Tesla will reveal the second-generation Roadster on October 1, 2026, nine years after it started taking deposits on a car it has never built. The company posted a teaser on X on Saturday, September 12, showing the car lit from below like it is sitting on a launch pad, four thruster plumes at the rear and the date 10.01 stamped across the bottom. The caption was three words: “Go for launch.” A countdown clock went live on Tesla’s Roadster page the same day.

EVXL covered the first version of this promise in July 2025, when Elon Musk left the design studio and posted that the most epic demo ever was coming by the end of that year. It did not. Neither did the three dates that followed.

The October Date Is at Least the Fourth Since November

October 1 is at least the fourth reveal or demo date attached to the Roadster since last November. The first three passed without an event. It is also the first the company announced itself, rather than Musk floating it in a reply or on an earnings call.

At the annual shareholder meeting on November 6, 2025, Musk put the demo on April 1, 2026, and told the room the April Fools’ date gave him “deniability because I can say I was just kidding,” according to contemporaneous coverage of the meeting. (The chief executive of a public company, pre-building the excuse.) In March he changed the word from demo to unveil and moved it to late April. On the April 22 earnings call it became roughly a month away. Then nothing until September.

It started before November. In July 2025 Musk promised the most epic demo ever by year’s end, and the November meeting arrived with nothing demonstrated. The habit is not Roadster-specific: EVXL flagged it in April, when Tesla said it was building a compact SUV cheaper than the Model 3 and had said so before.

The Invitation Puts the Reveal Next to a SpaceX Rocket Site

Invitations sent to reservation holders put the venue in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of Tesla’s Austin headquarters and next door to SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test facility. Tesla has not named the exact site, and it has not confirmed a livestream for anyone who is not in the room.

Tesla has not published the invitation. Images of the digital ticket circulated within hours of the teaser, and the details reported from it by Motor1 and Teslarati match: an 8:30 p.m. Eastern start, an RSVP deadline of midnight on September 16, entry limited to guests 21 and older, no transfers.

Musk has claimed since 2018 that an optional SpaceX cold gas thruster package, mounted where the rear seats would go, could take the Roadster to 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds. The September 12 teaser Tesla posted on X shows four plumes. Waco is where you would go to demonstrate that.

Reservations Cost $50,000, and 2017 Buyers Are Still Waiting

A base Roadster reservation cost $50,000: $5,000 online and $45,000 wired within ten days. Founders Series buyers paid $250,000 up front, capped at 1,000 cars. EVXL reported in April 2025 that the Founders Series alone put roughly $250 million in Tesla’s hands.

Tesla’s reservation agreement says the money is fully refundable until a purchase agreement is signed, and getting it back has still taken people months of phone calls. Marques Brownlee canceled one of his two reservations last year after eight years of waiting, telling his podcast audience that Tesla had been sitting on his $50,000 and done nothing with it. Sam Altman went public in October 2025 with screenshots of a refund request that bounced.

Those are the people Tesla is inviting to Waco.

The 2017 Numbers Are Still the Ones Tesla Has to Hit

Musk promised a 620-mile (998-kilometer) range, a top speed above 250 mph (402 km/h), and 0 to 60 mph (0 to 97 km/h) in 1.9 seconds, at $200,000. Nine years later those figures are still the benchmark, because Tesla has never replaced them.

Musk has since said the production car will be very different from the 2017 prototype, and that the acceleration target moved under one second. He has also put manufacturing at 2027 or 2028, at Giga Texas. Design chief Franz von Holzhausen said this year that the car was close, and he and engineering vice president Lars Moravy have confirmed it is in active testing. Those are statements of intent, not specifications.

The segment filled in while Tesla talked. Ferrari’s first EV was scheduled for October 2026, the same month as this reveal, and BYD’s Yangwang U9 has been on sale in China since 2024. Tesla went public in 2010 on the strength of the first Roadster and is reintroducing the second into a market others reached first.

EVXL’s Take

Credit where it is owed: this one is different. The date came from Tesla’s own account with a countdown on its own order page, and invitations went out with a deadline attached. That is a harder commitment than Musk posting on X that the unveil is hopefully next month.

Something is going to happen in Waco on October 1. What I don’t buy is that it settles anything. Tesla’s teaser says “Go for launch” and gives a date. It does not say whether the car on that stage is the production design or a demonstrator with thrusters bolted to it, and Tesla has not addressed the difference anywhere in its announcement. That gap is the whole story. A demonstrator that lifts off the ground for a moment in a field next to a rocket test site makes a great video and tells a deposit holder nothing about when a car arrives.

The thing to watch on October 1 isn’t the car. It is whether anyone from Tesla says a production month out loud, and whether that month is still the same month on the next earnings call. Given nine years and at least four dates in ten months, that is the bet, not the promise.

Tesla has had the use of that deposit money since 2017, refundable or not. If October 1 produces another slipped date, the decent thing to do is stop holding deposits on a car the company cannot schedule.

Sources: Tesla on X, Motor1, TechCrunch, Autoblog, Drive Tesla Canada, The Autopian

EVXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.