Published 10/16/2026 – 8:25 GMT+2•Updated 11:27 Tech billionaire Elon Musk gave Tesla fans a close look at the electric vehicle maker’s latest and perhaps most ambitious project on Thursday night: the long-awaited Tesla Roadster. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT “We need an audience to show that it’s not AI or SI,” Musk told the crowd at the livestreamed event. “Then you can tell people that you saw it with your eyes. Because what you see with your eyes, you won’t believe it.” In a spectacular demonstration, the Roadster, Tesla’s only manually driven car, drove up a towering curved ramp, flipped upside down before launching off the end, flipping in the air and landing safely on the ground as the crowd cheered. “Well, it worked,” Musk said. According to Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, who presented alongside Musk, the Roadster uses a “fan suction system” at the bottom of the vehicle that he says can “draw up to 2 G to make the car flip.” “Then we borrowed some technology from SpaceX to do the rest,” he said. Musk added that the Roadster has “altitude control thrusters and main thrusters on the back, so it can basically fly like a rocket.” “It can do turns, it can do crazy gymnastics,” he said, while joking that “it’s not necessarily a safety-optimized car.” A second demonstration then put that claim to the test, with the car approaching a row of other Tesla vehicles before shooting into the air and doing a “kickflip” over them. Another screen showed the Roadster accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in less than a second. Tesla’s website shows that the company is now accepting reservation orders for the car, with three variants available: Performance, Thrust and Rocket. The Rocket version is listed as invite-only. The Roadster has a range of more than 300 miles and a top speed of more than 230 mph (Rocket version), according to Tesla.
