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I’m in the UK, so when I access the Roadster page, I’m taken to https://www.tesla.com/en_gb/roadster.

At the bottom of the page it says “Availability is subject to each region's legal requirements and applicable laws. Available as a Left-Hand Drive vehicle only”.

I’m not sure if this was the case for the “middle” 2020 Roadster.

I understand why Tesla stopped producing the right-hand drive (RHD) Model S; the low volume didn’t justify the extra engineering expense. However, since the new Roadster will have steer-by-wire, I assume that it would be fairly trivial to support both LHD and RHD. It would seem to be an obvious benefit of adopting steer-by-wire.

In fact, I can imagine a future scenario where you could literally unplug the steering wheel and move it to whatever side suits your current use case. If it wasn’t for the centre touch screen, you could even put it in the middle!

If I recall correctly, UK reservation holders were asked for deposits of £38K (Base Model) or £189K (Foundation Series) over 9 years ago. It seems like a slap in the face to those people if they’re only just discovering that the car they’ve been awaiting for almost a decade will not be ideally suited to driving in their home country. Of course, the same applies to other RHD countries, of which there are about 75!

So Elon Musk goes onto the stage and says this will be the only manually driven car Tesla sells, ok, but I wonder if there's something else going on. Tesla started with a Roadster, then built 2 luxury cars, then dropped down to the consumer category, with the Model 3 and Y. They just recently sunset the Model X, S (Pour one out), I wonder if the cycle will continue anew, so maybe within a few years, there will be a new X or S type descendant, with the guts of "New Tesla" with the more powerful drive train, and battery technologies, then that technology will find its way down into the Model 3 or Y, which will honestly probably never completely stop selling, regardless of what he says. I wonder if this is just a pivot to reinvigorate the excitement around Tesla. Curious to hear your thoughts too.

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the new roadster seems strikingly similar to the 1989 Vector W8 and I promise I'm not going insane when I say this

Endgame

Prototype (2017) vs Production (2026)

Which one do you like better:

Anyone happen to know the tracks they were playing prior to the start of the event. I was vibing 🕺