Real Artists Ship, Tesla Edition

Friday, 16 October 2026

Jonathan Gitlin, writing for Ars Technica:

Nine years after first trying to resurrect the Roadster, Tesla is apparently trying again. CEO Elon Musk might have relocated its HQ to Texas, but yet again he has returned to California’s showbiz industry to hawk his wares; last time it was a Hollywood back lot for the remote-controlled Cybercab demo, last night it was decades-old stunt technology to make a show car do tricks in the air. [...]

Musk claims that the Roadster will go into production by 2028. But the CEO has a long and glorious history of overpromising and underdelivering; in 2017 he told attendees at the previous launch that “We are making it now.” Using the company’s referral program, some people were in line to receive two free cars. But those free cars never showed up, and neither did the ones that people put down $50,000 deposits for; last year Sam Altman discovered how hard it can be to get that money back.

I like a good stunt show as much as the next guy, and this looked like a cool stunt show. But people are losing their minds if they think this stunt show makes it any more or less likely that Tesla will deliver a Roadster as promised. This Reuters story makes it sound like they think Tesla is going to sell cars that do this stuff. Last night’s stunt show has no more bearing on actual production cars Tesla may or may not ship than George Lucas’s Star Wars movie had on Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense system.

The Tesla Roadster is vaporware. But Elon Musk is very good at distracting from unshipped vaporware by delivering on stunts. Two years ago it was robots that were totally faked. Last night’s car stunt involved real things that actually happened but only in the way that David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty “disappear”.

Over at Jalopnik, Amber DaSilva has another good take, which concludes:

Tesla has long made up specs for its cars, made wild claims that weren’t substantiated by users, and now it’s making more big impressive claims. The “cars” used for the demos were likely nothing more than shells outfitted with exactly enough equipment to make the tests work. The 0.81 second zero-to-60 number wasn’t even shown with an on-screen timer during the event, let alone independently verified. Tesla has yet to prove anything about the new Roadster works in the real world, or could even exist within the realm of physics that those of us not named Musk occupy.

Roadster preorders have reopened, with the company once again taking $50,000 checks to reserve a car that’ll theoretically be made two years from now. It hasn’t yet said what will happen to the people who placed a reservation for the car Tesla announced nine years ago, which looks and functions completely differently to the one that bears its name today. And — arguably most concerning — we don’t know, if Tesla rakes in more money off the Roadster name, just how much will go to some malicious end.

And on Threads, Benedict Evans reiterates his longstanding take on what makes Elon Musk so confounding to so many people:

A long time ago, I described Elon Musk as a bullshitter who delivers. This is the perfect expression of that. This car was first shown a decade ago, with another stunt, and it never shipped. Now there’s another stunt, and another huge wave of PR and admiration.

But meanwhile, there’s the scaled car company, and the self-landing rockets!

Henry Ford was a brilliant industrialist, a terrible manager and a racist piece of shit. Several things can be true at once.

If you think Musk is either completely legitimate and trustworthy or an utter fraud, you are wrong. He has led his companies to extraordinary accomplishments, and he has made promises based on complete bullshit. He is a shameless bullshitter who sometimes delivers. The sometimes is implicit in Evans’s take, because if he always delivered, there’d be no bullshit. But I think it’s worth including the sometimes to make the point. And some of the things he’s delivered are so amazing that they sure sounded like they might be bullshit when they were announced. “Space internet” sounded like total bullshit when Musk announced it in 2015, but it started rolling out in 2020, and today you can just buy it at Best Buy for $350.

Tesla makes some tremendous vehicles. Their self-driving technology is the best in the consumer market. (Not as good as Waymo’s, but you can’t buy a Waymo.) So maybe they will ship a great Roadster in 2028. I’ll pay attention if and when they do. But I wouldn’t bet a nickel that they will. And I wouldn’t bet that they won’t, either.