Tesla Roadster Reveal: Livestream Transcript Tesla Roadster reveal livestream, October 15, 2026 Source: https://www.youtube.com/live/qt5p-_tE8d0 Note: This is an edited version of YouTube's auto-generated English captions, prepared by Electron Motion (electronmotion.com). Punctuation, capitalization and obvious mis-hearings have been corrected and filler words trimmed. Speaker labels appear only where the speaker is clear. Unclear passages are marked [inaudible]. Timestamps are approximate and follow the YouTube video. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [00:00:00] [Pre-show music] == Roadster legacy and welcome == [00:05:07] Franz von Holzhausen: Welcome, everybody. Hey everyone, welcome to McGregor. I'm Franz, this is Lars. We hope you enjoyed our little pre-show Raptor static fire over there. [Cheering] [00:05:19] Franz von Holzhausen: We are here at SpaceX's rocket test and development center in McGregor, Texas. It's 4,000 acres. Thank you for having us. Thank you for hosting us, SpaceX. Thank you to everyone that's here, and thank you to everyone watching online. [00:05:39] Franz von Holzhausen: We're 20 years from when Elon first introduced the Roadster to the world. It was really a proof of concept that proved EVs were a viable product. Fun to drive, could go the distance. They were real cars. And look at how far we've come in those 20 years. [00:05:59] Lars Moravy: Yeah. To be honest, the Roadster is the reason I came to Tesla. We had a master plan to build an EV that proved we could do everything Franz just said, and then make a cheaper EV that people could afford with Model S. And then we built Model 3 and Model Y. But the last time we had Roadster and SpaceX together, we put Elon's into orbit, and you can see it there. Starman is still out there somewhere. Amazing feat. [00:06:34] Lars Moravy: But I think we should get Elon out here to talk more about that. What do you think? [Cheering] Elon, come on out. == Collaboration and vision == [00:07:00] Elon Musk: All right. You're going to see some crazy stuff tonight. We need an audience to prove that it's not AI or CGI. So you can tell people you saw it with your eyes, because what you see with your eyes, you will not believe. [00:07:23] Elon Musk: You're going to see the results of what happens when you have a collaboration with the world's best car company and the world's best rocket company. This is the culmination of incredible work by Tesla and SpaceX engineers working closely together to make something that you haven't seen in any movie. Better than any James Bond car. I'd never seen anything like this. When I suggested this to the team, I thought, am I crazy? Maybe a little bit. [Laughter] [00:08:12] Exactly. Am I crazy? Not at all. 100% sane. [00:08:20] Elon Musk: Things kind of built upon themselves, and we're like, well, maybe we could do a little more of this and a little more of that. By the way, success is not guaranteed. It'll probably work. [Laughter] But if it doesn't work, we're at a safe distance. And excitement is 100% guaranteed. So let's go. [00:09:09] The future is autonomous, Elon, right? [00:09:10] Elon Musk: Yes. [00:09:12] But this is not an autonomous car. It is the last... [00:09:16] Elon Musk: Well, it is technically autonomous for this demo, to make sure we don't kill anyone. Just in case. But this will actually be, long-term, the only manually driven car that Tesla makes. You're going to have some fun sometimes. And if you're going to have only one manually driven car, let's take it to the limits and way past the limits. [00:09:48] Elon had this crazy idea. I don't know where it came from. [inaudible] Guys, we've got 10 seconds. Should we count it down? Four, three, two, one. == First flight demonstration == [00:10:12] [Music. Flight demonstration.] [Cheering] [00:12:18] Elon Musk: Well, it worked. Flying cars are real. == Advanced aerodynamic tech == [00:12:25] Elon Musk: A friend of mine, Peter Thiel, once said that the future promised us flying cars, but instead we got 140 characters. Well, not anymore. [Laughter] That's not the last thing you'll see, by the way. [00:12:47] To do that, we have a fan suction system on the bottom of the car that can pull up to 2 Gs in order to make the car go upside down. And then we borrowed some technology from SpaceX to do the rest. [00:12:55] Elon Musk: I mean, this car really sucks. This car could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. [Laughter] It could suck a tennis ball through a hose pipe. And it can stick upside down. Now you might say, how often do you want to stick upside down in a car? Maybe not that often. But it actually has a benefit on the track, or just driving, where the downforce means you can corner incredibly well. It looks like you're breaking physics, because the car sticks to the ground so hard. So acceleration, cornering, it's going to crush every track record that has ever existed. [00:13:53] The last time we put Roadster with SpaceX, we had Starman in it. Maybe we should check. Did we put anyone in the cars? [00:14:05] I think Starman's going to make an appearance. I think he went for a little ride. Any minute now. There he is. [Laughter] [00:14:32] Elon Musk: Just to be clear, that is not a real human. [Laughter] The car obviously has attitude control thrusters and main thrusters in the rear, so it can basically fly like a rocket. It could do rolls. It could do crazy gymnastics. Whatever you want, really. Now I should say this is not necessarily a safety-optimized car, but it takes the fun meter to 11 out of 10. [00:15:12] Speaking of the fun meter, want to try something else? That was just a little flight. Let's do a longer flight. All right, let's see what we've got set up. [00:15:32] [Kickflip demonstration] [Cheering] == Design and inspiration == [00:16:04] I've seen a lot of things, but I've never seen that before. Tony Hawk would be proud. We call that the kickflip. [Laughter] I think we could have cleared our whole fleet. We can go further. [00:16:22] Elon Musk: This will be an actual car that's on the roads. I'm not sure it's necessarily legal in all jurisdictions, but there will be such a car that someone can own. So it's going to be pretty wild that you can have a rocket car. [00:16:40] Lars Moravy: To do that, we borrowed rockets from SpaceX technology. You talked about the carbon overwrapped pressure vessels. I just want to tell everyone, because I'm a spec guy: there are two of them in the car. They total 600 liters. There's about 250 kilos of air. And we have 10 nozzles to do all that work. [00:16:58] Elon Musk: It's using an advanced ultra-high-pressure air tank, so the car can recharge its air tank. It's not like you need special propellant or anything like that. It literally is just going to puff itself up and be able to do these maneuvers whenever you'd like. [00:17:21] Well, why don't we show them the car? Should we bring it out? [00:17:25] Franz von Holzhausen: Since we knew Roadster was going to fly, we looked for some inspiration about flying, and we thought we would lean into the most badass stuff out there: the SR-71, cars that transform. And that led us to the new Roadster. == Vehicle reveal and features == [00:18:22] Franz von Holzhausen: So now you get an up close look at the new Roadster. Thank you, Andy and Lamar. Those guys are kicking ass on our engineering team, making this all happen. [00:18:31] Franz von Holzhausen: You can see the car. Very clean. It's a nice clean aesthetic. Like I said, we leaned into some of the aerospace aesthetics. It's a two-seater. I'll open it up. As you can see, two guys got out of it. We leaned into lightweight as well, so the seats are molded into the chassis. It's a steer-by-wire system: a steer-by-wire yoke, by-wire brake, by-wire throttle. [00:19:00] Franz von Holzhausen: As we get to the rear of the car, this is where a lot of the action is. You can't see it, but online you can: in the diffuser area is where the thrusters are, and the fans. This is the business end of the car. But the car can transform, because we wanted to make a pretty car, but also a car that could deliver amazing downforce. So we'll turn the fans on for you. [00:19:35] Sorry, it's a little loud here. As Elon said, this car is meant to be the best driver's car, and to do that, we wanted to break the laws of physics. We put the fan suction system on there to give us traction to corner at greater than 2 Gs, and to accelerate with traction that goes beyond the tires, which is typically 1.26 Gs. [00:20:01] You see here we have two modes: a high downforce mode, and what the car is in now, a low drag mode. The fan system also has two modes. It can suck the car down at low speed to give us traction when we need it, and at high speed it will open up the front and rear parts of the suction system to create even more flow underneath the car. [00:20:22] Elon Musk: The rear wing has a variable pitch, so it can adjust the downforce dynamically, and it will do it automatically based on what it calculates you need when you're going around a track. [00:20:34] But Elon, how fast did you want to go 0 to 60? I can't remember. [00:20:37] Elon Musk: Well, you've got to break 1 second. [00:20:40] I tested this the other day. Can we put the test up, guys? This goes fast. [Test video plays] [Laughter] == Performance testing == [00:21:22] All right. 1 second, right? You said 1 second. [00:21:26] Elon Musk: Well, I said less than 1 second. [00:21:30] Hey guys, we have a car out there, right? Can you put it on max? Let's try and beat 1 second. [00:22:11] Do we have a time? What was the time, guys? We didn't have a whole lot of room out on the pad, so we had to cut it short. But do we have a live time? I'm waiting for it. [00:22:31] While we're getting the live time, I will say this. Elon mentioned the rocket thrusters. You can see that the thrust is exiting the back of the four thrusters faster than the speed of sound, so you see the Mach diamonds. It actually creates over 80 kilonewtons of thrust. [00:22:50] Elon Musk: There are cars, and then there's one car that has Mach diamonds. [Laughter] [00:22:55] I think we broke the system. We didn't do it in 0.17 seconds. [Laughter] 0.1 seconds? [00:23:04] Elon Musk: I think we'd destroy the human if we did that. [Laughter] [00:23:08] There you go. 0.81 seconds. There we go. Nice work. [00:23:19] Elon Musk: We anticipate being able to do better than that. I like Newton's formula, F = ma, or a = F/m. As you increase force and decrease mass, you get more acceleration. So the production car will actually do better than that. We'll just ride the limit of not detaching the retina of the human in the car. [Laughter] [00:23:49] It is the world's quickest production car, 0 to 60. It'll do a half mile in the time that other cars can do a quarter mile. I think that's really what we wanted to say today. What else have we got? [00:24:07] Top speed, of course. [00:24:10] Elon Musk: Depends on your street, but it'll be a viable car. And we're going to actually have a follow-on demo, or two, or [inaudible]. == Future goals and conclusion == [00:24:32] Elon Musk: I don't know if this is possible or not, but some people may know about Evel Knievel's attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon. [00:24:42] Let's give it another shot. [Laughter] That's going to look nuts. [00:24:58] Elon Musk: Have to go pretty fast to do that. Really fast. We're going to need a running start. [00:25:05] The car can go over 230 miles per hour. Hopefully we can get even faster. [00:25:10] Elon Musk: Definitely much faster than that. [00:25:13] How fast? [00:25:15] Elon Musk: Well, I think you've got to crack halfway to the speed of sound. Mach 0.5, maybe a little higher. [00:25:23] All right. Challenge accepted, sir. [00:25:32] Elon Musk: Where we're going, you don't need tires. [Laughter] [00:25:37] So today marks the day that we build the world's first best flying car, and the last best driver's car. When do you want to get it to customers? [00:25:48] Elon Musk: We enter production in 2028. Actually, for real. [00:25:58] Anything left in your bag? [00:26:05] Elon Musk: I think we might have one more little thing going. Okay, let's do the last thing. == Closing == [00:28:45] [Music] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ End of transcript.