in a way, the Roadster reveal stands out as a bit of old-school car theatre in the middle of a company that’s clearly thinking about a very different future.

What this means if you’re watching from Kuwait

For most people here, this isn’t going to change your daily commute any time soon. But if you follow EVs, car tech, or just enjoy watching Musk do his thing, it’s a reminder that Tesla’s identity is shifting fast, from the company that made EVs cool to one betting big on robots and self-driving software.

If you’re the kind of person who likes keeping an eye on luxury and performance car trends in the Gulf, this is one to bookmark. Deliveries are years away, but reservation pages tend to open up interest from collectors in this region well before cars actually land here.

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