Success Is Not Guaranteed. Excitement Is.

In February 2018, SpaceX bolted Elon Musk's own cherry-red Tesla Roadster to the first Falcon Heavy and fired it into orbit around the sun, a mannequin named Starman at the wheel. On Thursday night in Texas, the rocket company returned the favour.

At SpaceX's test site at McGregor, outside Waco, Tesla finally unveiled the second-generation Roadster, almost nine years after a prototype promised deliveries by 2020. It was less a product launch than a stunt. With nobody on board, the white two-seater drove up a ramp that curled back over itself, clung upside down by suction, flipped off the end and steadied itself in mid-air on bursts of compressed gas before touching down. It then hopped over a Cybercab, a Cybertruck, a Semi, a Model Y and a Model 3, and sprinted to 60 mph in under a second. Musk, watching from a safe distance, supplied the night's most honest line.

"Success is not guaranteed. I mean that. It'll probably work." - Elon Musk, Chief Executive, Tesla and SpaceX

Three trims are promised: Performance for the road, Thrust with rear cold-gas thrusters for the track, and Rocket, an invitation-only single-seater with ten thrusters around the body. Tesla quotes about 300 miles of range and more than 230 mph, production in 2028, no price and a $50,000 reservation.

The thrusters, engineering vice-president Lars Moravy explained, draw on 600 litres of compressed air held in carbon-wrapped pressure vessels, the same class of component behind several SpaceX rocket explosions.

One engineering stack, two badges

Strip away the theatre and the real reveal comes into view: a single engineering stack wearing two corporate badges, with propulsion, pressure vessels and control hardware from the rocket company fitted to a car company's chassis. Musk framed it as the best car maker meeting the best rocket maker. Starlink already rides inside the Cybercab, the two companies are co-developing the Terafab chip plant, and Dan Ives, Wall Street's loudest advocate of a merger, took the Roadster as proof of concept.

"Strengthens the case for the two companies operating as one engineering platform." - Dan Ives, Analyst, Yorkville Ives

There is an artificial intelligence story in the exhaust too. Tesla's valuation rests on robotaxis and humanoid robots, not sports cars, and Musk has cast the Roadster as a last hurrah for human drivers, a farewell gift to the steering wheel from a company that has spent the year building cars without one.

"The best of the last of the human-driven cars." - Elon Musk, on the new Roadster

Markets applauded, then thought better of it. Tesla shares jumped as much as 5 per cent before Friday's open, then closed down 2.1 per cent at $354.72 as a broader technology sell-off dragged the Nasdaq down by the same margin. SpaceX slipped too. Ives told clients to treat the car not as a growth driver but as a polish for Tesla's halo a week before third-quarter results on 21 October, and Musk himself has conceded it will barely move revenue.

Social media told a different story. Tesla's livestream passed 11 million views on X, Musk's teaser about the 7:55pm start drew close to 30 million as fans read the time as 1955, the year Marty McFly lands in Back to the Future, and politicians from Ron DeSantis to Elise Stefanik marvelled at the clips. The sceptics were just as loud. Marques Brownlee, who once waited eight years on a reservation, asked whether the whole thing was a prank, and the Federal Aviation Administration said the car does not meet its definition of an aircraft.

What, then, was Musk trying to say? Very little about a car. He was saying that his companies now work as one organism, that the brand which taught the world to want electric cars can still make it look up, and that excitement can be summoned on demand even when deliveries cannot.

Musk even floated jumping the Snake River Canyon, which is where the evening's lesson lies. On 8 September 1974, Evel Knievel strapped into the Skycycle X-2, a steam rocket Idaho would permit only once it was registered as an aircraft, while audiences in several hundred theatres paid to watch on closed-circuit television. Too short of money for further tests, he flew his last machine, the parachute burst open early and the wind carried him back to the canyon floor, alive, adored and defeated.

Forty-two years later the stuntman Eddie Braun crossed the same gorge in a replica built from the original blueprints, with only the parachute changed, proving the idea had been sound all along and had simply needed time, money and a steadier hand. Musk's machine, which regulators insist is not an aircraft at all, may follow the same arc. Success, as he admitted, is not guaranteed, but excitement is, and as Knievel discovered half a century ago, the crowd pays for the launch long before anyone knows how the landing will go.

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