Tesla’s Roadster Is ‘a Few Weeks Away,’ Says Its Chief Designer

Tesla’s chief designer Franz von Holzhausen told the Tesla Takeover Europe crowd on Saturday that the Roadster is arriving in “a few weeks,” twelve days after Ferrari’s first electric car shed 8% of Ferrari’s market value in a single trading session and nine days before SpaceX lists on the Nasdaq. Teslarati reported the remark, citing multiple event attendees who confirmed it directly, without any accompanying official Tesla announcement or press release.

Two days earlier, Electrek had reported, citing an exclusive from The Information, that the Roadster’s public demonstration has moved to August. That would mark the eighth timeline shift since the car’s prototype debuted in November 2017.

Ferrari’s Bad Week

Ferrari unveiled the Luce, its first production electric car, on May 25 at the Vela di Calatrava sports complex in Rome. CEO Benedetto Vigna called it “a very, very important day” for the company. The staging was elaborate: police escorts through the city for more than 200 journalists, a preview video featuring Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, and a DJ set once the car finally rolled in. Ferrari stock opened down 8% the next morning.

The Luce’s exterior and interior were designed by LoveFrom, the creative collective co-founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and designer Marc Newson. The car is a four-door, five-seater hatchback weighing 2,260 kilograms, with a 122 kWh battery powering four motors for a combined 1,035 horsepower. Ferrari claims 0-62 mph in 2.5 seconds, a top speed of 193 mph, and a range of over 500 kilometers. It starts at €550,000 ($640,000) with first deliveries planned for Q4 2026.

The backlash came fast and from familiar faces. Former Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo, who held leadership positions at the company for decades before stepping down in 2014, told Italian media: “I hope that they take off the prancing horse from that car.” Italy’s transport minister wrote on social media that the car “looks like anything but a car from the Prancing Horse.” Ferrari’s PR response escalated to unusual channels: a communique released the day after the stock fell showed Pope Leo inspecting and taking a ride in the Luce, an implicit endorsement from the Catholic Church’s newly elected leader. Bernstein analysts argued that collectors and completists would fill the order book regardless, writing that “if Ferrari builds the car, the clients will come.” Ferrari’s stock recovered 1.3% by Thursday as Vigna spent two days defending the design and price in media appearances.

On Friday, Vigna told reporters Ferrari will never build a fully autonomous car. “We want people to have fun, not the [computer] chips,” he said. “We want to have a steering wheel and a man or a woman behind the steering wheel.” Lamborghini has already cancelled its own electric vehicle program, citing weak demand in the luxury sports segment. Aston Martin has pushed back its first EV timeline as well. That was the landscape in European automotive news when von Holzhausen took a stage on Saturday and said “a few weeks.”

Eight Deadlines, No Car

The Road From 2017

The Roadster prototype debuted alongside the Tesla Semi at Tesla’s November 2017 launch event. Musk promised production by 2020, attaching a specification sheet that reset expectations for the EV performance category: a claimed 1.9-second 0-60 mph time, a top speed above 250 mph, and 620 miles of range. The Semi entered production and now moves freight for North American fleet customers. The Roadster from that night remains a prototype.

After COVID, the delays became structural. Musk repeatedly deferred the Roadster to prioritize higher-volume programs: the Cybertruck, the Semi, and successive Model 3 and Model Y updates. The Roadster returned to active public discussion only after those programs had shipped. By July 2025, VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy was telling interviewers the team had spent years rethinking the car from first principles to make it “the last best driver’s car” before autonomous technology becomes the industry norm.

The A71 Bottleneck

The November 2025 shareholder meeting introduced a new kind of candor. Musk set April 1, 2026 as the demo date and acknowledged on record that choosing April Fools’ Day gave him “deniability.” It was the first time Tesla’s CEO publicly admitted the timeline was partly structured around managing expectations rather than engineering confidence. The event did not happen. At the Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Musk said the demo might come “in a month or so.” That month became summer.

The engineering obstacle is the A71 system, Tesla’s cold gas thruster program developed in collaboration with SpaceX. Cold gas thrusters push pressurized propellant through nozzles without combustion, keeping the hardware road-legal while adding an acceleration burst the company says no production street car currently provides. Tesla and SpaceX engineers presented Musk with an internal A71 demonstration in late April 2026. The system was not ready for public display, and the demo was moved to August.

What Tesla Has Promised

Tesla’s performance specifications for the Roadster are unchanged from the 2017 prototype reveal. No production car exists yet to test them against.

• 1.9 seconds – claimed 0-60 mph time, which would rank among the quickest ever offered in a street-legal production car at any price
• 250+ mph – advertised top speed
• 620 miles – claimed single-charge range on a 200 kWh battery
• $50,000 – deposit required from early reservation holders since 2017

Two variants are confirmed. The SpaceX Package includes the full A71 cold gas thruster hardware. A scaled-down version drops the thruster for buyers who want the electric performance without the rocket-adjacent systems. Both will be assembled at Gigafactory Texas, a build location von Holzhausen and Moravy confirmed on the Ride the Lightning podcast in late May 2026.

On the Moonshots podcast with entrepreneur Peter Diamandis, Musk described what the car is for:

It’ll be the best of the last of the human-driven cars.

Musk has also said the Roadster will be Tesla’s only remaining manually operated model long-term, as Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology takes over the broader lineup. Von Holzhausen has separately revealed that Tesla is developing wireless EV charging capability for the Roadster, which would let owners charge by parking over a home pad without plugging in. Ferrari’s Vigna made nearly the same “man behind the wheel” argument on Friday, arriving at the same destination from an entirely different direction.

The SpaceX Week

The Roadster’s SpaceX Package carries that name because of a documented engineering collaboration, and that collaboration goes public on June 12. SpaceX begins trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX at a fixed price of $135 per share, targeting a $75 billion capital raise at a $1.77 trillion valuation. That would make it the largest initial public offering (IPO) in stock market history, more than triple the size of Alibaba’s 2014 listing.

Tesla’s position inside SpaceX is already material. The company holds 18.99 million SpaceX shares, worth roughly $2.56 billion at the IPO price, according to SpaceX’s S-1 prospectus filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. SpaceX’s xAI subsidiary also purchased $269 million worth of Tesla megapacks in April 2026, adding to the $430 million in megapack sales xAI made to Tesla the prior year. Musk will hold more than 82% of voting control in SpaceX after the offering. E*TRADE has set up a dedicated IPO share allocation for Tesla shareholders who have held the stock for at least 10 years, a structural detail that illustrates how thoroughly the two companies’ investor bases already overlap.

Discussions of a formal SpaceX-Tesla combination have circulated among market observers since early 2026. CNBC has previously reported that insiders suggest Musk wants to combine the companies, with 2027 as the most cited timeframe. The Roadster, with an A71 thruster built by SpaceX engineers installed into a Tesla body, is the most tangible current product signal of the organizational proximity that makes such a deal plausible.

Von Holzhausen delivered the “few weeks” claim on the fifth day of SpaceX’s investor roadshow, which launched June 4. Share pricing finalizes June 11; trading starts June 12. The Roadster, nine years into its wait, surfaced in the same week as the largest capital raise in market history.

Few Weeks Versus August

“A few weeks” from early June covers late June to mid-July at most. August sits nine weeks out. Musk’s documented track record with elastic language on the Roadster, the April Fools’ target chosen on record for “deniability,” the Q1 earnings “month or so” that became a four-month gap, means every qualifier Tesla attaches to this car carries more uncertainty than the words suggest.

The preparation signals are real. Tesla filed trademark applications for the second-generation Roadster badge in May 2026. Von Holzhausen and Moravy confirmed active testing at Gigafactory Texas on the Ride the Lightning podcast. A ground-effect aerodynamics patent was filed in August 2025. The A71 thruster reached an internal Musk demonstration in late April 2026, which is genuine progress from where the system stood a year ago when Moravy described it as one of the hardest engineering challenges in the program.

Even an August demo would not deliver a car to anyone. Tesla’s own stated production timeline runs 12 to 18 months after the public showcase, putting first builds somewhere between mid-2027 and late 2028. Reservation holders who placed $50,000 deposits starting in 2017 will have waited at minimum a decade. The demo, whenever it arrives, is planned for Texas and will give the public its first look at the A71 thruster operating in a car.