The Tesla Roadster episode

Frederic Lambert (0:00)

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

Seth Weintraub (0:11)

I'm good.

Frederic Lambert (0:12)

Yes, I'm good too. I was supposed to be in Paris this week, didn't work out. Turns out your expiration date on your passport is not a real expiration date. There's, you need to be 90 days or fewer for the Schengen Zone. And they turned me away at the airport. They're like, oh, we won't get you on the plane or you might get stuck at Charles de Gaulle. And I didn't want to get stuck at Charles de Gaulle. So I was like, okay, I'll skip it. And hopefully I'll get to drive these GLE vehicles in the next few months in Canada anyway. So it's good for that. There are a few things that I missed at the Paris Photo Show that we're going to discuss later on the show. But first of all, what it did give me the opportunity to is give me the opportunity to watch the Roadster unveiling live last night, because I was still in Montreal. And what a show, what a spectacle was that. I think that's the main takeaway of it. It was impressive. It was the stunt. Like if you're looking at it purely on a stunt base, because those were clearly stunts.

There's definitely something, if a human is not inside a stunt, like if it's not like an evil can evil kind of thing, like it does make it less impressive.

So it's not even the stunt itself, it's more like an engineering feat, an engineering demonstration. And I guess from that was impressive, because obviously we have the image right now of the kick flip over the entire Tesla lineup, which is extremely impressive, because look at the height here, that's to be like what, six meters probably.

Seth Weintraub (2:00)

Oh yeah.

Frederic Lambert (2:01)

Yeah. And that car was on the ground. It was on the ground and it lifted itself up with trust from cold air trusters and compressed nitrogen all the way up in the air. They had enough trust left to make a pretty smooth landing. And then obviously there was the ramp in the back that you saw, which when I saw the ramp, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew, we've seen fan cars before, I knew I was going to be able to stick to it. And I knew because the way that the ramp handed, they were going to jump off that thing and kickflip to land on their feet. And they did it and I was still crazy impressed. You know why? Because it's super impressive and everyone involved in making that stunt happen. Should be proud. I'm sure it was extremely difficult.

That's pretty much, I don't know about you, but that's pretty much where my praise end.

And I'm going to start with one thing, the main thing probably, and that's not even with the delays and everything, is like I would have a little bit more respect for Tesla and Elon Musk in particular because he's the one that led the whole thing. If they would have introduced the whole thing, they would have introduced those demonstration by saying something like what you're about to see is absolutely crazy, and it's an impressive feat of engineering to make it happen, and it is a good demonstration of some of the technology that we are introducing to the Roadster, push to their limits.

It's not what you're going to get.

And I think that would have been fair because the internet is going like crazy like, why are you complaining about, the guy made flying cars happen? It's not. There's three versions of the Roadster that were announced, and technically in another video, Franz von Austin said there's going to be a Ford, there's going to be like a base one, two that we don't know the details about. And that's the problem with the details. The whole presentation was very light on details. After that, on X and on other videos, they gave an exclusive video to Agurdy and an exclusive video to MotorTrend, was more details on the website as well, but a lot of the specs are not linked to these three different versions, so we don't know which one does when, other than like the acceleration maybe. So there's three versions. The performance version, that as, basically as fans, as the vacuum system, it can do the vacuum part of it. I don't think it has even colder trusters. Let me go in the poll, just to make sure I'm not talking through my ass here, but performance, what did they say about the performance? Road-ready, seats two, active aero, multi-mode suction system, zero to 60 in under 1.6 second. So that's a rough one for me, this one, because you lose two seats, you lose half of the range, because it's over 300 miles, I don't say more than that, over 300 miles, it used to be 600, over 600, and you gain 0.3 seconds, zero to 60