Tesla turns to 50-year-old stunt technology as it tries to Roadster again

Nine years after first trying to resurrect the Roadster, Tesla is apparently trying again. CEO Elon Musk might have relocated its HQ to Texas, but yet again he has returned to California’s showbiz industry to hawk his wares; last time it was a Hollywood back lot for the remote-controlled Cybercab demo, last night it was decades-old stunt technology to make a show car do tricks in the air.

The new Roadster, we’re told, will be unlike anything else, although the angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Giorgetto Giugiaro’s original Lotus Esprit—Musk is known to own a James Bond prop car—as well as the more recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear are four giant exhaust pipes; these do not signal Tesla’s sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation.

Rather, it’s where 100,000 psi jets of compressed nitrogen shoot out. It’s early in the morning and the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Statutes are dense reading, so I am yet to find the section where it explains how and when it’s legal to use such a thing on the road.

Unusually, Tesla says it stuck with rear-wheel drive for the new electric vehicle. The battery pack uses the troubled 4680 cells it has been trying to scale up in-house; customer complaints of poor performance were presumably the driving force behind developing what the company says is a special battery chemistry just for this model.

Some of the performance claims are even more grandiose than nine years ago. Now, Musk claims a planned top speed of 383 mph (616 km/h), with a 0-60 mph time of 0.8 seconds. And as with the last time this happened, there are already other EVs on sale that are more capable than Tesla’s vaporware claims.

You want to drive upside down?

And right now, that’s the McMurtry Spéirling, which looks like a miniaturized Batmobile (the good Michael Keaton one) and which is capable of generating up to 3.5 lateral Gs. The best Tesla claims for the new Roadster is 2 Gs. Oh, and the Spéirling will most definitely drive upside down.