Responding to a question asked by a Tesla fan, company CEO Elon Musk said the upcoming Roadster EV would be able to sprint from zero to 60 miles per hour (96.6 km/h) in less than a second. That’s about twice as fast as the previous assessment, which also struck us as overly optimistic back when we heard it a few years ago. At any rate, Musk also dropped a launch date estimate.
When Tesla just began teasing the next Roadster generation, it promised a 0-60 mph launch time of around 2 seconds. In 2021, Musk said a special upgrade package called SpaceX would slash that time to just 1.1 seconds. He has now upped that target yet again. If the company somehow manages to stay true to this promise, the second-gen Tesla Roadster might become the world’s fastest-accelerating production vehicle in history. That said, it’s a rather big “if”, looking back at Musk’s extensive track record of misleading and false promises.
In his reply, Tesla CEO said that acceleration wasn’t by far the most exciting parameter of the Roadster. He added that its premiere would be the most mind-blowing event of this kind in history. With most of the engineering and design already done, the public debut is now allegedly penciled in for late 2024. Therefore, the sales could begin as early as 2025.
