Tesla will reveal its long delayed second generation Roadster on October 1 in Waco, Texas, pairing a “Go for launch” teaser image with a countdown clock and a demonstration built around SpaceX thruster hardware.
The event lands weeks after a different Tesla product launch cost shareholders money. That gap between spectacle and disclosure is what investors have to price.
Nine Years, One Rocket Company
Tesla has set dates like this before. Musk once picked April 1 for the Roadster demo, then told shareholders he chose April Fools’ Day so he could always claim it was a gag.
That date passed. So did the ones after it.
The new plan involves cold gas thrusters, small nozzles that fire compressed gas, borrowed from SpaceX rocket parts. Teslarati reports the car may briefly leave the ground with nobody inside. Musk says it could hit 60 mph in 1.1 seconds.
However, not everyone buys the physics. Mate Rimac, founder of the rival hypercar maker Rimac Automobili, has pushed back on numbers like that.
“…you need something like 30.000 Nm on the wheels to accelerate below 1 sec 0-100 km/h.”
Tesla first showed this car in 2017 and promised deliveries by 2020. Nine years later, nobody has one.
What the Stock Did 10 Days Ago
Wall Street already ran this exact test. Tesla launched the Cybercab on September 3 at a closed Austin robotaxi event. No livestream. No public remarks from Musk. No fleet numbers.
Shares fell 5.92% to $354.08 that day, according to Yahoo Finance.
They clawed back to $365.44 by September 11. The average analyst target sits at $377.08, barely 3% above that. Tesla is priced on robots and software, themes that ran through its second quarter earnings, not on a car that hovers.
The difference is simple. A hover is a video. A build date is a business, and October 1 decides which one Tesla brought.