Tesla is turning to 50-year-old stunt technology in its roadster reboot

If you want to spin a car in the air, compressed gas is a good way to do it.

A rendering of the newer Tesla Roadster. Although there's clearly a roof here, Tesla says the roof panel is removable.

Nine years after first attempting to revive the Roadster, Tesla is apparently at it again. CEO Elon Musk may have moved his headquarters to Texas, but he's still back in the California show business to sell his wares. Last time he was in Hollywood for the Cybercab remote control demo, last night he used decades-old stunt technology to trick a show car into the air.

The new roadster is said to look like nothing else, though its angular, wedge-shaped styling owes more than a little to Giorgetto Giugiaro's original Lotus Esprit - Musk is famous for owning a James Bond car - as well as the recent Lamborghini Gallardo. At the rear there are four giant exhaust pipes. These do not indicate Tesla's sudden embrace of hydrocarbons beyond those emitted by private aviation.

Rather, it's where jets of 100,000 psi of compressed nitrogen shoot out. It's early in the morning and the federal motor vehicle safety laws are being read very strictly, so I still haven't found the section that explains how and when it's legal to use something like this on the road.

Unusually, Tesla says it's sticking with rear-wheel drive for the new electric car. The battery pack uses the problematic 4680 cells in an attempt to increase the internal scale; Customer complaints of poor performance were likely the driving force behind creating what the company says is special battery chemistry for this model.

Some performance claims are even bigger than nine years ago. Now, Musk claims a planned top speed of 383 mph (616 km/h) and a 0-60 mph time of 0.8 seconds. And just like the last time this happened, there are already other electric cars on sale that are more capable than Tesla claims.

And now, it's McMurtry Spéirling, made to look like a miniature Batmobile (good Michael Keaton) and able to generate up to 3.5 Gs of lateral force. Tesla's best claim for the new Roadster is 2 Gs. Oh, and Spirling will definitely drive upside down.

Sperling has also set a lap of the Top Gear test track faster than an F1 car, broken the Goodwood Hill Climb record, and I'm sure it would blow away VW's pristine Pikes Peak lap time if VW hit it. McMurtry has sold at least 24 of the planned 100 cars.

In 2022, McMurtry climbed the Goodwood hill faster than anyone else, including a Formula One car.

Musk claims that the Roadster will be in production by 2028. In 2017, he told attendees at an earlier launch event that "we're building it." Using the company's referral program, people lined up to get two free cars. But those free cars never showed up, and neither did the ones people deposited $50,000 for: last year, Sam Altman found out how hard it is to get that money back.

And it's not like there's actually much of a market for super-expensive, super-fast electric cars: hypercar buyers want noise and emotional connection, and they're not getting that from an electric car.

Meanwhile, Tesla's core business continues to struggle. Even in the seasons when the company has good sales, its profits are destroyed by increasing costs and decreasing sales prices. And lately, sales haven't been good.

Its stratospheric valuation was largely based on promises of steady growth, something that might have seemed possible when its market share was close to total and there was little competition from EVs. But now Europe and China have hundreds of models to choose from, only two of which are offered by Tesla. Both the Model 3 and Y are getting increasingly old, and Tesla has shown little ability to innovate as quickly as the Chinese brands, which have churned out a lot of sales there. In fact, it may even leave the Chinese market.

But as Musk has told us time and time again, Tesla is no longer a car company. Right now, he seems more interested in Tesla's merger with SpaceX, and claims synergy with AI despite the fact that most of his AI revenue comes from renting GPU time to others. But the merger gives SpaceX a window into the S&P 500, which rejected the rocket company in June. It needs several consecutive profitable quarters to be included. If Musk succeeds, he will have access to billions of dollars from passive mutual funds that invest retirement accounts in the S&P 500. Apparently, this could happen before the end of the year.

Jonathan is the automotive editor at Ars Technica. He has a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in the field of pharmacology. In 2014, he decided to pursue his lifelong passion for cars by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute to launch Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington DC.