Tesla's Roadster 2 arrives six years late to a US market with nearly 90 EVs

Take the person who put down a $50,000 deposit in 2017, when Tesla said the car would start at $200,000 ^[5]. That deposit is a quarter of the base price ^[18]. The delivery date they were working toward has slipped six years ^[4].

The 2017 pitch assumed the buyer wanted to leave gasoline behind. Musk said on stage that year, "The point of doing this is to give a hardcore smackdown to gasoline cars" ^[2]. The carmakers who sell to this buyer are acting on the opposite assumption. Porsche and Ferrari have said they will keep developing gas engines, and Lamborghini said earlier this year it would shelve electrics altogether ^[13]. Some luxury makers have worked hard to imitate the sound of a V-8 in cars that do not have one ^[14]. Wired reports that Bugatti's CEO, who founded his own electric hypercar company, expects loud ICE cars to become a status symbol among the wealthiest buyers ^[15]. Those are makers' bets on buyer behavior. Wired's report includes no sales or reservation data for the Roadster itself.

The mainstream EV shopper wants something else. Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of Industry Insights at Cox, said, "People are looking for range, performance, charging ability, resale value" ^[17]. Those shoppers now choose among nearly 90 EVs, up from 15 in 2017 ^[16]. That is close to six times as many ^[19]. Ed Kim, president of AutoPacific, described the hypercar end of the market differently: "EVs in this space really have to wow the shopper with a lot more than practical things" ^[9].

That leaves speed and spectacle to carry the sale, and the speed claim has moved. In 2017 Musk promised a then-record sub-2-second 0-to-60 time, and a handful of other production cars have since broken that barrier ^[10]. Shea Burns, a partner in the automotive and industrial practice at AlixPartners, said, "The laws of physics are catching up with them, outside of the rocket piece" ^[12].

Anyone with customers holding deposits on a late product can run a two-question test. List the reasons the customer committed. For each reason, ask whether the market still rewards it and whether the maker has shown it can deliver it. A reason that passes both stays in the pitch. One that passes the first and fails the second goes into writing with a date. One that fails the first needs a replacement before the customer asks for it. In our view, the Roadster's 2017 reasons fail the first question on Wired's evidence. Gas-engine makers are staying in the segment ^[13], and a sub-2-second time is no longer rare ^[10].