Abstract:
In a dazzling press conference, Musk re-released a nine-year-old car, showing off shocking rolling stunts, but what he really wants is not to sell many supercars, but to bring back the aura of cool black technology to Tesla, thereby laying the foundation for a possible SpaceX merger.
After watching the Tesla Roadster somersault launch conference, top American technology video blogger MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) wrote on Is this a prank?
He later put it more directly in a conversation with Tesla fans: "It is impossible for you and me to buy this car (that can turn somersaults). Don't think of it as a product that will come true; the basic version, that is, the fan car, I think it is possible."
As a scheduled car owner, MKBHD is qualified to say this. He paid a deposit of US$50,000 to order a Roadster in 2018, but canceled the order last year. At that time, he complained publicly that Tesla took his 50,000 yuan and delivered nothing in eight years. Of course, MKBHD is not short of money at all. The main reason for canceling his subscription is that he and Musk have fallen out and the two have disowned each other.
A car that can turn somersaults
I have to say that the on-site effect of this conference was truly shocking. The car drove up a vertical or even inverted ramp, spun around in the air and then fell back to the ground. It must be pointed out that there is no real driver inside, it is operated by autonomous driving.
This cool effect shocked the audience and immediately became a hot topic in global media and social media. From this aspect, it fully achieves the cool technological halo effect that Musk wanted.
Vertical wall climbing and somersaults are two completely different techniques. The reason why it is mounted on the wall is because there is a fan installed under the car, located near the rear diffuser, which actively evacuates the air from under the car and forms a low-pressure area below, so the atmospheric pressure outside the car presses the entire car against the contact surface.
Engineering leader Lars Moravi explained that this system can produce up to two G of suction, and this number is exactly the dividing line between whether it can be driven upside down: the weight of the car body counts as one G. After it is inverted, gravity will pull the car off the wall. If the suction force is two G, there will be one G left to hold it down. So driving backwards depends not on speed, but on air pressure difference. In theory, the car cannot fall down even if it is parked there.
This is not an innovation. In the 1970 Can-Am race, Chaparral 2J used fans to extract air to create downforce. In the 1978 F1 race, the Brabham team's BT46B won the Swedish Grand Prix with the same design, and was subsequently banned by F1. The difference between Tesla and Tesla is that electric cars have enough power budget to drive high-power fans, while those racing cars back then had to take a portion of the engine output.
Somersaulting is another story, relying on air-conditioning for propulsion. Tesla Vice President of Engineering Lars Moravy gave a technical explanation. There are two carbon fiber wrapped pressure vessels on the car, containing about 250 kilograms, equivalent to 600 liters of high-pressure air; ten nozzles are distributed at the bottom, sides and rear of the car. According to Musk, the main thrust is at the rear and the attitude control nozzles are on both sides. The entire set of actions is controlled by Tesla's self-developed software.
The process of the action called a somersault is: the vehicle is traveling at normal speed, the nozzles on the bottom of the car lift the car off the ground, the side attitude control nozzles push the body to complete a 360-degree flip in the air, and then the downward-facing nozzles blow air to buffer it before landing. The whole process takes about three seconds. In another arch bridge demonstration, the car jumped about 68 feet and landed with a maximum overload of 3.2 G.
The fundamental difference between cold air propulsion and rockets is here: rockets rely on fuel combustion to produce high-temperature and high-speed gas, and the specific impulse is usually more than 300 seconds; cold air propulsion only releases compressed air and generates thrust by momentum exchange, and the specific impulse is about 70 seconds. The speed increment for the same kilogram of working fluid is much less. This explains why 600 liters of air is only enough for three seconds - it's not a conservative design, it's a physical upper limit.
To turn this set into a salable car, the difficulty is not whether it can be sprayed, but the two pressure vessels. All available cavities in the car are filled with high-pressure gas bottles. The safety standards of COPV under collision, fatigue and long-term storage conditions are two different systems from the crash test regulations of a sports car. There have been two rocket explosions in the history of SpaceX related to this. Filling a private sports car with COPV on public roads and unknown road conditions sounds daunting.
It will take a full 11 years
Quick stunts aside, the new Roadster is available in three gears, all with a range of 300 miles (approximately 483 kilometers) and a top speed of over 230 miles per hour (approximately 370 kilometers per hour). The two-seater Performance version comes with active aerodynamics and an adsorption system, and is positioned as a road-legal vehicle. The two-seater Thrust version has air-conditioning vents at the rear and can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in less than one second, so it is positioned as a track-legal vehicle. The somersaulting Rocket version only has one seat and ten nozzles. Tesla said this level is invitation-only.
MKBHD said that this technology cannot be mass-produced, which may not be accurate. To be precise, the version that can do that somersault is not a car for driving, but an exhibit for showing off stunts.
The new Roadster was originally released in November 2017. At that time, I went to the Los Angeles launch conference and experienced the charm of Musk’s innovative idol. At that time, the deposit for the regular version was US$50,000, and a founding version of US$250,000 required full payment in advance. It was promised to be put into production in 2020.
But Musk never delivered the car. Nine years have passed and it has been postponed at least eight times. Each time he said that he was solving technical problems and would give fans some new hope every once in a while. The version re-released last night is scheduled to be delivered in 2028. In other words, buyers will have to wait another two years, for a total of 11 years, starting from the originally promised production launch in 2020.
The process for re-opening the reservation this time is to first swipe $5,000 on the credit card, which Tesla said is fully refundable. Then the customer has ten days to pay the remaining $45,000, and the reservation will be considered established after the payment is received. The price of the new car has not yet been announced.
Bounced tickets have always been a common occurrence for Tesla. Roadster was announced at the Semi truck prototype launch conference, and the Semi itself also delayed delivery in small batches for many years; Cybertruck waited until the end of 2023 after the glass-smashing launch in 2019, and its scale was far lower than expected for a long time; Cybercab's mass production time has also been revised repeatedly. This model is quite stable: first use a visually stunning demonstration to lock attention and deposits, and then use several years to digest the gap between promise and reality.
Last night’s somersault was the most exaggerated one in this series of bounces. The degree of technical completion has indeed exceeded outside expectations, but between the demonstration and a car that can be sold to ordinary people, there are still obstacles such as crash testing, vehicle certification, pressure vessel safety standards, and a price that has not been announced yet.
A cool show car that creates a halo
Tesla’s third-quarter financial report is scheduled for October 21. Before this press conference, Tesla’s stock price had fallen for three days in a row, with a cumulative decline of 19.4% during the year. Tesla’s stock price rose more than 5% before the market opened last Friday, hitting $381.15. Then it spit it all back out.
At the close of the day, Tesla closed at $354.72, down 2.13%, with about 62 million shares traded, while the average trading volume was only 37.7 million shares. That is to say, after opening high, it was sold all the way, closing at a position close to the lowest level of the day, and falling on heavy volume. A press conference cannot buy a day of emotional recovery, and this is not the first time for Tesla.
Of course, the market was not doing well that day either. The S&P 500 fell about 1.1%, the Nasdaq fell 2.15%, and the entire electric vehicle sector was weakening. Therefore, it is normal that Roadster cannot change Tesla's trend. SpaceX stock price closed at $146.03 that day, down 1.74%.
It seems that the attitude of institutional investors is much calmer than that of retail investors. Gene Munster believes that this release is a demonstration of engineering strength, does not constitute a breakthrough for the stock price, and has no economic value for Tesla.
However, there is a special saying in the industry for a model like the Roadster called a halo car, which means that its mission is not to make money, but to prove the technical capabilities of the entire brand and create a cool halo. It is expected that the sales volume of the new Roadster will only be in the few thousand level. For a company with annual revenue of 100 billion US dollars, the impact of this magnitude on the financial statements will be close to zero.
But Tesla needs this cool launch of Roadster: the growth of electric vehicle sales is slowing down, the FSD narrative has been told for many years before it is just implemented, and the progress of humanoid robots is also being repeatedly questioned; at this time, Musk needs to come up with a car that can do somersaults in the air, conveying the message that we still have a lot of black technology.
What’s interesting is that the original Roadster in 2008 was Tesla’s first product. Its mission was to prove that electric cars can be neither ugly nor difficult to drive. That car is the reason for the company’s survival; and Musk’s tone for the 2026 generation is also very straightforward: it is the best car among the last batch of human-driven cars. The implication of this sentence is that Tesla’s future does not lie in this car.
The real story is the merger
Perhaps the biggest significance of this conference is not Tesla at all, but the future merger with SpaceX. The Roadster launch conference was held outside Waco, Texas, next to SpaceX's rocket test base. The car itself was jointly developed with SpaceX. The venue and partners have extra meaning at this point in time.
Barclays analyst Dan Levy just issued a report on October 14, judging that the official merger of Tesla and SpaceX may be announced before Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting. According to regulations, this annual meeting must be held before December 6. It should be noted that Levy’s basis is based on the public statements of management. The report does not mention that investment banks have been hired, a special committee of the board of directors has been established, or substantive negotiations are ongoing.
The magnitude of this deal is as follows: SpaceX has a market value of approximately US$2.07 trillion, Tesla has a market value of approximately US$1.45 trillion, and after the merger, it is close to 3.5 trillion. Levy's estimated share exchange ratio is about 0.7 SpaceX shares for each Tesla share; that is to say, in this plan, SpaceX actually acquires Tesla.
SpaceX was listed on Nasdaq just this year under the code SPCX. Its market value is already more than 40% higher than Tesla. A rocket company that has never delivered a consumer-grade product has a market value greater than that of the world's most valuable car company that has sold millions of cars. This inversion itself explains why the press conference was held next to the rocket test site last night. Now it's Tesla that needs SpaceX's halo.
Levi believes that the synergy of SpaceX's acquisition of Tesla is not financial, but the vertical integration of the industrial chain: holding the supply chain of chips, launches, and factories in one hand. He calls the two jointly built Terafab chip factories a key driver. He also admitted that it would be a complicated situation for Musk to obtain the approval of both boards of directors at the same time, especially Tesla, where he does not have an absolute voting power advantage.
Before the press conference, the prediction market gave only about a 24% chance of a formal merger announcement before December 31; overnight after the press conference, this probability jumped to 56%, nearly doubling. In other words, what the market reads from this car is not how many sports cars Tesla will sell, but how deeply the technology and personnel of the two companies have cooperated.
Dan Ives, a well-known analyst who has long been bullish on Tesla, confirmed this: This release makes the relationship between Tesla and SpaceX more tangible and tangible. Investor Ross Gerber put it more simply, saying the merger had become obvious.
Making big news is the purpose
Roadster has been delayed for nine years, and now the team finally has something to show off. Musk has previously said that this will be the most exciting demonstration of any product ever, regardless of whether it succeeds or not. After the press conference, he commented that he had never seen anything like it.
For Musk, making big news is an end in itself. Simply interpreting this press conference as raising the stock price would underestimate him. What he wants is for everyone to reaffirm one thing: no other company dares to throw a car into the air and turn around at the press conference. Only Tesla and Musk can do it.
By this standard, last night was a complete success. Trump posted that he was very happy for Musk and Tesla, saying the car was amazing; Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent congratulations; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wrote only one word: Wow.
The most interesting one comes from OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, Musk’s old enemy. He also paid a deposit of US$50,000 to order a Roadster in 2018. When he wanted to get a refund in 2025, he found that the email was returned, so he complained about Tesla on X. Musk first cursed, "You stole a non-profit organization," and then refunded him $50,000.
But after watching the new Roadster do somersaults, Altman praised it on This is probably all the desired effect of this conference.
Article / Silicon Valley Observation Zheng Jun
Comments