Toyota Motor Corporation President Akio Toyoda steps out of Tesla Motors’ electric vehicle “Roadster” with Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk (in the back of the car) as they arrive at a press conference in Tokyo, November 12, 2010.
Kazunari Kato | Reuters
8 years ago tesla CEO Elon Musk promoted the next-generation Roadster by naming the electric car the company debuted in 2008 after the sports car.
The updated version is not yet in production. But Musk again promised that new products are in the works.
In a conversation with podcaster Joe Rogan published Friday, Musk was asked about the long-delayed vehicle. He provided a sense of timing but declined to share the latest technical or design details.
“You can’t make an announcement before it’s announced,” Musk said. As previously stated, Musk claimed that the new Roadster “could be the most memorable product launch of all time.”
Tesla aims to show off the improved Roadster to fans and investors “hopefully by the end of the year,” Musk said.
Musk’s comments came a day after his former close friend and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that he was canceling his Roadster reservation from 2018 and trying to get his deposit refunded. He shared a screenshot showing an email to the company being bounced.
“I was really excited about this car!” Altman wrote. “I understand the delay, but waiting seven and a half years seemed like a long time.”
Musk, who helped launch OpenAI in 2015, has been in a bitter legal dispute with Altman and now runs competing artificial intelligence startup xAI.
Patrick George, editor-in-chief of InsideEVs and a longtime industry observer, told CNBC on Friday that the Roadster “has been MIA for years.”
“The only thing that would cause Mr. Musk to start talking about this again is that his biggest rival, Sam Altman of OpenAI, just recently said that he was trying to cancel a reservation for the Roadster that he had held since 2018,” George said.
Earlier this year, popular gadget and car critic Marques Brownlee spoke about the difficult process of canceling his Roadster reservation in an interview on the Waveform Podcast.
The Roadster is a high-end, low-volume model intended to challenge vehicles like BYD’s YangWang U9 Xtreme, which was recently crowned the world’s fastest production car.
Musk and his board are asking investors to approve a huge pay package, and Musk will face a vote on Tesla’s largest shareholder next week.
The compensation plan would give Musk nearly $1 trillion in Tesla stock, with his stake increasing to about 25% depending on whether the company reaches various market valuations and other growth milestones.
Watch: CNBC interview with Tesla Chairman Robin Denholm
