Tesla Roadster Speed Bump: Does It Dent TSLA’s Investment Thesis?
Tesla TSLA has moved its Roadster demonstration from Oct. 1 to Oct. 15, citing severe weather forecast for central Texas. On its own, a two-week slip is minor. But it is the latest in a long string of postponements, and for investors the real question is how much faith they can place in Tesla’s timelines.
The Roadster Demo and Its Long Trail of Delays
The demo is planned at SpaceX‘s SPCX rocket test site in McGregor, near Waco. Tesla intends to make the car hover using a cold gas thruster package developed by SpaceX. Elon Musk has said the car should hit 60 mph in under two seconds on its own, and in under one second with the thrusters.
The Roadster was unveiled in 2017 with production promised for 2020. Nearly a decade on, there is still no production car, and even the public demo keeps sliding. Its target date has now been reset six times, per Electrek, starting with the end of 2025 and passing through April 1, late April, a vague “month or so,” August and October 1. Tesla guides production in 2027 or 2028. But with the demo itself slipping so many times, investors have good reason to be skeptical of even that window.
Why Missed Targets Weigh on the TSLA Thesis
Investors have long been used to Tesla missing timelines, but each new slip makes it harder to trust the company’s next promise. That matters because the investment case now rests far more on Tesla’s other bets, namely AI-driven autonomy and the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk has positioned as Tesla’s next chapters of growth. These are the areas where investors are being asked to believe the most, on timelines that are the least proven.
TSLA Semi: Slow to Ramp, and Still Proving Itself
The Semi followed a similar path. It was revealed alongside the Roadster in 2017, and pandemic disruptions, supply chain problems and battery constraints slowed it down. A handful of trucks reached early customers like PepsiCo in 2022, but volume production never followed.
Tesla’s new Semi factory at Gigafactory Nevada opened just last week. The 1.7-million-square-foot plant sits next to the 4680 cell lines and can build up to 50,000 trucks a year.
Demand is also catching up. A new freight coalition, ZET SCALE, picked Tesla to lead a purchase of 2,500 electric Class 8 trucks, with deliveries spread over several years to 10 regional hubs, including Los Angeles, Houston and Chicago. PACCAR‘s PCAR Kenworth, RIDE and VolvoGroupVLVLY are also suppliers, so Tesla won’t fill the whole order. As lead supplier, though, its share would likely still top earlier deals, such as Einride’s 500 truck orders in August and WattEV’s 370 units in May.
