Tesla has reopened reservations for its next-generation Roadster, asking buyers for a $50,000 deposit about two weeks before the car is even unveiled.
The reserve page went live this week ahead of an October 1 reveal near Waco, Texas. It’s the second time Tesla has collected $50,000 for the Roadster. The first batch of deposit-holders is still waiting, nearly nine years later.
The page asks for $5,000 on a credit card today, described as “fully refundable,” followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. The reservation isn’t final until the wire clears.
The second time around
Tesla first took Roadster deposits in November 2017, when it rolled a prototype onto the stage at the Semi event. The terms then were the same $50,000 for a standard reservation, plus a $250,000 “Founders Series” that required the full amount up front. Production was promised for 2020.
That never happened. The 2017 Roadster has been delayed at least eight times and hasn’t delivered a single unit. We reported last year that reservation holders, including Marques Brownlee (who’d waited eight years), struggled to even get their deposits back, with Tesla initially hanging on to the $5,000. Sam Altman says he was ghosted when he tried to cancel his.
So the new reservations ask a familiar question: hand Tesla $50,000 now, trust it to build the car later. Except this time buyers are putting the money down before Tesla has shown the production version at all.
What Tesla is promising this time
Tesla says the October 1 event will reveal pricing, specs, and production targets. Elon Musk has spent months teasing a demo built around SpaceX-designed cold gas thrusters that he says will let the car “fly,” or at least hover. The stunt car is expected remote-operated, won’t be street legal, and could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars on its own.
Musk isn’t hiding the ball on expectations. “It’ll be a banger. Excitement guaranteed. Success is not guaranteed, but excitement is,” he said at the All-In Summit this month. He added that Tesla needs a live audience “to vouch for the fact that this is not AI.”
The 2017 car promised a 620-mile range, a sub-1.9-second 0-60 mph time, and a 250+ mph top speed for a $200,000 base price. The latest teasers point to a redesign with Tesla’s angular “Cyber” styling and a full-width light bar borrowed from the robotaxi line/Cybertruck. As we wrote last week, the Roadster never needed a redesign. It needed to ship.
Prediction markets aren’t buying it either. On Polymarket, a contract on the Roadster reaching customers by the end of 2026 sits under 5%, though that market is thinly traded. A separate 2027 contract prices it around 61%.
Full disclosure: I’m one of the people waiting. I hold two Founders Series Roadster referral awards from Tesla’s old referral program, and this week Tesla quietly swapped the placeholder art in my account for the new teaser image, the same one now on the reserve page.
We’ve watched this movie before. In 2017, Tesla took $50,000 deposits, promised a 2020 delivery, and then spent the better part of a decade not building the car. Those buyers still don’t have a Roadster. Now Tesla is running the same play, and it’s collecting the cash before anyone has seen the production version.
The October 1 show might finally give us a production-intent Roadster with a real price and a real timeline. But I won’t trust it’s happening until cars are actually in the hands of cusotmers.
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