Tesla Roadster gets a date, VW XL1 comes back electric, BYD's new Tesla fighter, and more

Frederic Lambert (0:00)

One, and we are live, a new episode of Electrek Podcast. I am Frederic Lambert, your host, and as usual, I'm joined by Seth Weintraub. How are you doing, Seth?

Seth Weintraub (0:08)

I'm good.

Frederic Lambert (0:09)

I hope you're good, because you're about to get two roadsters in your driveway.

Oh my God, so this news is already a week old at this point, but it happened after the last week's podcast, so we're gonna discuss it. But Tesla has put a date on the second reveal of the Roadster, October 1st. It's coming up fast. We're two weeks away at this point. Not a ton of info other than the date. There's a new teaser image that you're seeing right now on the screen if you're watching on one of the streaming platform.

I don't know how to take the teaser image personally. It's definitely a light bar, so a rear light bar. Then you have the four lights on top, which I'm not sure. Yeah, Trusters. Definitely there's lights coming out of it, so there's light into stream of hair, it looks like. So they look like Colder Trusters. But Seth, if they are Colder Trusters, I think the picture is upside down. Is it? The Trusters wouldn't be up like that. I mean, they could be if you're on to produce some down force at the same time as pushing forward, I guess. I guess you're going to need that, otherwise the car will just like, whoa, it's shaking up.

Seth Weintraub (1:33)

Right into space.

Frederic Lambert (1:34)

But it is, just from what we're seeing from the light bar, it's already quite different from the original red and there was also silver. Was there, I think it was a black to Roadster that was unveiled in 2017 that we saw. But there is that, there's also, if you, not on this picture, but the one that they posted on Twitter, there is, if you change the contrast, if you play with the contrast a little bit, you do see a quote from Back to the Future in there.

That, plus, looking at the sides here of the vehicle, it looks like that thing got a little tiny touch of the cyber design language that Tesla has been going for since the Cybertruck.

That's my intuition from this. And of course, Back to the Future, what could be the reference other than the DeLorean, which is also cyber punky a little bit for its time, specifically. So it sounds like this is what's happening. But do we get excited about this? How do we get excited about this? It is a reveal, a second reveal of the Roadster. It's been dealing quite a bit. It was supposed to happen in April. Well, it was supposed to happen every year for the last four years, but in the most recent...

Seth Weintraub (3:01)

Nine years.

Frederic Lambert (3:02)

Yeah. The most recent effort to actually bring this to market or actually do a demo, because the focus has been on a demo.

It was supposed to happen in April and it was pushed every month. Until now, it's October. There's been some information, especially from the publication, the information that suggested that Tesla was looking to have some kind of very impressive flying demo of the vehicle, because Elon has been selling it as a flying car, even though it sounds like at best it's going to be able to hover. And that's apparently the plan here. It's to actually make it hover for the demo. The demo has been downgraded quite a bit. But even then, it sounds like it's going to be quite limited, because there's rumors that there won't be anyone in the car for the demo itself.

Apparently, one of the main issues is that those cold air thrusters, they're pretty loud. So, they could be problematic for someone that's closed or inside the vehicle. And yeah, that's just that all these things, you know, will make for a cool demo. But having a cool demo of a product that was unveiled a decade ago is nothing too exciting, let's be honest. So, what we're mostly looking for at the reveal is plans for production. So, whatever new version of this vehicle that we will unveil, which, you know, we've been agreeing for Electrek for a while, it should just be the same vehicle, maybe updated a little bit, give it that 1000 kilometer range, 600 miles of range. You know, maybe I do the acceleration a little bit faster, but no one was asking for cold or trusters, it was, you know, forced upon the roadsters. And there's now, you know, fear that Tesla has downgraded the range of the vehicle, and downgraded a few things to, you know, focus on those cold or trusters.